A leading Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen was due to be presented with the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought on Friday. But the award ceremony will now not take place as planned after the Green party-affiliated Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBS) said it was withdrawing its support, according to The Guardian.
The HBS said it objected to and rejected a comparison made by Gessen in a December 9, 2023 essay in The New Yorker between Gaza and the Jewish ghettos in Europe.
In the essay, Gessen, who uses they, criticised Germany’s unequivocal support of Israel, drawing attention to the Bundestag’s 2019 resolution condemning the Israel boycott movement BDS as antisemitic and quoting a Jewish critic of Germany’s politics of Holocaust remembrance as saying memory culture had “gone haywire”.
According to the German newspaper Die Zeit, which broke the story, the prize will still be presented to Gessen, though “in a different setting”, and on Saturday instead of Friday. It remains unclear who will present it, what they will be presenting and whether Gessen and other invited guests still plan to attend.
Early this month, the Associated Press reported that Russian police have put prominent Russian-American journalist and author Masha Gessen on a wanted list after opening a criminal case against them on charges of spreading false information about the Russian army.
Russian media reported last month that a criminal case against Gessen, an award-winning author and an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was launched over an interview they did with the prominent Russian journalist Yury Dud.