Oren Persico: They do see the destruction, but they don't see the human cost. The result is that Israel is very much still on October 7th.

Brooke Gladstone: For the last three months, Israelis have seen on TV, a version of the bombardment of Gaza without the victims. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. As the war drags on, the debates swirling around it morphed into fights about all kinds of things, including plagiarism.

Will Sommer: Bill Ackman said, this plagiarism, this is like Oppenheimer inventing the atomic bomb. This is going to change the world forever. It's just like, "What? Just because your wife was accused of plagiarism."

Brooke Gladstone: Plus the tug of war over the memory of The Holocaust and who gets to decide what's okay to say?

Masha Gessen: The only way to make good on the promise of "Never Again,” is to constantly be checking whether we are actually falling into darkness.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. As of earlier this week, Israel's bombardment of Gaza has entered its fourth month.

Speaker 1: Israel is still pounding Gaza, the UN now deeming it "uninhabitable."

Speaker 2: Israel is facing new questions about an airstrike near the city of Khan Yunis that killed two journalists.

Speaker 3: Palestinian health officials say Israeli is offensive has killed nearly 23,000 people.

Micah Loewinger: Nightmarish images of destruction in Gaza have filled the news and social media feeds for months but within Israel, the mainstream media tells a very different story. Oren Persico is a staff writer at The Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine focused on media and freedom of speech in Israel.

Oren Persico: Ever since the war started, there's been a huge spike in ratings on TV and radio. It's like two, maybe three times the amount it was before, mostly on Channel 12. That's the major commercial TV channel in Israel. We also have Channel 14, which is a right-wing pro-Netanyahu propaganda machine, which became the second most popular TV channel in Israel even before the war. You have Ynet the digital arm of Yedioth Ahronoth, a very big media corporation in Israel. You have Israel Hayom which is a free newspaper, Haaretz which is maybe more well-known outside Israel than it is read inside Israel.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. People always point to it and see it as a beacon of liberal thought in Israel, but you're saying it doesn't have that much attraction among Israeli leaders?

Oren Persico: No, that's right. It's because the left in Israel is small and getting smaller all the time.

Micah Loewinger: There was a piece in the Guardian from last weekend that reported that nearly half of Israelis get their news from TV channels and that TV in particular has been hugely influential in shaping Israeli opinion after October 7th.

Oren Persico: During the first day, October 7th and probably October 8th and 9th, Israeli television really filled in a void that the Israel state left open. A lot of the Israel establishment, of course, the military, but also the health, the social welfare, the first aid, it really didn't know how to respond. Israeli television really did outstanding work in the first few days. You could really hear live on air, people asking for help from their shelter saying, "We can hear Hamas, jihad terrorists outside. They're shooting." Israeli TV showed that to the public and later helped those people get in contact with their families and loved ones. Ever since, it became a very important factor in shaping the reality in Israel.

Micah Loewinger: It sounds like TV journalists really rose to the occasion. Since then though, I wonder how strong their reporting has been. Former National Security Advisor Eyal Hulata has described a "dome of disconnection" with Israelis increasingly feeling isolated from a world that they feel doesn't understand their pain and their fear of Hamas.

Oren Persico: Yes, I think that's very true. The main two roles of TV journalism in Israel after October 7th was one, to lift the morale of the army, lift the morale of the Israeli public, and the second is to not show anything damaging that's happening in Gaza because of the Israeli bombardment and invasion. The logic here is that if you show civilians in Gaza getting hurt, then a lot of people in Israel will start questioning the legitimacy of the IDF attacks in Gaza. The result is that Israel is very much still on October 7th.

Micah Loewinger: I don't doubt that it would take any nation a long time to heal. I'm surprised though to hear that if you turn on Israeli TV, you would not see what we're seeing in the US media, which is brutal footage, a growing death toll, and reports about starvation, disease. Are Israelis really not seeing that?

Oren Persico: They do see soldiers collapsing buildings and cleaning out terror tunnels that were used by Hamas. They do see streets that are now rumbled. What they don't see is humans in Gaza being killed or wounded, especially women and children. They don't see that at all. Nothing of the human cost, even if you do mention the number of the casualties, you always say, "This is the numbers that we get from the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and you shouldn't trust their numbers."

