“Sorry, I feel like a Fox News host when I ask you this, but: Have some Germans tried to cancel you, a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors, because of your views on Israel and Gaza?” So MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan asked publicist Masha Gessen in mid-December. It was about the awarding of the Hannah Arendt Prize, from which the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Bremen Senate had withdrawn. In an essay for the New Yorker, Gessen made a comparison between the situation of Palestinians in Gaza and Jews in Nazi ghettos.
She doesn't like the word “cancel” any more than Hasan, said the author. But that's how it might seem after the Bremen awards ceremony shrank from a banquet to a small ceremony “with a portable fan heater.” According to Gessen, German cultural policy blankets criticism of Israel with accusations of anti-Semitism. The memory of the Shoah is being used to immunize the Israeli government against criticism. At the same time, it becomes more difficult to combat actual anti-Semitism.
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