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The Intercept published an article on Society of Fellows alum Joelle M. Abi-Rached's latest critique of The New England Journal of Medicine. Abi-Rached (SOF 2017-2019) highlights how The Journal has yet to publish any articles about Palestinians and Gaza, and "said that it is the role of historians, medical journals, and universities to speak out and raise such questions to reckon with both past and present, referring to Israel’s war in Gaza as 'the most glaring and moral crisis of our time.'”
Read the article below
She Exposed a Prestigious Medical Journal’s Silence on the Holocaust. Now She’s Asking About Gaza
A historian who exposed the New England Journal of Medicine's silence on Nazi atrocities confronted the journal’s treatment of Gaza during a Harvard symposium.
Earlier this year, two Harvard medical historians published an article on a leading American medical journal’s willful ignorance of Nazi atrocities in the 1930s and ’40s. The article found that the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the nation’s longest-running and most prestigious medical publications, either chose not to cover the Nazi regime’s racist and antisemitic health policies, mass killings, and medical experimentation, or, in one case, praised the Nazi health care system for its approach to public health.
The New England Journal of Medicine convened a symposium on Wednesday where the authors, Joelle M. Abi-Rached and Allan M. Brandt, could present their findings — and Abi-Rached took the opportunity to call the journal out for repeating its mistakes today.
“Is the silence of the journal regarding the pulverization of the health care system in Gaza, and Israel’s relentless attack on health care workers and the creation of a public health and humanitarian disaster and the weaponization of starvation similar or different to its silence during the Holocaust?” Abi-Rached said toward the end of her talk, joining the symposium virtually from Paris. “What explains the erasure of the predicament of Palestinians in the pages of the journal? What do we mean by the political determinants of health if we precisely ignore the plight, the health, and well-being of marginalized and vulnerable populations?” [...]