What they never mention is past conflicts in Gaza, if you look at the numbers of Hamas and you look at the numbers of the IDF, they're roughly the same. There is a difference if you look at the male casualties, 16 to 50 or something like that, the age where you can be a militant. If you look at the women and children, there's not such a big difference between the numbers that Hamas has and the number that the IDF releases after the war. They just ignore that.

If you do see footage of shirtless men in Gaza handcuffed, they would be regarded as terrorist surrendering and that would be the headline. Perhaps a day or two later, you could see maybe in Haaretz or in the bottom of an article that after interrogation, the IDF found out that most of them weren't terrorists. Most people would get the feeling that the only people still occupying Northern Gaza where the invasion started are now terrorists. There are no citizens there, and that's why you can bombard the area without hesitation.

Micah Loewinger: Okay, but I see TikToks from Israeli soldiers. I see posts from Israelis on social media. Surely Israeli citizens are seeing footage of the suffering of Gazans. It's hard not to find it if you're online. I find it hard to believe that maybe outside of the legacy media; Israelis aren't exposed to this stuff.

Oren Persico: Well, if you don't want to know something, even though it pops out, the TikTok or Telegram channel or whatever, it's very easy to go past it to a video of a fallen soldier's family or the Israeli victims. There's no lack of material that is pro-Israel and anti-Hamas. It's just a matter of your decision.

Micah Loewinger: Ever since October 7th, you've said nearly all mainstream outlets have started to shift towards the right or at least have adopted more propaganda with Channel 14, which is basically an arm of Netanyahu's propaganda machine still being the most extremist. Can you give me some examples of this wider shift?

Oren Persico: Right. Shortly after the beginning of the war, you could hear very extreme guests that you wouldn't see before on the mainstream media popping up, and also the journalists themselves getting more and more extreme calling for harsh retaliation. You could hear there is no innocent people in Gaza. Amit Segal, the most popular journalist in Channel 12, which is the most popular channel in Israel, on his Telegram channel referred to the Hamas terrorists as Nazis, and therefore the people who support them are also Nazis.

Again and again, you could hear the comparison to Dresden. You have to fight like you're fighting the Nazis, and if the ally forces completely destroyed the city of Dresden, then we can completely destroy Gaza because it's 100% good against 100% evil. It's completely black and white.

Micah Loewinger: It's not exactly like Dresden is celebrated today as a discriminant act of warfare, right?

Oren Persico: No, it's exactly the opposite. This is the moment that there was no consideration of human life much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's mentioned also in Israel in the past few weeks.

Micah Loewinger: Saying the Americans did it, so we can do it, too.

Oren Persico: Yes. Who are you to cast doubt on our morality when you did the same when you faced pure evil? That's the logic.

Micah Loewinger: I see. Another example of the shift that you're talking about is Israel's top satirical TV show, Eretz Nehederet. In November, it broadcasts the sketch making fun of pro-Palestinian progressives.

Speaker 4: Hi, everyone. We are live on YouTube with Columbia Untisemity News where everyone is welcome, LGBTQH

Speaker 5: H?

Speaker 4: Hamas from [unison] the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free. Do you know why it's true?

Speaker 5: No.

Speaker 4: Because it rhymes.

Speaker 5: Oh.

Micah Loewinger: There have been other English skits, mocking BBC journalists for how they've been covering the war.

Speaker 6: Israel has bombed a hospital killing hundreds of innocent people. With more details, our Middle East correspondent, Harry Whiteguilt.

Speaker 7: Good evening, Rachel, from the Illegal Colony of Tel Aviv.

Micah Loewinger: This was odd because Eretz Nehederet used to be known for mocking Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

Oren Persico: They're still mocking Netanyahu, but they are mobilized like most of the other people in Israel to support the war effort. If a satirical show needs to do Hasbara, which is Israeli propaganda, then that's what they'll do. They're completely with the mission to explain why the world is wrong, and we are right. You mentioned before the dome of disconnection. People in Israel are shocked that the world doesn't see the situation like they see it.

They are shocked and baffled, "How could anyone be angry at Israel and speaking about atrocities that Israel does, when Hamas butchered and raped and killed so many people in Israel on October 7th?" Because they're still in October 7th, they don't realize that the world saw different images in the past few weeks.

Micah Loewinger: The passion with which you speak makes me think that you inhabit a different kind of ideological perspective. You're consuming different media than the average Israeli. You are a media critic, but I'm just curious to know how common is the perspective that you are sharing right now.

