The dispute with the Israeli government overshadows the birthday of the release of Buchenwald Camp – Politico

Israeli officials accuse Boehm, professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York with a double German-Israeli citizenship, of trivializing the Holocaust.

“The decision to invite Omri Boehm, a man who described Yad Vashem (the Israel Memorial to the Holocaust victims) as an instrument of political manipulation, relativized the Holocaust and even compared it to the Nakba (the Palestinian term for the flight of 700,000 Palestinian Palestinians, but to the Arab-Eventual War) “Wrote the Israeli Embassy on X.” Under the guise of science, Boehm tries to dilute the commemoration of the Holocaust with his discourse on universal values, thus depriving him of his historical and moral meaning. »»

The chief of the German foundation supervising the Memorial of Buchenwald criticized the Israeli pressure.

“To be really forced to deny the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, the soil is really the worst thing that I have known in 25 years of commemorative work,” said foundation director, Jens-Christian Wagner, on public radio. “Third parties play a history policy on the back of the victims and it is extremely regrettable.”

Boehm was invited “because we can expect it to provide a high level of ethical reflection on the relationship between history and memory, in particular on the value of universal human rights and their meaning with regard to Nazi crimes,” Wagner said in a press release.

He said he had drawn the “emergency brake” to cancel Boehm’s speech to prevent the controversy from overshadowing an event intended to honor the survivors. “I really couldn’t reconcile him with my conscience of the scholarship holders of a conflict that had nothing to do with them the 80th anniversary,” he said in the interview with public radio.