Wednesday, January 14, 2026, 7 pm Palestine time
M. Gessen, journalist
Title: A Conversation with M. Gessen
Abstract: During the discussion, M. Jessen will address the political repression faced by writers and the exclusion of Pro-Palestinian voices from festivals and public spaces. They willl examine the German reaction to them winning the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the comparison between the situation of Palestinians in the Gaza strip and that of Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. They will also discuss the exclusion of a Palestinian writer from the Adelaide Festival in Australia, and the subsequent withdrawal of several writers and journalists in solidarity. Finally, they will address the importance of political action in confronting systems of repression.
Bio: M. Gessen is an opinion columnist at The New York Times, a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and the author of 11 books of nonfiction. They write about autocracy, Russia and Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, and LGBT rights. They are currently at work on two books, one a biography of Hannah Arendt with a focus on her relationship to Zionism and the other on the possibility of political action in dark times.