AMY GOODMAN:
Samia Halaby, we want to bring in another Palestinian American artist
into this discussion, the artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir. She was
scheduled to speak at any event in Berlin, Germany, in October, but her
appearance was canceled. She’s the recipient of prestigious awards,
including a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, a Prince Claus Award
from the Prince Claus Fund in The Hague, the Hugo Boss Prize at the
Guggenheim Museum, and most recently she won an American Academy of Arts
and Letters prize and received an honorary doctorate from the National
College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland. She is the founding
director of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem,
where she was born.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Emily. It’s very good to have you
with us. Can you talk about what’s happened to you, actually, not here
in the United States, but in Berlin, Germany?
EMILY JACIR:
Thank you, Amy, for having me on your show. It’s really a pleasure to
be here. I also just would like to begin by expressing my solidarity for
Samia and the loss of her show, but also for the curator, Elliot,
because he was in Bethlehem last summer and spoke to me at length about
this exhibition, so I was quite excited about it.
I was slated to speak in Berlin as part of a workshop at Potsdam
University. And when they canceled the talk, they wrote to me and said
they were going to postpone it to a more peaceful time — or, to a more
peaceful point in time, which, now listening to Samia speaking about the
idea of being a lightning rod, this really resonated with me. And this
is one of the methodologies that is being used to actually stop us from
being able to speak publicly and share our words and share our work.
This is another way of doing it, is by saying, “Oh, we’ll just do this
in another peaceful time.” But this is the time. This is the time when
we should be speaking and having discourse, across the board, around the
world. So I don’t buy that that was the real reason.
Again, we have to also take the curator into consideration and try to
imagine what kind of pressure, particularly being in Germany, they must
have been under. The situation in Germany, as we all know, is one of
the most extreme cases of silencing Palestinians. But it’s part of a
larger war effort targeting Palestinian voices and intellectuals, using
various methodologies, including harassment, baseless smear campaigns,
canceling shows, canceling talks. So, it’s very much part of a
coordinated movement.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
So, Emily Jacir, could you talk about some of the — there have been
numerous incidents in Germany where people have been canceled, for one
reason or another having to do with Gaza. If you could just go through
some of those people, in particular, the Palestinian artists and
writers?
EMILY JACIR:
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the first incidents was Adania Shibli, who
was slated to receive an award in Germany. That was within the first
week of October, if I remember correctly. The list is quite extensive.
My sister’s film, Annemarie Jacir, was canceled within weeks also, I
think. Her film was canceled. It’s a film about a wedding, and it was
deemed too controversial to show on German television. Candice Breitz,
as we all know, is another person. There are so many. The list is
endless.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:
Well, we want to go now to a writer, a highly acclaimed writer and
author, the award-winning Masha Gessen, who was also canceled, or her
award. She was to receive the Hannah Arendt Award in Bremen. We spoke to
her in December, shortly after the publication of their New Yorker piece headlined “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.”
In the essay, Gessen wrote, quote, “For the last seventeen years,
Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound
where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave
for even a short amount of time — in other words, a ghetto. Not like the
Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a
Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany,”
they wrote.
Gessen went on to explain why the term “ghetto” is not commonly used
to describe Gaza. Gessen said, quote, “Presumably, the more fitting term
'ghetto' would have drawn fire for comparing the predicament of
besieged Gazans to that of ghettoized Jews. It also would have given us
the language to describe what is happening in Gaza now. The ghetto is
being liquidated,” Gessen wrote.
They had been scheduled to receive the prestigious Hannah Arendt
Prize in Germany, but the ceremony had to be postponed after one of the
award’s sponsors, the left-leaning Heinrich Böll Foundation, withdrew
its support.
Gessen discussed the New Yorker piece and the controversy that followed on Democracy Now! on the very day they had been originally scheduled to receive the award in Bremen.
MASHA GESSEN:
A large part of the article is devoted to, in fact, memory politics in
Germany and the vast anti-antisemitism machine, which largely targets
people who are critical of Israel and, in fact, are often Jewish. This
happens to be a description that fits me, as well. I am Jewish. I come
from a family that includes Holocaust survivors. I grew up in the Soviet
Union very much in the shadow of the Holocaust. That’s where the phrase
in the headline came from, is from the passage in the article itself.
And I am critical of Israel.
Now, the part that really offended the Heinrich Böll Foundation and
the city of Bremen — and, I would imagine, some German public — is the
part that you read out loud, which is where I make the comparison
between the besieged Gaza, so Gaza before October 7th, and a Jewish
ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. I made that comparison intentionally. It
was not what they call here a provocation. It was very much the point
of the piece, because I think that the way that memory politics function
now in Europe and in the United States, but particularly in Germany, is
that their cornerstone is that you can’t compare the Holocaust to
anything. It is a singular event that stands outside of history.
