on the basis of his criticisms of Israeli policies is a bush-league witch hunt that does more damage to the reputation of the university than to that of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright.
As you may have heard, the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted Monday to withhold an honorary degree that had been slated to be awarded to Kushner. According to the NYT, the prevailing board contingent, led by trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, claimed that Kushner, who like many artistic intellectuals has been critical of Israeli actions, "disparaged the State of Israel." The board's surprise kick in the teeth to Kushner, which has not happened to a would-be CUNY honoree since 1961, has set off a storm of criticism from CUNY faculty and students. Even the CUNY administration has tactfully distanced itself from the board's decision; a CUNY spokesperson said that “The CUNY board of trustees acted independently and exercised its authority.”
CUNY's leadership looks like a den of dunces right now. And it should.
Sadly, we have seen this kind of hard-line pro-Israel foolishness before, as in 2006 when the New York Theatre Workshop knuckled under to pressure to cancel a play depicting the life of activist Rachel Corrie, an American defender of Palestinian rights who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she stood in protest of Israeli demolition of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip. (See below.) Some apologists for the brutality of the contemporary Israeli regime – who will brook no criticism of Israel's hyper-militarized dominance of Palestinians – just plain lose their marbles when confronted with intelligent indictments of Israeli policy, especially from Jews such as Kushner. Like an exponential magnification of certain blacks' defending the actions of President Obama no matter what, such rationalizers of Israeli actions fiercely denounce critics as being anti-Israel and anti-semitic.
Most such accusations, including those against Kushner, are, of course, complete nonsense. Condemning the current Israeli regime's actions is no more anti-Israeli or anti-semitic than condemning the Bush 2 regime's behavior is anti-American. In fact, I believe that in the long run it is pro-Israeli to criticize current-day Israel's self-destructive contempt for the rights for Palestinians, just as it was pro-American to criticize the Bush 2 regime's trampling of due process and international rule of law.
Many Americans already know this, which is why CUNY now looks so stupid. In fact, I think the intransigence of defenders of Israel's self-pitying posture is in direct proportion to the growing backlash against Israel's hopeless aggressiveness. Decades from now, when reality has forced Israel to acknowledge the territorial and human rights of Palestinians, none of this will even be subject to debate.
Which is why Tony Kushner, a playwright who will be remembered long after the wild-eyed CUNY trustees have been entirely forgotten, doesn't need any stinking honorary degree.
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Here is what I wrote on this blog in 2006 about the Rachel Corrie controversy:
A Sorry Showing.
With our official chroniclers being so generous these days in dispensing the mantle of "hero" (the title is now bestowed upon the tragic legacy of virtually every uniformed American man or woman who dies following senseless orders), the story of Rachel Corrie serves, like an ice-water dunking, to shock us back into understanding the meaning of the word.
You might remember her: the 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Washington who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer as she stood with outstretched arms, wearing an orange vest, attempting to block the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family amid Israel's campaign to clear-cut Palestinian border neighborhoods in the name of security.
As it turns out, Corrie was a writer of some ability as well as an activist, and her copious and revealing journals were edited into a play, a one-woman show titled "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which took London by storm last year. The play was the biggest sellout in 50 years at London's Royal Court Theatre, and has since moved to the West End, London's equivalent of Broadway, where it is expected to be a smash.
This year, New Yorkers were also expecting to be able to see the play until, weeks before its scheduled March 22 opening at the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), the theater suddenly announced an open-ended postponement of the play's debut amid intense pressure from groups not pleased with the dramatic message of a blue-eyed blond American pro-Palestinian activist. It seems that in an age of quisling liberals diving for cover from post-9/11 political vigilantism, these tickets were, in the words of a cover story in The Nation, "too hot for New York."
The outrage from theatrical luminaries was deservedly swift and widespread. The play's co-creator, Alan Rickman, proclaimed in the Guardian of London, "This is censorship born out of fear." Nobel literary laureate Harold Pinter, in a letter to the New York Times signed by nearly 20 other well-known self-described Jewish playwrights and writers, said that NYTW's claims of recent Mideast developments making the Corrie play too controversial "make no sense," and asked, "what is it about Rachel Corrie's writings... that New York audiences must be protected from?" Actress Vanessa Redgrave declared to Pacifica Radio that NYTW's failure of will is "an act of catastrophic cowardice." Famed playwright Tony Kushner, whose own work has been featured at NYTW, wrote in a letter to the New York Observer that he is "disappointed and disheartened by this decision and... baffled by the subsequent attempts to justify it."
