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92NY implodes over cancellation of Israel-critical author event
(JTA) — It took less than four days for 92NY to go from having a packed calendar of literary events and a full team to a depleted schedule and staff resignations.
The dramatic shakeup at the venerable New York Jewish cultural center came after the institution scrapped a planned talk Friday by Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, after Nguyen signed an open letter in the London Review of Books that pushed for “an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine,” accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and condemned “the deliberate killing of civilians” — without denouncing Hamas specifically.
Staff at the 92NY told the press it had made the decision out of concern for its Jewish audience.
Following the decision, which 92NY’s leaders made only hours before Nguyen’s planned talk, a slew of other authors pulled out of its upcoming programming slate. On Tuesday, staff at the center began resigning over the controversy, including poetry center director Sarah Chihaya and senior program coordinator Sophie Herron.
The blowback led the organization to announce Monday it was pausing its current poetry reading series.
The fallout came amid a series of Israel-related clashes at cultural centers and within the arts and entertainment world at large since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. Disputes over the attacks and Israel’s retaliation have also spilled into sports, academia, government, tech, business and law.
As Israelis and Palestinians bury their dead, both sides are demanding major institutions pick sides. And for some Jewish institutions, reeling from a Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and saw 200 others taken hostage, their usual rules of pluralism and commitment to fostering diverse opinions are harder to apply.
“It’s certainly challenging to navigate this moment as a cultural organization (much less a Jewish one) and ensure that we are remaining mission-aligned even in complicated situations,” said Naomi Firestone-Teeter of the Jewish Book Council, which books Jewish authors at JCCs and other venues around the country. “We are hearing from new authors every day who need an outlet to share their experience and ensure our global readership is aware of the pain and suffering in the Jewish community — in Israel and the Diaspora.”
Andrea Grossman, founder and director of the influential Los Angeles literary nonprofit Writers Bloc, recently canceled a planned book talk with the Jewish author Nathan Thrall because Thrall’s new nonfiction book, “A Day In The Life of Abed Salama,” deals critically with Israel’s military occupation.
Released days before Hamas’ attacks and dealing with the aftermath of a 2012 bus explosion in the West Bank, the book has become one of many Israel-related political footballs in the arts arena: American Public Media, a national content distributor for public radio and TV stations, recently told The New York Times it had pulled ads for Thrall’s book, saying they would be “insensitive in light of the human tragedies unfolding.” Thrall has undertaken his book tour alongside his subject, Abed Salama, a Palestinian father of a five-year-old boy who died on the bus in 2012.
“How does one promote a program on this subject to a largely Jewish audience when people on all sides are being bombed, killed and buried? The community is deeply polarized,” Grossman told the Guardian.
Thrall, who lives in Jerusalem, called the cancellations “outrageous.”
“There’s an atmosphere that is wholly intolerant of any expression of sympathy for Palestinians living under occupation, any discussion of the root causes of the conflict,” he told the Guardian. “My book is not a polemic. It’s been praised for showing characters, both Jewish and Palestinian, in an empathetic way.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen speaks at the PEN/Hemingway 2019 Award Ceremony at The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library And Museum on April 7, 2019 in Boston. (Paul Marotta/Getty Images)
Questions of “polarization” and “sensitivity” also seemed to be on the mind of the organizers of the Frankfurt Book Fair, a major global publishing gathering held last week in Germany. Hundreds of authors and literary professionals objected last week after organizers announced that, owing to “the war started by Hamas,” they would no longer host a prize ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli.
In a statement last week, the fair’s prize affiliate, Litprom, said that it would not hold the ceremony at the Frankfurt fair as planned, “due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering.” Organizers said they planned to hold the event in “a suitable format and setting” at “a later point,” and that they still intended to give it to Shibli, whose novel “Minor Detail,” released in English in 2020, recounts the 1949 gang-rape of a Bedouin Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers.
Shibli’s English-language publisher called the decision “cowardly” and accused the fair of lying about the author’s willingness to agree to the plan.
The cancellation happened only days after the fair’s organizers had vowed on Instagram to “make Jewish and Israeli voices especially visible at the book fair.” Hundreds of authors and publishing industry professionals charged in a letter that organizers had made an inappropriate judgment in “closing out the space for a Palestinian voice.”
Among the signatories were the Man Booker Prize finalist Sarah Bernstein, who is Jewish, and the Polish Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, whose most recent novel “The Books Of Jacob” is a deep dive into Jewish history.