Oren Persico: It's not very common. Like I said, the Israeli left is small and getting smaller, but if you do read Haaretz, you get the information. There's still tens of thousands of subscribers to Haaretz, a lot of them are people in the government, the intellectual elite, but I would say that this point of view is considered fringe in Israel these days, almost treacherous.

Micah Loewinger: In the American media, we've seen reports that Israel plans to scale back some of its offensive, at least in Northern Gaza, following pressure from the American government. For instance, Netanyahu has said that Israel doesn't intend to have, say, a permanent occupation in Gaza, but as many outlets have observed, Israeli media and officials are telling a different story about the next phase of the war. This seems to be a larger pattern of the information that Netanyahu gives to American Western journalists as opposed to what he says to an Israeli audience. What are you all hearing about the coming months?

Oren Persico: Well, our Prime Minister has two Twitter accounts or X accounts. One is very dignified where he published his video of himself saying, we don't want to conquer Gaza or expel the population. The other X account is where all the populist material is published, and he speaks a very different language there and addresses a very different audience, the Israeli audience. We do hear also in Israeli media that there is a new phase starting to evacuate parts of the military reserves that were drafted on October 7th. What nobody's talking about is what will happen in the day after. What would happen after you collapse Hamas?

Micah Loewinger: If that's even possible.

Oren Persico: Exactly.

Micah Loewinger: You've made a strong case that Israelis don't understand what's taking place in Gaza. Is there anything you think that American audiences don't understand about what's happening in Israel that you would like to communicate?

Oren Persico: Well, basically, that Israelis are inside a bubble and are unaware of A, what's going on in Gaza, and B, how is it seen in the entire world. When you speak with your Israeli friend or relative or whatever, you should remind yourself that you're speaking with someone who is a parallel universe who does not see what you see.

Micah Loewinger: Oren, thank you very much.

Oren Persico: Thank you.

Micah Loewinger: Oren Persico is a staff writer at The Seventh Eye, an independent investigative magazine in Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the war at home among the rich and powerful.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Back in the US, debates about the war in Israel and Gaza have refracted into convoluted sideshows. This week when the same billionaire who wielded plagiarism accusations to unseat Harvard, President Claudine Gay, went after a news outlet that made similar allegations against his wife. A quick reminder of how we got here.

Speaker 8: Protests that erupted after the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel have roiled college campuses across the country.

Speaker 9: College campuses are deeply divided, including here at Harvard.

Speaker 10: The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania are testifying on Capitol Hill about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Micah Loewinger: Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York followed up.

Speaker 11: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?

Speaker 12: It can be depending on the context.

Will Sommer: Republican representative, Elise Stefanik saw this as an opportunity to really press these college presidents.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a media reporter at The Washington Post.

Will Sommer: I think a charitable way to look at it is that she wanted them to take a firm stance on anti-Semitism. I think a less charitable way is that she was looking for a soundbite and really trying to back them into a corner. The point Claudine Gay was making was nuanced, but that doesn't really work in Congress, particularly if you have a hostile interviewer.

Micah Loewinger: From there, various activists got involved, particularly Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager, and Christopher Rufo campaigning to get her and some of these other university presidents fired. Rufo has openly discussed over the years how he has successfully manipulated the media to raise panic around a whole bunch of culture war issues like critical race theory. He was successful in helping turn CRT into a catchall boogeyman, applying the same strategy to raising alarm around healthcare for transgender people.

Most recently, he has set his sights on DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Can you just give us a sense of what role Christopher Rufo played in shaping the conversation that we all ended up having for the last month or so?

Will Sommer: Yes. Christopher Rufo is really good at latching onto these wedge issues and getting Republicans to pick them up. In December, shortly after Claudine Gay is facing all this pressure from the Congressional hearing, he then comes out with these plagiarism allegations against her. Now, apparently, these allegations had been floating around on the Internet, someone had packaged them up into one document, a person who seems to have been opposed to her management of Harvard in terms of anti-Semitism. Christopher Rufo was the first one to really go public with them.

Micah Loewinger: Alongside Christopher Rufo was billionaire Bill Ackman. He's one of those hedge fund guys who's so rich that we should know more about him, but if I'm being honest, I had no idea who he was until all of this started.

