Another scandal, again it’s about Israel, again it hits a Jewish voice: Masha Gessen, born in 1967 into a Jewish family in then-Soviet Moscow, should have received the Hannah Arendt Prize at a ceremony in Bremen on Friday. Hours before the award ceremony, first the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen and then the state of Bremen canceled the ceremony. They responded to criticism of one essayGessen in US Magazine new Yorker published – about German and European culture of remembrance, Israel, Gaza. The text was cool in tone but uncompromising in substance, which surprises no one who has followed Gessen’s journalistic work. Gessen, who fled to New York to escape the Kremlin’s anti-LGBTQ policies, is one of the best-known observers of authoritarian regimes and has received many awards, including the Leipzig Book Fair’s Prize for European Understanding for the book “The Future is History – How Russia is Freedom won and lost”. A call on the evening of arrival in Bremen, because Masha Gessen arrived despite the expected turbulence.
Masha Gessen in an interview about the Hannah Arendt Prize – Culture