PEN America, the literary and free speech nonprofit, weighed in on the Nguyen and Thrall controversies in a statement also noting “events canceled or postponed due to security concerns, including Jewish cultural events in Sweden; an exhibition of Hebrew manuscripts in Australia; and The Witness Palestine 2023 Festival in Rochester, New York.”
PEN was founded, its statement said, “on the idea that writers could play a role in preventing future wars; that when governments are locked in conflict, writers and literature can provide comfort, a bridge to empathy across divides, even a roadmap toward the faraway horizon of understanding. At a moment of great anguish, we urge the literary community to double down on that essential potential.”
The 92NY in particular has sought to operate as both a major nonsectarian cultural institution and an organization proud of its roots in the Jewish community. Formerly known as the 92nd Street Y, the institution recently rebranded itself to emphasize its outsized role in the general New York City cultural community, while also making some hires and programming moves to make its Jewish connections more explicit.
“92NY is a Jewish institution that has always welcomed people with diverse viewpoints to our stage,” 92NY said in a statement. “The brutal October 7th attack by Hamas on Israel and the continued holding of hostages, including senior citizens and young children, has absolutely devastated the community. As a Jewish organization we believe the responsible course of action right now is to take some time to determine how best to use our platform and support the entire 92NY community, so we made the difficult decision to postpone the October 20th event.”
But while its leadership seemed to want to put the Nyugen’s event on hold until it could figure out how to orient itself in the wake of Hamas’ attacks, some writers who pulled out of events there saw darker motives. The critic Andrea Long Chu called the group a “pro-war nonprofit.”
“I have no regrets about anything I have said or done in regards to Palestine, Israel, or the occupation and war,” he wrote on Instagram.
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The post 92NY implodes over cancellation of Israel-critical author event appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Mayor Olivia Chow’s city hall has yet to adequately address antisemitism in Toronto, based on Jewish community complaints
It’s been a rocky year for relations between Toronto’s Jewish community and city hall following the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel—which led to an ongoing regional war in the […]
The post Mayor Olivia Chow’s city hall has yet to adequately address antisemitism in Toronto, based on Jewish community complaints appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Amsterdamned: The Shame of Femke Halsema
Mayor of Amsterdam Femke Halsema attends a press conference following the violence targeting fans of an Israeli soccer team, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Nov. 8, 2024. Photo: Reuters/Piroschka Van De Wouw
JNS.org – In the arsenal of the antisemite, denial is a key weapon. Six million Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust? Didn’t happen. The Soviet Union persecuted its Jewish population in the name of anti-Zionism? Zionist propaganda. Rape and mutilation were rampant during the massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023? What a smear upon the noble resistance of Hamas. And so on.
No surprise, then, that the left-wing mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is now publicly regretting her use of the word “pogrom” in her summation of the shocking antisemitic violence unleashed by Arab and Muslim gangs in the Dutch city in the wake of the soccer match between local giants Ajax and visitors Maccabi Tel Aviv two weeks ago.
One day after the violence, Halsema noted that “boys on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli football fans, it was a hit and run. I understand very well that this brings back the memory of pogroms.” She could have also mentioned (but didn’t) that the Dutch authorities ignored warnings from Israel that the violence was being stoked in advance in private threads on social-media platforms, resulting in a massive policing failure; that Ajax supporters were not involved in the attacks, undermining claims that what happened was merely another episode in the long history of inter-fan violence at soccer matches; and that the “boys” engaged in the assaults were overwhelmingly youths of Moroccan or other Middle Eastern or North African backgrounds, who gleefully told their victims that their actions were motivated by the desire to “free Palestine.” But at least Halsema grasped the nature of the violence. Or so we thought.
A few days later, she rolled back her initial comments. “I must say that in the following days, I saw how the word ‘pogrom’ became very political and actually became propaganda,” she stated in an interview with Dutch media. “The Israeli government, talking about a Palestinian pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam. In The Hague, the word pogrom is mainly used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers, Muslims. I didn’t mean it that way. And I didn’t want it that way.”
On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.”
Halsema’s discomfort does not, of course, mean that what happened in Amsterdam was not a pogrom. Nor does she speak for the entirety of the Dutch political class. Both the center-right VVD Party and the further-right PVV Party, for example, continue to describe the violence as a pogrom and have suggested strong measures for countering further outrages targeting local Jews and visiting Israelis. Both parties have urged a clampdown on mosque funding from countries promoting Islamism, such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and have called on the Netherlands to follow Germany’s example in denying or removing citizenship from those convicted of antisemitism.