Will Sommer: I only became aware of him because, on the HBO stock market show industry, there's a character based on him played by one of the Duplass Brothers. He's like a pop culture figure in some way. Bill Ackman became famous during the pandemic because of some smart plays he made predicting that the pandemic would depress stocks and then predicting that the stock market would rebound. That's what elevated him from rich guy to rich guy, a lot of people think is a fount of wisdom in some way.

Micah Loewinger: Why was he lending his platform to the campaign to get Claudine Gay to resign?

Will Sommer: Bill Ackman is a Harvard alum. After October 7th, he became convinced that Harvard students were just running amok with anti-Semitism. Even before the Congressional hearing, he was on this campaign to get the board of Harvard to fire Claudine Gay. After these plagiarism allegations come out, he latches onto that. The anti-Semitism stuff takes a backseat, and then he says, "Well, look, you simply have to fire her because of this plagiarism issue."

Micah Loewinger: What were the plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay?

Will Sommer: It was research papers or publications where she would cite research she was drawing on. Then, rather than putting quotation marks around the phrasing, she would just take the phrasing wholesale.

Micah Loewinger: The source would show up in the bibliography, but in some of her research, the source she was quoting from, that same language showed up, not in quotes.

Will Sommer: Yes, in the bibliography, or even at the end of the paragraph, material that should have been in quotation marks was not in quotation marks. Bill Ackman met with members of the Harvard community. He claims to have met with students and professors and board members. He said, "Something like this if an undergrad did even less plagiarism than this, or a more minor instance, they would've been expelled from Harvard. What does it say that the president of this institution is a plagiarist?"

Micah Loewinger: We have Christopher Rufo, Bill Ackman really pushing this. Then we had media coverage from the conservative press, most notably The Washington Free Beacon that broke a lot of these stories about Claudine Gay's alleged plagiarism. The New York Times also played a significant role in keeping the heat on these university presidents and Claudine Gay specifically, a lot of stories on their front page.

Last week, media critic Adam Johnson, who's the host of Citations Needed posted to X that "Articles about Claudine Gay and her various scandals were top five featured stories on The New York Times homepage December 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, 17th, 22nd, and 25 and her firing is now their top story." On January 2nd, the day that she resigned, Christopher Rufo tweeted, "This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America's institutions. We will expose you, we will outmaneuver you, and we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation." What do we make of that?

Will Sommer: This is not exactly particularly coded language. There's the insinuation there that Claudine Gay was essentially an affirmative action hire that her scholarship did not justify becoming the president of Harvard and that the plagiarism underlines that. This was seen by the right as a symbolic victory against affirmative action or diversity, equity inclusion, what they see as the post-2020 progressive cultural landscape.

Micah Loewinger: Two days after she resigned, Bill Ackman the billionaire, was now the subject of a similar story that he would not like very much, a Business Insider investigation that ran with the headline, "Bill Ackman's Celebrity Academic Wife Neri Oxman's Dissertation is Marred by Plagiarism." Okay. First off, who is Bill Ackman's wife academic Neri Oxman?

Will Sommer: Sure. Neri Oxman is a professor at MIT in a idiosyncratic category called Material Ecology, which is something she invented. She does TED Talks. She's a big hit on podcasts. I listened to a podcast she was on where she talks about what if we could grow iPhones in nature. She was on the cover of Fast Company Magazine of WIRED Magazine. She was profiled in The New York Times. She really had a successful career on her own and is a public figure in her own right.

Micah Loewinger: Last Friday, Business Insider ran another story about Neri Oxman in which they found 28 additional cases of plagiarism in her dissertation. In some cases, Business Insider alleges that she lifted passages from Wikipedia without attribution. How did her plagiarism compare to that of Claudine Gay?

Will Sommer: Some of her plagiarism is actually very similar in that there are citations to articles and yet she is, rather than paraphrasing the material, as you should, she's taking it wholesale without putting quotation marks. She's acknowledging there's another source for this idea or this data, but then she's not acknowledging that she's also taking these words.

Micah Loewinger: Neri Oxman seemed to acknowledge the reporting and the instances of alleged plagiarism that were found. How did her husband Bill Ackman respond?

Will Sommer: Bill Ackman went ballistic. He has since Friday, been on a Elon Musk or Trumpian level of Twitter meltdown.

Micah Loewinger: Saying what?

