Author Masha Gessen received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought over the weekend, after original plans for the ceremony were scrapped, the Associated Press reports.
Gessen had been scheduled to receive the award, given to “individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by presenting their opinion in controversial political discussions,” last Friday at the city hall of Bremen, Germany.
But Bremen’s city senate withdrew from the ceremony, along with the award’s sponsor, the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Both groups decided to cut ties after Gessen published a New Yorker article, “In the Shadow of the Holocaust,” in which they compared the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to that of Jews in the Eastern European ghettos under the Nazis.
Gessen, the author of books including The Future Is History and Surviving Autocracy, is Jewish. Their grandfather was murdered in the Holocaust.
Gessen reacted to the prize sponsor’s withdrawal in an interview with the Washington Post, saying, “Even people I know in Germany who have been dealing with this on a continuous basis for the past several years continue to be shocked by the craziness of this—people’s speech being shut down, Jews being denounced as antisemitic for criticizing Israeli policies, et cetera.”
Gessen ended up receiving the prize on Saturday in a different location with about 50 people in attendance, according to the AP.
The Arendt Prize, named after the German American political theorist, was founded in 1994. Previous winners have included Tony Judt, Timothy Snyder, and Jill Lepore.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