But the mayor’s 180-degree turn speaks volumes about how the left in Europe enables antisemitism by denying that it is a serious problem. To begin with, there is a refusal to situate each incident in its historical context, which makes it all the easier to portray violent explosions as an anomaly. Listening to Halsema, you would never know that the Amsterdam pogrom was preceded in March by a violent demonstration at the opening of the National Holocaust Museum, where pro-Hamas protestors masked with keffiyehs and brandishing Palestinian flags—this century’s equivalent of a brown shirt and a Nazi armband—lobbed fireworks and eggs in protest at the presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. What you will realize, however, is that Halsema is terrified of being labeled “Islamophobic.” That explains her pleas for understanding for a bunch of Moroccan thugs who express contempt not just for Israel but for the country that has provided them a sanctuary with housing, education and many other benefits.
Not only are Jews expected to take all this abuse lying down; they are then told by non-Jewish leftist politicians—often aided by Jewish “anti-Zionist” lackeys—that they have no right to situate the violence directed against them within the continuum of Jewish persecution over the centuries. What happened in Amsterdam, we are badgered into believing, was different because it wasn’t motivated by hatred of Jews but a righteous rejection of Israeli policy.
That’s why the behavior of some of the Maccabi fans is brought into the equation. Video showing fans descending into a subway as they chanted “F**k the Arabs” spread like wildfire on social-media platforms, along with reports that Palestinian flags adorning some private homes had been torn down. I am not going to endorse these actions, even if, as a Jew, I can understand and empathize with the feelings that motivated them, but I also consider them essentially irrelevant to this case. The advance planning of the pogrom, coupled with the wretched record of pro-Hamas demonstrations around the Netherlands in the previous year, proves that the Maccabi fans would have been hounded and attacked even if their behavior had been impeccable. Moreover, legally and morally, violent assaults are in a different league than acts of petty vandalism or the singing of distasteful songs. There can be no comparison, and nor should there be.
What the Amsterdam pogrom underlines is that the extremes of the left and the unreconstructed elements of the nationalist right are now at one in their attitudes towards Jews. On the left, the enemy is “Jewish privilege,” and on the right, it is “Jewish supremacism.” Both terms carry the same meaning, but are expressed in language designed to appeal the prejudices of their respective supporters. For the left, claims of antisemitism are dismissed as expressions of Jews exercising their “privilege,” dishonestly seeking victim status at the same time as the “colonial” state they identify with is persecuting the “indigenous” inhabitants. For the right, claims of antisemitism are a tactic to shield the contention that Jews are superior to everyone else. Translated, both communicate the same message: The violence you experience is violence you bring upon yourselves.
To her eternal shame, Halsema is now trafficking in this noxious idea while presiding over a city in which no Jew can now feel safe, less than a century after their ancestors were rounded up and deported by the German occupiers. She should resign.
The post Amsterdamned: The Shame of Femke Halsema first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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On Academic Indoctrination in American Universities
DePaul University Law School. Photo: ajay_suresh/Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – On a site named “Slow Factory,” which serves as a resource for college pro-Palestine activists, its FAQ page poses the question: “Is ‘Free Palestine’ Antisemitic?” The answer, of course, is no. Why is that supposed to be a correct response? As they explain,
“First, antisemitism is a distinctly European cultural trait that has no historical equivalent in the Levant. … The movement does not single out or attack Judaism as a religion or people. … It hopes to create a truly democratic state in which self-determination and human rights are available for everyone.”
Before treating the claptrap quoted, we need to note that Slow Factory defines itself as “an environmental and social justice nonprofit organization” that works “at the intersections of climate and culture” to “redesign socially & environmentally harmful systems.” This is accomplished through “narrative change and regenerative design.” In short, mind control is supported by progressive funding. Influence Watch makes it clear that they are extremely anti-Zionist.
To return to the above-quoted excerpt, it is patently apparent that Slow Factory is presenting a false narrative. There is antisemitism in the Levant. While some of it could be traced to the influence of Christian missionaries, much of it is rooted in the Quran and accompanying Islamic literature. There are attacks on Jews by Muslims chanting itbah al-Yahud (“slaughter the Jews”) from Baghdad’s Farhud in 1941 to the massacre by Hamas in the Western Negev in 2023. Moreover, 31 years following the signing of the Oslo Accords, no democracy has developed in the Palestinian Authority; instead, it is a continuation and deepening of an authoritarian societal rule.