Will Sommer: "Business Insider didn't give us enough time to comment on this. Business Insider's going to go bankrupt and be liquidated." Essentially his argument is, "This is really unfair. Business Insider is only writing about my wife because I was involved in getting Claudine Gay fired and in fact, is it even really plagiarism? Who's to say what plagiarism is? Why can't you plagiarize from Wikipedia?" He does a U-turn from, "We got to stamp out plagiarism in academia. This stuff is so serious," to, "It's a matter of degrees and some plagiarism is like a spelling error. Are you going to hold that against my wife?"

Micah Loewinger: First, he claimed that, as you said, they didn't give him enough time to respond. Second, he says, "It's not fair for them to go after his family just because he's in the news." Third Ackman says that a top editor at Business Insider has been critical of Israel and therefore potentially had ulterior motives in pushing the story because Ackman's wife, Neri Oxman is Israeli. This is where Axel Springer gets involved.

Axel Springer is a big German media company that owns Business Insider and Politico and many German outlets, including the conservative newspaper Die Welt. Ackman brought his suspicions that there's some anti-Zionist agenda to take down his wife right up the chain of command right to Axel Springer, what happened next?

Will Sommer: Then Axel Springer makes a very unusual move. They put out a statement on their own, separate from Business Insider saying, "Well, no one disagrees about the facts here, yet we are still going to review this story because we are looking into the motivations and the processes of how this story came about." That really suggests that they really want to throw Bill Ackman a bone here. They want to undermine the reporting in some way so that he can say, "Well, that story's under investigation," and yet there's frankly just not a factual basis for them to do that.

Micah Loewinger: In your reporting, you found that Axel Springer actually has some unusual policies for how it runs its companies, at least by American journalism standards.

Will Sommer: Over the past decade, Axel Springer has really been increasingly getting involved in the American media market. They own Business Insider and they own Politico. I've been anticipating the day this conflict would arise because Axel Springer operates in a way that American media outlets do not. It requires employees in Germany to sign a statement of political principles. You have to commit to support NATO, support the right of Israel to exist among other things. That would never happen at an American outlet, certainly not a mainstream outlet.

Axel Springer after an outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany, its CEO flew the Israeli flag in front of headquarters for a week and he said, "If anyone has a problem with what this suggests about us not being entirely nonpartisan when it comes to Israeli coverage, you're welcome to quit your job and leave Axel Springer." At Business Insider, the Editor in Chief there put out an email to the staff that almost was a brushback to the corporate ownership in Germany and said, "We are really standing by this story. There's nothing wrong with this story. We welcome any review."

Micah Loewinger: Bill Ackman, he's not done fighting. On Monday this week, he posted on Twitter/X that he will pursue "problems with how our media operates, the ideological takeover of our education system, discrimination in all forms, and free speech to the end of the earth." He says that this is the most important battle he's ever fought. Do you see any bigger messages in the story about the influence that billionaires like Bill Ackman wield? What does it mean?

Will Sommer: There's this story about billionaires, whether it's Elon Musk or Peter Thiel who bankrolled essentially the destruction of Gawker legally, or Bill Ackman get very involved and often with, in the case of Musk and Ackman, with a Twitter veilance to it. They're very willing to pursue these pet projects with their money.

Micah Loewinger: To twist personal slights into populist crusades and pretend that they're fighting for the common person or universal values when their ego has just been scratched a bit.

Will Sommer: I was struck by, after the plagiarism allegations against Neri Oxman came out, that Bill Ackman said, "Oh, this plagiarism, these allegations, this is like Oppenheimer inventing the atomic bomb. This is going to change the world forever, but we'll just have to destroy academia and rebuild it." It's just like, "What? Just because your wife was accused of plagiarism, you have to just remake the American university and stuff?"

Micah Loewinger: Well, let me ask you about that because in an op-ed published in The New York Times, Claudine Gay after she resigned, argued that the campaign to have her resign was "a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society." She goes on to say, "Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda." Do you think she had a point?

Will Sommer: I think she does have a point. I do think that there has been a decades-long attack from the right on independent institutions, particularly ones that relate to truth and reason, whether it's science. We can think of all the attacks on scientists and medicine during the pandemic, or these decades-long attacks On the Media where these attempts to paint colleges is just like these out-of-control loony bins. I do think she's right on there. I think the challenge for her and her supporters has been that if you do feel that you're under all this pressure, it really doesn't help if you have this plagiarism in your background.

Micah Loewinger: Will, thank you very much.

