Petra Marquardt-Bigman. Picture: Hen Mazzig.
I’ll all the time be grateful to Twitter for having introduced Petra Marquardt-Bigman into my life. It was there, on a platform that’s steadily, and justifiably, maligned for selling strife and battle, that we first “met” and commenced to “discuss” about issues that mattered to each of us.
Someday, I messaged her to inform her that I used to be on my technique to Israel. Would possibly she need to meet in particular person? She agreed instantly.
We met at Café Suzanna, a Tel Aviv establishment that occupies a great chunk of a block on Shalom Shabazi Road — a quaint and classy avenue that runs towards the ocean by way of town’s historic Neve Tzedek neighborhood. We met once more the subsequent day, and on my subsequent journey to Israel, Petra invited me to spend a weekend at her condo that sat on the prime of one of many high-rises towering over the seashores of Bat Yam.
We went buying at Bat Yam’s industrial heart, the place Russian girls arrange retailers crammed with trendy garments whose “Made in Italy” labels doubtless meant “Made in Turkey,” and we giggled as I translated the saleswomen’s gossip to her. Then we sat on the balcony consuming tea and listening to the sounds of the Israeli summer time rising from under: waves lapping on the shore, lifeguards barking orders at feckless swimmers, and the rhythmic back-and-forth of the Matkot — a ubiquitous Israeli seashore tennis sport.
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January 20, 2021 6:55 am
The garments we purchased that weekend are nonetheless with me, however Petra now not is. In early October of final yr, shortly after Israel’s second nationwide coronavirus shutdown ended, she went to the hospital to take a look at a again ache that had been getting worse. Inside two weeks, she discovered it was most cancers. She died on Jan. 7 on the Tel-Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv.
Those that adopted Petra on social media knew her as a fearless defender of fact and accuracy in public discourse about Israel. She fought tirelessly in opposition to antisemitism that hid below the label of “anti-Zionism.” Her dedication to the Jewish individuals was all of the extra exceptional on condition that she herself was not Jewish.
Petra Marquardt was born in 1958 within the small village of Schlat, close to Stuttgart, within the southern a part of Germany. Her dad and mom had been refugees from the a part of Germany that, after the conflict, was turned over to Poland. In 1986, she acquired a scholarship to Georgetown College to write down a PhD on US intelligence on Nineteen Forties Germany. Just a few days after arriving at Georgetown, she met her future husband and the love of her life, the Israeli economist David Bigman.
They spent the subsequent 20 years splitting their time between Washington DC, Israel, the Netherlands, India, South Korea, Vietnam, and China — wherever David’s work took them. It was in these early years that Petra started to reexamine her prior assumptions about Israel that had been grounded in her “lifelong allegiance to the left.” In a 2011 Jerusalem Post article, “Confessions of a Lapsed Leftist,” she famous that one of many decisive elements in her change of coronary heart was watching the left try and justify Palestinian terrorism.
As a scholar with a agency dedication to info, and easily an sincere particular person, she couldn’t ignore the proof she noticed in entrance of her eyes. And as soon as she noticed it, she couldn’t stay silent. She started to dedicate herself to combating misinformation and distortions she noticed in Western protection of Israel — the “warped mirror” perspective that she noticed informing the talk on the difficulty. This phrase would grow to be the title of her blog.
Within the “about” part of the Warped Mirror, which dates to 2011, she noted with attribute incisiveness that the unending makes an attempt to show Israel right into a pariah state had broader implications: “When well-documented historic info and related contexts are routinely dismissed in favor of emotionally charged ‘narratives’ demonizing Israel, it isn’t simply the world’s solely Jewish state that’s focused, however the very foundations of the progress derived from the West’s enlightenment heritage.”
Her observations stay acutely related at the moment, a full decade after she made them: “We dwell in occasions when entry to data and information is less complicated than ever; but, depressingly, conspiracy theories appear as common as they had been when solely privileged elites might learn and educate themselves.”
As a scholar of historical past — together with the historical past of the nation of her delivery — she had no bother discerning a parallel between the outdated Nazi slogan of “Jews are our misfortune” and “Israel is our misfortune”: “There are eerie parallels between the medieval view that the Jews had been accountable for Europe’s Black Dying and the trendy notion that it’s the Jewish state that must be blamed for the shortage of peace and progress within the Center East.”
She hated the hypocrisy and mental laziness that she noticed afflicting each the left and the fitting. Having misplaced her political dwelling on the left, she discovered no different. She was staunchly secular, figuring out together with her husband’s secularist kibbutznik custom. She overtly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and felt pissed off by the continued dysfunction in Israel’s political system.
She published widely, together with in The Algemeiner, Haaretz, The Times of Israel, The Forward, The Guardian, The Jerusalem Post, Legal Insurrection, and others. Her buddy, who tweets as @kweansmom, advised me that she as soon as requested Petra why she bothered publishing in left-wing publications whose audiences could be hostile to her evaluation. Petra’s reply was that she needed to ensure that pro-Israel voices had been current in these areas, to forestall them from turning into echo chambers.
The information of Petra’s passing produced an outpouring of grief amongst those that knew her nearly and in actual life. The blogger Elder of Ziyon wrote an obituary. So did her colleagues at Legal Insurrection. Twitter person @ClaireRedacted wrote that she felt a “particular kinship with Petra,” who she thought of a “sort, affected person, and warm-hearted” particular person whose title evoked “justice, love of the Jewish individuals and our nation.” Michael Elgort tweeted that he would miss “her highly effective and educated voice.” Hen Mazzig posted a photo of himself with Petra, and referred to her as a “expensive buddy” and “an unbelievable particular person, with a lot love and brilliance.”
“She left us too quickly, and her premature dying is a large loss to these within the scholarly {and professional} world who adopted her vital writings,” Miriam Elman, Govt Director of the Educational Engagement Community, wrote to me. She notably emphasised the significance of Petra’s writings in regards to the media and the West’s “ignorance and silence over incitement to violence and terrorism in opposition to Israelis, but in addition about antisemitism on the left within the US” in addition to the European far-right.
Elman famous how a lot she appreciated Petra’s defense of her and her colleagues in opposition to a smear marketing campaign that erupted over “Word Crimes” — a particular challenge of the Israel Research Journal, which Elman co-edited.
For the pro-Israel group, Petra was a warrior, a meticulous and inveterate researcher, and a defender of Israel and the Jewish individuals. Those that knew her personally may even keep in mind her as a form and beneficiant one that had spent years caring for her mom, sister, and husband, and was simply as giving and caring together with her pals. She will probably be deeply missed.
Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar with the Kennan Institute on the Wilson Middle and a contributing author for Pill journal.
