Tag: Masha Gessen

Categories
Commentary

Masha Gessen’s Glib And Shameful Comparison

Masha Gessen

The New Yorker recently published an article by staff writer Masha Gessen in which she erroneously compared the Gaza Strip to Nazi ghettos in Eastern Europe. Understandably enough, her shameful comparison embarrassed the Heinrich Boll Foundation, which had awarded Gessen the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Having deplored her thesis as “unacceptable,” the foundation withdraw […]

Categories
Arts

The Spectacular Failure of Birobidzhan

Masha Gessen does not mince words. Birobidzhan, set aside by the Soviet Union in the late 1920s as a national homeland for Jews, was “perhaps the worst good idea ever.” She develops this argument in an absorbing book, Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region (Nextbook) For a […]