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Andrea Pitzer

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Andrea Pitzer
Born1968 (age 55–56)[1]
Parkersburg, West Virginia, U.S.[2]
OccupationJournalist
Websiteandreapitzer.com

Andrea Pitzer is an American journalist, known for her books One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.[3][4][5] Pitzer's third book, Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World,[6][7] was published in 2021.

Early life

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Pitzer attended the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where she says she studied nuclear negotiations and treaties.[5] While at Harvard, she founded Nieman Storyboard.[8]

Career

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Pitzer was widely cited in 2019 over whether the camps where the United States Border authorities detained refugee claimants were or weren't canonical concentration camps.[3][4][9] In particular, a tweet where Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez linked to an article in Esquire magazine, that extensively quoted Pitzer stirred widespread debate.

Pitzer was interviewed on All In with Chris Hayes, on the Border Patrol detention camps, on June 6, 2019.[10] According to Pitzer, recognizable concentration camps were first used in Spanish Cuba, developed by General Valeriano Weyler during the Cuban War of Independence in the 1890s.[11][12] She said that while the Nazi death camps were the best known concentration camps, they have been used around the world. She said she found that concentration camps were hard to close; how she found that authorities found them so convenient, that they were re-used for other groups. She cited how French camps first used to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War were later used by the Vichy French to house Jews rounded up to hand over to their Nazi occupiers, and a camp at the Guantanamo Naval Base to house Haitian and Cuban refugees was later used to house captives from Afghanistan. She said her book began when she "looked to see how this idea, of rounding up a whole bunch of civilians - noncombatants - and putting them in detention, without trial... How did that get to be seen as a good idea?"

Pitzer has described the internment systems for ethnic Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang, Japanese American during World war II and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar as concentration camps.[11]

References

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  1. ^ @andreapitzer (November 25, 2020). "1968 is great--no need for day/month. Fabulous. Thank you!" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  2. ^ Andrea Pitzer (April 30, 2019). "The small-town West Virginia bookstore that helped me survive my terrible childhood: The Books in My Grandparents' Parkersburg Store Helped Me Escape From My Troubles and Understand Cruelty". Zocalo Public Square. Retrieved July 17, 2019.
  3. ^ a b Jack Holmes (June 13, 2019). "An Expert on Concentration Camps Says That's Exactly What the U.S. Is Running at the Border: "Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz."". Esquire magazine. Retrieved July 17, 2019. But while the world-historical horrors of the Holocaust are unmatched, they are only the most extreme and inhuman manifestation of a concentration-camp system—which, according to Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has a more global definition.
  4. ^ a b Masha Gessen (June 21, 2019). "The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps". New Yorker magazine. Retrieved July 17, 2019. Pitzer argued that "mass detention of civilians without a trial" was what made the camps concentration camps.
  5. ^ a b Weiss, Michael (October 13, 2013). "Pale Fire, Cold War". The Daily Beast. Retrieved June 13, 2020.
  6. ^ Slade, Rachel (January 12, 2021). "'Icebound' Takes Us Back to the Arctic, in All Its Terror and Splendor". New York Times. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
  7. ^ Briefly reviewed in the January 25, 2021 issue of The New Yorker, p.63.
  8. ^ Desai, Sagar (February 10, 2012). "Exiled Iranian Reporter Speaks to Undergraduates". The Harvard Crimson.
  9. ^ "The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 'concentration camp' debate, explained". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. June 19, 2019. Retrieved June 25, 2019.
  10. ^ Chris Hayes (June 6, 2019). "Lessons from history as U.S. detains more migrants". MSNBC. Retrieved July 17, 2019. As the U.S. camp system to detain migrants grows, author Andrea Pitzer laid out lessons from history on camp detentions.
  11. ^ a b "On anniversary of Auschwitz liberation, writer calls attention to modern-day concentration camps". The Current. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. January 27, 2020. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
  12. ^ "Crucible of Empire - PBS Online". www.pbs.org. Retrieved January 28, 2020.
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