Israeli officials accuse Boehm, a philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research in New York with double German-Israeli citizenship, of trivializing the Holocaust.
“The decision to invite Omri Boehm, a man who has described Yad Vashem [Israel’s memorial to 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 an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war], is not only outrageous, but a blatant insult to the memory of the victims,” the Israeli embassy wrote on X. “Under the guise of science, Boehm is attempting to dilute the commemoration of the Holocaust with his discourse on universal values, thereby robbing it of its historical and moral significance.”
The head of the German foundation overseeing the Buchenwald memorial criticized the Israeli pressure.
“To actually be pressured into denying a Holocaust survivor’s grandson the floor is really the worst thing I’ve experienced in 25 years of memorial work,” the foundation director, Jens-Christian Wagner, said on public radio. “Third parties are playing history politics on the backs of the victims and that is extremely regrettable.”
Boehm was invited “because we can expect him to provide a high level of ethical reflection on the relationship between history and remembrance, in particular on the value of universal human rights and their significance with regard to the Nazi crimes,” Wagner said in a statement.
He said he pulled the “emergency brake” to cancel Boehm’s speech in order to prevent the controversy from overshadowing an event intended to honor survivors. “I really couldn’t reconcile it with my conscience to burden them with a conflict that had nothing at all to do with them on the 80th anniversary,” he said in the public radio interview.