The “movement” indeed singles out Jews. It prevents them from crossing encampment lines. It attacks Jewish objects—whether people, institutions, places of business or customers at cafes. It seeks out the doors of Jewish students in dormitories. It lays siege to synagogues, hospitals named “Jewish” and Jewish schools. As for their vision of a democratic state, it is a movement that heralds the most undemocratic societies, whether in Gaza or Ramallah, Hebron or Shechem.
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As explained by Austrian-born essayist Jean Améry, already in 1969, the left on campuses has been captured by pro-Palestine rhetoric and framework referencing that aligned itself with, first extreme left-wing and then, in its eventual progressive mutation, melding with Islamist antisemitism. Améry (born Hanns Chaim Mayer) realized that Israel would be demonized since nothing could ultimately satisfy the eliminationist demands of anti-Zionists. Anti-Zionism was fashioned to be the new “honorable antisemitism.”
For those opposed to Zionism, Israel is a symbol of capitalism, imperialism and colonialism—the core evils leftists exist to oppose. This is the underlying layer of today’s debasement of anything pro-Israel, its pillars sunk into a feeling of intense and even depraved degradation of Jews and all things Jewish, especially an independent and successful Jewish state.
What has evolved is epitomized at Villanova University outside Philadelphia, where a director of counseling services can present antisemitic views at an international conference, describing Zionism as a “disease” that requires psychotherapy. FBI-style “Wanted” posters targeted Jewish faculty and staff members at the University of Rochester. The sheriff’s office in Walla Walla, Wash., was required to respond to a pro-Palestine student protest outside a Whitman Board of Trustees dinner at a winery forcing the college to relocate its dinner venue.
At De Paul University, supporting Israel landed one Jewish student in the hospital while a second student was lightly injured. At Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, the campus flagpole had a Hamas flag hoisted.
The deeper invasive connection between academia and anti-Zionism, however, is not in protests but in the educational content, or rather the indoctrination, that a student undergoes. For example, the University of California, Berkeley has announced that it is offering a course this coming spring semester describing Hamas as a “revolutionary resistance force fighting settler colonialism.” More invidious, the course description reads as if a primer for a revolutionary underground:
“With the U.S.-backed and -funded genocide being carried out against Indigenous Palestinians by the Israeli Occupying Force, many have found it difficult to envision a reality beyond the one we are living in today.”
A second example is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seminar taught by linguistics professor Michel DeGraff. The course deals with “language and linguistics for decolonization and liberation and for peace and community-building.”
His position is that Jews have no connection to Israel and that Israeli textbooks “weaponize trauma of the Holocaust.” Israeli youth, he further asserts, grow up “with this trauma that made them fear that their existence is in threat.” That may be a fair observation, but he adds that the threat comes from “anyone who doesn’t believe in the superior position of the Jewish people in Israel.”
If you perceive some racism and black supremacist theory in this explanation, you are probably correct.
This is but one sphere of influence crushing on a student. In too many cases, his/her lecturers and advisors are those who sign pro-Palestine petitions, marshal the demonstrations and sit-ins, and provide support for campus groups when they are disciplined—or more correctly, when administrations attempt to do so.
The Capital Research Center has published a study titled “Marching Towards Violence” that investigated militant left-wing antisemitism on the campuses of U.S. colleges and universities. It has identified more than 150 campus groups that explicitly support terrorism or, at the least, emphasize violent anti-Israel rhetoric.
David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and author of Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, sums up the situation:
“Anti-Israel forces focused on U.S. college campuses have transformed the American university into a vector for their activist agenda … playing the long game—what activists call “the long march through institutions”—in inculcating a stark ideological worldview that portrays anyone with power or success … as oppressors.”
Is there an antidote? One is the Deborah Project, which defends the civil rights of Jews facing discrimination in educational settings. Its aim is “to use legal skills and tools to uncover, publicize and dismantle antisemitic abuses in educational systems.” Other groups and individuals work on many levels of engagement; still, if the monied Jewish establishment institutions do not get behind this, then the anarchy, irrationality and hate will at some point come to overwhelm Diaspora Jewry.
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