Will Sommer: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Will Sommer is a media reporter at The Washington Post.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the big arguments over history and language that fuel the small ones swirling around the war.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Thursday, hearings in the International Court of Justice in The Hague began, the first time Israel has been tried under the Genocide Convention, drafted after World War II and The Holocaust. It began with South Africa bringing the charge that Israeli air and ground assaults were meant to "bring about the destruction of its Palestinian population and that Israeli leaders had in comments signaled their genocidal intent." On Friday, Israel responded.

Dr. Tal Becker: The attempt to weaponize the term genocide against Israel in the present context does more than tell the court a grossly distorted story.

Brooke Gladstone: Dr. Tal Becker, the legal advisor of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Hague.

Dr. Tal Becker: It subverts the object and purpose of the convention itself, with ramifications for all states, seeking to defend themselves against those who demonstrate total disdain for life, and for the law.

Brooke Gladstone: Meanwhile, the petty proxy war stateside rages on. Adib Sisani, communications director for Axel Springer, the German company that owns Business Insider, declared that billionaire investor Bill Ackman was "completely losing it and that his suggestion that anti-Semitism prompted those plagiarism stories about his wife is so far out there." That seems likely because Axel Springer holds that supporting Israel's right to exist is German duty. The New Yorker's Masha Gessen recently took a deep dive into the German view of The Holocaust after becoming ensnared in its orthodoxies and contradictions. The piece is called In the Shadow of The Holocaust.

Masha Gessen: I'm from a Jewish family in Russia. I grew up in the shadow of The Holocaust, and I also grew up in the shadow of Stalinist terror. I was living in Russia in the 90s, wondering if there was any hope that Russia was ever going to be able to reckon with its own totalitarian past, and then Germany seemed to be doing it so beautifully.

Brooke Gladstone: In the late '90s and early 2000s when a lot of Berlin's memorials were conceived and installed, you visited often.

Masha Gessen: I was really riveted watching the formation of this, the building of museums. There was so much radical thinking about representation going into this.

Brooke Gladstone: At some point, you said that the effort began to feel glassed in.

Masha Gessen: Something happened sometime probably in the last decades. The Philosopher Susan Neiman said that German memory culture has gone haywire. It's created a bureaucracy that enforces the right ways of thinking about memory, the right ways of talking about The Holocaust, the right ways of talking about Jews, and central to my piece, the right ways of talking about Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: On November 9th, about a month after Hamas's attack on Israel, it was the 85th anniversary of a series of pogroms against German Jews, called Kristallnacht, a Star of David and the phrase "Never Again is Now," was projected in blue and white on the Brandenburg Gate, the same day the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, considered a proposal called Fulfilling Historical Responsibility: Protecting Jewish Life in Germany.

Masha Gessen: It's part of this system of enshrining in not law, but resolutions and bureaucratic mechanisms of enforcing this unconditional support for Israel, but I'm more interested in resolutions that have already been passed such as the BDS resolution. BDS is the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Movement to exert economic pressure on Israel to end the occupation. Israel has put a lot of effort internationally into portraying the movement as not a movement against Israeli policies, but an anti-Semitic movement.

Brooke Gladstone: It doesn't affirm Israel's right to exist.

Masha Gessen: I think the BDS movement would probably be more effective at disarming its critics if it affirmed Israel's right to exist. At the same time, it's a really strange thing to ask of a boycott movement. There's a non-binding resolution that was passed in the Bundestag a few years ago, that equates support for BDS with anti-Semitism. That's had a profound effect on Germany's cultural scene. We don't feel it so much in the United States, where similar resolutions and in fact, laws exist in 35 American states, equating BDS with anti-Semitism.

Brooke Gladstone: You note that this resolution against BDS in Germany has an interesting history because it was originally introduced by the AfD, the relatively new-ish radical right alternative for Germany party, that has in the past openly made anti-Semitic statements and endorsed the revival of Nazi-era language, but it really loved going against BDS and why?

Masha Gessen: It was a brilliant move on the part of AfD. At the time, AfD was newly represented in Parliament, and there was a kind of agreement between mainstream parties that they would not cooperate without AfD. Then AfD brings this resolution. Following this prior agreement of not cooperating with this far-right party, the mainstream parties voted the resolution down, but now they're in a pickle because they've just voted down a resolution that is presented as part of the fight against anti-Semitism. They immediately introduce an almost identical resolution and approve it. For AfD the far-right party, it's a double victory.

