Simon Schama has accused the acclaimed author Pankaj Mishra of delivering an “exercise in sustained moral profanity” with an essay on Israel and Gaza that suggested those supporting the actions of the Jewish state had failed to learn the lessons of the Shoah.
In a hard-hitting, and well-received speech, delivered at a London conference on antisemitism, historian and author Schama spoke out against widespread misrepresentation and dilution of Holocaust memory in popular culture.
After citing the more obvious examples of anti-Jewish propagandist in our society, including the rapper Ye, previously known as Kayne West, Schama raised the essay The Shoah After Gaza, published in the London Review of Books by Mishra – who he said had become “a kind of darling of the English intellectual literati left.”
“I think a really low in this process, I mean can you actually sink any lower than this, of actually moving beyond the dilution of Holocaust memory to disqualifying Jews from being the custodians of that memory was reached by Pankaj Mishra in a famous essay he published last year in the London Review of Books.
“He became, as you probably know, the kind of darling of the English intellectual literati left. ”
Schama then said of the essay:”This is an exercise in sustained moral depravity. ”
Pankaj Mishra
The author, currently making a new BBC documentary on the Holocaust in an “age of denial”, suggested arguments such as those advanced by Mishara on Israel and Gaza leave a condition in which Jews are only allowed to “say Kaddish in effect for the six million if you come out like Naomi Klein and Judith Butler and Peter Beinhart and you come out as anti-Zionist.”
“So we have a kind of moral selection ramp,” continued Schama, “between those who are allowed to grieve and explain and write and study the Holocaust on condition that you repudiate the Jewish state – 20 percent of whom in its earliest years were Holocaust survivors.”
He added:”You know, sometimes chutzpah, which is a joke for us, can be a kind of ethical crime, as has been committed by Mishra.”
A subsequent book from Mishra was now titled The World After Gaza, Schama noted.
During Monday’s lecture at the London Centre Study of Contemporary Antisemitism conference in central London, Schama discussed attempts to remove the Jewish presence in the modern era from the Anne Frank story, mentioning the lessons to be learned from Dara Horn’s book People Love Dead Jews.
In the film world, Schama also openly criticised the award winning 2023 Jonathan Glazer movie Zone of Interest.
“In the end I became absolutely furious at his own clever self-admiration,” said Schama on Glazer’s film, which focuses on the life of German Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig.
“What you’ll all notice about the Zone of Interest,” Schama said to the audience at his talk, “it was completely Jew free, totally Jew free.”
He added the film was in actual fact a “disturbing soundscape” which “made no sense whatsoever in terms of what was actually going on.
“You could see the smoke coming out of the chimneys and so on….”
Simon Schama in BBC doc The Story of the Jews
Schama also said it was regretful that in an age of much Holocaust education there was a well documented rise in antisemitism amongst younger generations.
On more than one occassion the author said while he remained a Zionist, who believed in a two-state solution, he could not bring himself to support much from current Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The author of several nonfiction books, as well as a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and New York Review of Books, Mishra has been both praised and criticised for his recent interventions on Israel, Gaza and the Palestinians.
From some on the anti-imperialist left he is praised for his claims that Israel weaponises the Holocaust and for his attempts to link the actions of the Jewish state with Western colonialism.
But many critics, both Jewish and not, point to his failure to address the enormity of the October 7 Hamas atrocity, and accuse him of sidestepping wide reaching examples of violence against Jews throughout history.
