This is the best summary I could come up with:

This past weekend the prominent Russian-American journalist and writer Masha Gessen was awarded the prestigious Hannah Arendt prize for political thought under police protection in Germany.

But the event, which was to be a grand ceremony hosted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in the city hall of Bremen in north-west Germany, almost did not happen at all after Gessen published an essay in the New Yorker comparing Gaza before 7 October to the Jewish ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation of the event altogether.

The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

Gessen’s comparison was more light-footed than Arendt’s, whose reflection appears eerily prescient, but their rhetorical tact wasn’t enough to stop the censors at the gate in Germany who police what one can and cannot say about Israel, cowing the Foundation into compliance.

But her position shifted after she escaped to America in 1941, after she attended the Biltmore Conference in 1942 in New York City where she condemned David Ben-Gurion’s call for a Jewish state in Palestine.

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