From that point on basically, the system of not cooperating with them in Parliament broke down. The other thing is that you can use the supposedly anti-Semitic weapon to go after immigrants. A majority of immigrants to Germany are from Muslim countries, and AfD, their primary gender is anti-immigrant. A lot of that is animated at this point by the supposed fight against anti-Semitism. If that sounds crazy, look at what's happening in the US Congress. It's the exact same thing. We see representative Stefanik, using anti-Semitism in the exact same nihilistic way.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. Anti-Semitism defined in part, as being anti-Israel. In recent years, there's been what you call an obscure yet strangely consequential debate on what constitutes anti-Semitism, basically an argument over the definition. The side that's winning appears to be the 2016 definition offered by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance or IHRA. It's an inter-governmental organization. What was the definition that it proposed and that has been widely embraced?

Masha Gessen: The definition itself is anodyne. Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals, and/or their property to Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. Then, it provides 11 examples of what can be considered anti-Semitism.

Those examples include; denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example, by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor, drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. Those are the examples that have really created a culture of interpreting criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic.

Brooke Gladstone: How widely has this definition been adopted, even though it has no legal force?

Masha Gessen: Zero legal force. Even the IHRA calls it the working definition of anti-Semitism, and yet, it has been adopted by all kinds of governmental bodies, including all but one countries of the European Union, the United States State Department, and many of the institutions of the German state. The German state has created a system of anti-Semitism commissioners who use this definition of anti-Semitism to go after people that they perceive as anti-Semitic, who have disproportionately turned out to be Jews. You can't make this stuff up. Jewish artists, Jewish writers, Jewish thinkers, are accused by German bureaucrats of being anti-Semitic because they criticize the State of Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: You write about an artist named Candice Breitz, who tried to organize a symposium on German Holocaust memory. The state funding for the panel was pulled because one panel compared Auschwitz to the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people by German colonizers in Namibia. What does this event reveal about the politics of memory there?

Masha Gessen: It's an incredible story. Candice Breitz is a Jewish artist of South African birth, living in Berlin for more than 20 years. She was working with Michael Rothman, who was Jewish, and a Holocaust scholar at UCLA. A lot of these cancellations are couched in incomprehensible bureaucratic language, but apparently, it was because of this panel that compared genocides.

Brooke Gladstone: There was a German historian Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, who heads the Center for Research on anti-Semitism in Berlin, who said that "Any attempt to advance our understanding of the historical event itself, through comparisons with other German crimes or genocides, can be and is perceived as an attack on the very foundation of this new nation-state," by which she means Germany because Angela Merkel said that fighting anti-Semitism was a vital project for the German state.

Masha Gessen: As Germany came back together in the aftermath of the Cold War, it made reckoning with The Holocaust, its national project, in part, to show that this new reunified Germany was an entirely different country. What Stefanie Schüler-Springorum is saying in the quote you mentioned is that this national project revolves around the idea of the absolute uniqueness of The Holocaust.

When Candice Breitz and Michael Rothman's panelists was going to compare it to the genocide in Namibia, thereby putting it on a historical continue saying that Germany, like other empires had been guilty of genocide before the genocide of all genocides. That went directly against this explicit assertion that The Holocaust is unique and the German project of reckoning with The Holocaust doesn't bring with it the obligation to reckon with other genocides.

Brooke Gladstone: You note that some of the great Jewish thinkers who survived The Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, spent the rest of their lives trying to convince the world that The Holocaust could happen again.

Masha Gessen: All of them in one way or another were saying that you have to view The Holocaust as an unprecedented evil, but also as a function of a kind of politics, a kind of moment in time that could happen again. Jewish thinkers compared the Nazis, Nazi Party politics, and The Holocaust to contemporary events quite liberally. Hannah Arendt compared an Israeli political party to the Nazi Party back in 1948.

Brooke Gladstone: It was Israel's Freedom Party. What did she base her comparison on?

Masha Gessen: She based her comparison on the paramilitary part of the party's attack on an Arab village in Israel-Palestine that was not involved in the military conflict then. She saw that attack as being motivated solely by the fact that this was an Arab village,

Brooke Gladstone: That was just three years after The Holocaust.

Masha Gessen: Just months after the formal creation of the state of Israel.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that Zygmunt Bauman argued that the massive, systematic, and efficient nature of The Holocaust was a function of modernity that it wasn't predetermined, but it fell in line with other inventions of the 20th century.

