Hadas-Handelsman joins Jewish groups in denouncing Frankfurt's
decision to award US prof. Butler with Adorno Prize.
BERLIN – Germany has come under criticism from both Israel’s Ambassador Yakov
Hadas-Handelsman and the director of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center office in Jerusalem, Dr. Efraim Zuroff.
They slammed Germany on
Monday and Tuesday respectively for showing a lack
of sensitivity towards Nazi era crimes when granting
prestigious awards.
The issues are both the
city of Frankfurt’s award of the Adorno prize to US
Prof. Judith Butler, and the choice of Prof. Irena
Veisaite, a Lithuanian Jewish literature instructor
and critic, for the renowned Goethe prize.
Zuroff pointed out that
Veisaite has conflated the crimes of the Holocaust
with those of Soviet Communism, and Hadas-Handelsman
said that Butler’s pro-Hamas and Hezbollah statements
would now be legitimized, “with which she has caused
damage to the only Jewish state, and will play into
the hands of its opponents.”
Yakov Hadas-Handelsman
said Butler considers “Hezbollah and Hamas as progressive
organizations, and ignored their participation in terror
against civilians, and the attitude of these organizations
to religious pluralism and equal rights between men
and women, and between people of different sexual orientations.”
In the ongoing disagreement
over awarding Butler, a supporter of a cultural and
academic boycott of Israel, the Adorno award in September,
Jewish groups have called for Frankfurt to rescind
the prize.
B’nai B’rith International
issued a statement on Monday saying that “Butler’s
anti-Israel actions include endorsing the United States
Campaign for an Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
– a boycott that was actively promoted by the Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.”
B’nai B’rith continued:
“It is wrong to give the Adorno prize, named in honor
of a Jewish intellectual, to anyone who shares these
goals.
It is our hope that the
city of Frankfurt, a sister-city of Tel Aviv, will
reconsider presenting Butler with the Adorno prize
given her lamentable anti-Israel track record.”
In a Deutsche Welle article
on Tuesday, Veisaite said, “The Soviets were very,
very bad. Different from the Nazis, but not better.”
Zuroff, a leading expert
on the Holocaust in the Baltic states, told The Jerusalem
Post: “It is particularly unfortunate that the recipient
of this year’s Goethe prize is a Holocaust survivor
who allows her personal tragedy to be exploited, in
the service of the current Lithuanian government’s
efforts to distort the history of the Shoah – by minimizing
or hiding the unusually extensive complicity of Lithuanians
in the mass murder of their fellow Jewish citizens,
and by promoting the canard of historical equivalency
between the crimes of Communism and those committed
by the Nazis.”
Prof. Dovid Katz, a Yiddish
expert, teaches in Lithuania and has written extensively
about the government’s efforts to whitewash its advancement
of the destruction of Baltic Jewry. He wrote in The
Guardian, “Make no mistake, in the Baltics we are talking
not just about ‘collaboration’ with the Nazis, but
‘participation’ in the frightening sense of thousands
of volunteer killers being on hand to gleefully do
most of the Nazis’ killing, in effect of their own
neighbors, in the three Baltic states and some other
regions.”
jpost.com
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