The record, sadly, illustrates NYTW's willing surgical removal of its own spine in this matter. In response to early opposition to the play from some quarters, the theater's leadership, by its own admission in a March 22 interview on Pacifica's Democracy Now!, began a community "dialogue" process that involved pro-Israel partisans but no Arab-Americans. It began backing away from previously-agreed commitments to stage the play. It started to suggest, after the fact, to the play's British creators the need for audience "discussions" including pro-Israel scholars after each performance to place the play in "context." Most damningly, NYTW revealed its own lack of stomach for defense of artistic and political principle in the face of politically and financially influential opposition.
It is to their credit that, after the compost hit the fan, NYTW Artistic Director James Nicola and Managing Director Lynn Moffat agreed to do the Pacifica interview at all; the broadcast was a debate between them on the one side and the play's co-editor, Katherine Viner, whose sense of offense at NYTW's moral cave-in reflects the feelings of the play's other British creators and backers as well as of Corrie's parents themselves [full transcript of the debate is at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435259]. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is not known for lobbing softballs, and Nicola and Moffat, clearly no more morally steady on their feet than when they first took on the Corrie play, were out of their league. One might feel sorry for them but for the fact that the political cost of their cowardice is, for the broader artistic community, much greater than its personal cost for the two of them. Throughout the interview Nicola and Moffat betrayed, to their lasting shame, a feckless aversion to fighting back against the currently intimidating forces of cultural censorship.
I suggest that you go and hear (or read) Nicola's and Moffat's remarks for yourself. It wasn't pretty: Nicola stumbled, whimpered and equivocated through tortured attempts at self-justification by reiterating how very, very hard it is to try to mount a play when people get mad. And Moffat, for her part, stuck to a steely script of utter nonsense about the play's unique incorrigibility and the awful practical problems it posed. The British co-writer Viner, admirably restraining her likely desire to knock Nicola's and Moffat's squishy heads together, dispatched their hopeless arguments with civil precision. She also left them flat-footed by refusing, on the air, their plaintive offer to try to find some way for NYTW to stage the play; NYTW no longer merits any trust, she replied, and the play's creators have been inundated with offers from other American theaters to put on the play, one of which they hope to accept.
The heart of the matter, I think, is that theater people like Nicola and Moffat have been accepting toasts at cocktail parties and bowing for applauding trustees at board meetings for so long that they have forgotten how to take a flurry of punishing shots to the chops (or to the gut) for the sake of their mission. In the Pacifica interview, both Nicola and Moffat recited, like a mantra, that it was their Herculean task with the Corrie play to, in Nicola's words, make it "safe" for Corrie's message to be heard without its being "polluted" by the raging political argument surrounding the Israeli occupation. It is as if Nicola and Moffat hoped to shuffle mute audiences in and out of this political fireball of a play -- in Manhattan, no less -- with no muss, no fuss, and no need to take a fighting stance in the face of irate theater funders and infuriated political zealots. The essential and unavoidable need to stand up and fight in public for a work such as the Corrie play seems to have entirely taken these two by surprise. Even on the radio, one could sense their blinking disorientation. I think they are still in shock at having had such demands made of them.
Nicola's blubbering, in fact, reached its absurd peak in the interview when he cited, as if pointing to a newly-uncovered neutron bomb, a friend's having told him of an online claim that Rachel Corrie was a registered member of Hamas. People are out to slander Corrie and my play! he gasped. Well, duh. A lot of people hate the cause that Corrie supported, and some of them lie on the Internet, and a few are flat-out wacko, and others will go all-out with their financial and political clout against a theater that takes a stand for a Palestinian-sympathetic production. Hello? Earth to Jim. This is part of the job description for a theater artistic director who has principles. It is high time more artists posed dramatic challenges to the orthodoxy of American support for the amoral militarism and self-excusing atrocities of the current Israeli regime.
Welcome to the new McCarthyism: an era of contagious and officially-mongered fear that, like the 1950s, separates the heroes from the, er, James Nicolas.
(Posted 3/27/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)