Masha Gessen: This also goes to why we say that The Holocaust is unique and why it isn't. The Holocaust is unique in the very specific sense of being the genocide in which the largest number of people were killed in the shortest amount of time and in which the killing of people was systematized and industrialized. Bauman really focused on how modernity gave us the railroads' ideas of efficiency. That efficiency approach was of the 20th century, but genocide, not a Nazi invention, not a 20th-century invention.

Brooke Gladstone: I read a talk that you gave when you accepted the Hannah Arendt Prize not long ago. In that piece, you note that Germany and others rely on the singularity of The Holocaust as essentially not of this world. That thinking works counter to the phrase "Never Again".

Masha Gessen: Originally I was supposed to get the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, and then my essay in The New Yorker came out and all hell broke loose. The Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is one of the sponsors of the prize, pulled out. The city of Bremen, which hosts the prize pulled out. The Institut Français, which hosts the discussion that follows the prize, pulled out. Then it ended up being a back alley prize in the sense that I got it in a fortified shed in a back alley. I'm not kidding. All of this controversy was because, in the piece In the Shadow of The Holocaust, I make the comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto and Nazi-occupied Europe.

Germans who take it upon themselves to police the memory of The Holocaust were outraged. I ended up writing a talk about the value of historical comparisons, and my argument is that the only way to make good on the promise of "Never Again" is to constantly be checking whether we are actually falling into darkness. In the Hague, South African lawyers make the case that Israel is committing genocide and Israel is going to argue against South Africa's case.

They're arguing about whether it is valid to make the comparison between the kinds of crimes against humanity that the Nazis committed during World War II that gave rise to the Genocide Convention like our entire post-World War II International Legal Order is based on the idea that we have to be constantly asking, "Is this the kind of thing that happened during World War II, the kind of thing that we swore to prevent?"

Brooke Gladstone: Since October 7th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been revisiting the legend of Amalek, the Biblical legend of Amalek you personally knew quite well.

Masha Gessen: When I was a teenager and my family immigrated from the Soviet Union, basically, we were waiting outside of Rome for our papers to come to the United States. There was a rabbi who would give Torah lessons to kids of these Jewish refugees waiting for their papers. Now, for most of us, this was the first Jewish education that we ever received because this was illegal in the Soviet Union, which was part of the impetus for some of our families leaving.

Brooke Gladstone: You were a Jew in your passport, not a Russian.

Masha Gessen: I was a Jew in my passport, in my school file, in my parents' personnel files, my medical records, everywhere you went, you were marked as a Jew, and yet you could not have any Jewish education. You could not practice Judaism or study Hebrew. My very first Torah lesson took place when I was 14, and it was on Amalek, which was a people that set out to destroy the Hebrews. The way that the rabbi taught it, which is a very common way, was that every generation of Jews has its own Amalek out to destroy us, and the only way to survive is to destroy Amalek ourselves. That spoke to me when I was 14.

It gave a framework to what I had experienced, both as a kid growing up in the shadow of The Holocaust and a kid growing up with this really pervasive state-enforced anti-Semitism. This is also the legend that Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have been wielding to justify the indiscriminate destruction of Gaza. That second part of the legend of Amalek, that "You have to kill the seed of Amalek," is a Biblical quote being used now in the International Court of Justice by the South African lawyers to make their case that there's clear genocidal intent.

It's so crazy-making, but also so familiar. I think even 43 years later, I remember how comforting it was to fall into a sense of communal victimhood. Israel is the victim of October 7th and will be the victim of October 7th for a long time to come, but people can be victims and perpetrators at the same time. This is actually one of the other great lessons of the 20th century. Israel was the victim of a horrific attack and a horrific series of crimes against humanity and is at the same time now committing crimes against humanity.

Brooke Gladstone: If you were to state, how we'd get out of this cultural and intellectual conundrum, what would it be?

Masha Gessen: I think we need a pro-comparison movement. That is what learning is. Trying to figure out how one thing is like another, but I really think we need to rigorously discredit the idea that you can't compare The Holocaust to anything else.

Brooke Gladstone: Masha, thank you very much.

Masha Gessen: Thank you, Brooke. It's great to talk to you.

Brooke Gladstone: Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the article In the Shadow of The Holocaust.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineers were Andrew Nerviano and Brendan Dalton. Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.