My argument is that in order to learn from history, we have to
compare. Like, that actually has to be a constant exercise. We are not
better people or smarter people or more educated people than the people
who lived 90 years ago. The only thing that makes us different from
those people is that in their imagination the Holocaust didn’t yet exist
and in ours it does. We know that it’s possible. And the way to prevent
it is to be vigilant, in the way that Hannah Arendt, in fact, and other
Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust were vigilant and were —
there was an entire conversation, especially in the first two decades
after World War II, in which they really talked about how to recognize
the signs of sliding into the darkness.
And I think that we need to — oh, and one other thing that I want to
say is that our entire framework of international humanitarian law is
essentially based — it all comes out of the Holocaust, as does the
concept of genocide. And I argue that that framework is based on the
assumption that you’re always looking at war, at conflict, at violence
through the prism of the Holocaust. You always have to be asking the
question of whether crimes against humanity, the definitions of which
came out of the Holocaust, are occurring. And Israel has waged an
incredibly successful campaign at setting — not only setting the
Holocaust outside of history, but setting itself aside from the optics
of international humanitarian law, in part by weaponizing the politics
of memory and the politics of the Holocaust.
AMY GOODMAN:
That’s Masha Gessen. Masha Gessen was speaking to us from Bremen,
Germany. The award ceremony went from an auditorium of hundreds — they
ultimately got the award in someone’s backyard.
Meanwhile, more than 500 global artists, filmmakers and writers and
cultural workers have announced a push against Germany’s stance on
Israel’s war on Gaza, calling on artists to step back from collaborating
with German state-funded associations. The campaign is backed by the
French author, Nobel Prize for Literature winner Annie Ernaux and the
Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed el-Kurd. It alleges Germany has
adopted, quote, “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of
expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine,”
unquote.
We’re speaking with Emily Jacir, whose speech was just canceled in
Berlin, Germany. And as we wrap up with you, Emily, I wanted to know if
you could comment on what’s happening in your birthplace, in Bethlehem.
The last time we went to Bethlehem, we were interviewing two pastors
there, one of them who set up Christ in the rubble, a crèche scene that
showed the baby Jesus in rubble, signifying Gaza. If you can talk about
that and the importance of your art, as you continue?
EMILY JACIR:
Yeah, I will talk about that, but just to relate back to what everyone
else was talking about and how you started, I think it’s really
important to consider the way this attempt at creating a culture of fear
amongst the arts community globally and internationally is happening
through these baseless smear campaigns and defamation, threatening
people’s jobs. And I mention this just because, you know, one of the
things that happened to me was that there was a letter-writing campaign
in which every university I’ve ever taught at internationally, anyone
that’s ever given me an award received literally a five-page PDF claiming that I was an ISIS terrorist that supports the rape of women and the killing of babies. People who signed that Artforum letter,
and many, many, many of whom are Jewish and Israeli allies that I have
worked with for 25 years, also received that letter. In my case, because
people know me — they’ve worked with me for 25 years — the letters come
off as just absolutely absurd and ridiculous. But if that is happening
to me, it begs the question of what is happening to younger artists,
people who don’t — people in museums don’t know receiving letters like
that. And it’s very targeted and very systematic, and it’s something to
consider also in relationship with the targeted destruction of culture
in Gaza, art centers being bombed. Why would an art center be bombed?
Because part of genocide is precisely silencing artists and silencing a
culture’s cultural production. And I feel that that was very important
to say that.
In Bethlehem, the situation is quite difficult — nothing compared to
Gaza, of course. But we are witnessing incursions every night. It’s been
— you know, Bethlehem is a town that very, very much relies on visitors
and tourists for its economy, so that, economically, it’s been a
disaster. As an art center, our art center in Bethlehem promotes dance
and music and art practices and making and residencies of local artists
and international artists. We’re doing our very best to both deal with
the situation at hand but also provide a kind of way of working with the
children now who live in our neighborhood who are trying to handle the
situation, both on the ground in Bethlehem but also witnessing what’s
happening to Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN:
Emily Jacir, we want to thank you for being with us, acclaimed artist
and filmmaker, born in Bethlehem, goes back and forth between Bethlehem
and New York, was scheduled to speak in Berlin, Germany, her talk
canceled. And Samia Halaby, renowned Palestinian visual artist,
activist, educator and scholar, whose first U.S. retrospective was
abruptly canceled by Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art over
her support for Palestinians and criticism of Israel’s bombardment of
Gaza.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by a German American Jewish Holocaust survivor. Samia is 87. Marione Ingram is 88. She’s been standing outside the White House for months calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Her talks in her native Hamburg, which she fled from in the Holocaust, have been canceled. Stay with us.
