Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

A German City Retracted An Artist’s Prize Over BDS. Now A Museum Will Give It Independently.

The Germany city of Aachen walked back its support for an award for a Lebanese-American artist over concerns about his stance on the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement (BDS) — but he’ll receive the prize anyway, thanks to a defiant art institution.

The artist, Walid Raad, was set to receive a €10,000 prize from the city and a number of co-sponsors, foremost among them the Ludwig Forum of International Art. But as Hyperallergic reported, Aachen’s mayor, Marcel Philipp, announced on September 30 that the Aachen would no longer present Raad with the award over what he called an “evasive” answer given in response to a question from the city about his position on BDS.

BDS is a divisive political issue in Germany, where the parliament voted in May to declare that supporting the movement is anti-Semitic. The decision remains controversial, prompting a high-profile open letter sent in June and signed by 240 Israeli and Jewish scholars, arguing that the resolution would exacerbate anti-Semitism and discredit Palestinians. After the Berlin Jewish Museum shared an article about that letter on Twitter, the museum’s director, Peter Schäfer, resigned under pressure.

Philipp said that Raad’s answer was flippant and did “not do justice to the seriousness of the topic.”

But the Ludwig Forum decided to reject the city’s decision on October 1. The forum’s CEO, Michael Müller-Vorbrüggen, told the German publication Deutschlandfunk that the museum had secured the funds for the prize and planned to award it to Raad without the city’s participation.

Raad was being awarded the prize for his project “The Atlas Group (1989-2004),” a multi-media endeavor that uses manufactured materials from a fictional archive to present an alternate history of Lebanon. In 2014, according to Hyperallergic, Raad signed a public letter urging artists to pull out of the Creative Time exhibit “Living as Form” as if went on display at the Haifa-based Technion Institute; he has no other publicly-known affiliations with BDS.

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture fellow. He can be reached at [email protected]

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.