By Andrew Adler
You’ll have to excuse me, but writing this column has put me in a pretty foul mood.
Reason #1: The rampant cancel culture that seems to infect every facet of post-Oct. 7 life. First came the jettisoning of anything that smacked of sympathy to Palestinians. In the initial days and weeks following Hamas’s murderous rampage, with most of the world resolutely on Israel’s side, there was pervasive Arab Anathema. Regardless of context, objectivity was in perilously short supply.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (granddaughter of a rabbi, by the way) wrote a piece titled “With War in Israel, the Cancel Culture Debate Comes Full Circle” published on Oct. 23 – barely two weeks after Hamas had slaughtered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped hundreds more.
Goldberg had been scheduled to moderate a Brooklyn talk featuring author Nathan Thrall, who’d written “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” a widely discussed book that (in Goldberg’s words) “follows a Palestinian man named Abed Salama as he searches for his 5-year-old son after a deadly school bus crash in the West Bank, a search hindered by Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian movement.”
Then she learned that several previous appearances by Thrall had been scrapped, with organizers citing concerns over security, sensitivity, etc. etc. So had various events that were to include other Palestinians or likeminded sympathizers. It was an indication, Goldberg opined, that we were entering “an especially repressive period.”
But by a few months later, as Israel’s military actions in Gaza intensified and thousands of civilians lost their lives, the cancel pendulum had swung profoundly in the opposite direction. Now Israeli artists, authors, actors, musicians and scholars, found themselves locked out. Pro-Palestinian groups demanded that these Israelis be kicked to the cultural curb, threatening to disrupt any venue that dared not comply. The vaunted Eurovision Song Contest in Malmo, Sweden became a testing ground for groups professing hatred of Israel (and to many, a concurrent hatred of Jews). In Amsterdam, three concerts by the highly-regarded Jerusalem String Quartet were unceremoniously jettisoned – with organizers trotting out the same tired excuses of security threats and the potential to offend the easily offended. Public outcry was swift enough to persuade those same organizers to reinstate two of the three performances. No significant incidents occurred. Still, vehement cultural prejudices against Israeli representatives continue.
Reason #2: Within Our Lifetime – United for Palestine. This is the group co-founded in 2015 by Nerdeen Kiswani – a Palestinian-American Brooklynite who holds herself up as a beacon of freedom for her people, but who is in fact a font of extreme, often grotesque hatred for Jews, Israel and anyone she regards as brutal Zionist colonizers.
Within Our Lifetime (“WOL”) calls for the unfettered right of return of Palestinian refugees “to their homeland in all of historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea (sound familiar?)”
Not only did WOL fail to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks, Kiswani and the group went out of their way to praise Hamas and call for more “resistance by any means necessary.” They printed and distributed maps showing locations of Jewish/Zionist organizations in New York City.
Declaring the Brooklyn Museum to be “complicit in the ongoing colonization, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people,” on May 31 several hundred WOL activists occupied the museum, defaced parts of its exterior and from its roof “unfurled a banner that carried the central message of the action – ‘Free Palestine: Divest from Genocide.” The day’s slogan was, “If You Take Peace from the People, We Take Peace from You” – exemplified by anti-Israel protestors making their way the home of museum director Anne Pasternak (who is Jewish) and splashing red paint on her front door.
WOL saved its most outrageous act for the evening of June 10 – when protestors disrupted a travelling exhibit in lower Manhattan honoring victims of the Oct. 7 Nova Music Festival massacre. Shouting antisemitic slogans, one protestor declared, “When the (Nova Festival) Zionists decided to rave next to a concentration camp (her term for nearby Gaza) – that’s exactly what this music festival was. It’s like having a rave right next to the gas chambers during the Holocaust.”
Reason #3 was to be Wikipedia’s recent decision to label the Anti-Defamation League as a “generally unreliable source” because of its pro-Israel biases, but I’ve run out of space. Meanwhile, if you’re genuinely masochistic, hop on to X (formerly Twitter) and check out WOL’s feed. Let’s just say it won’t make you want to go gentle into that good night of human discourse.
Andrew Adler is Community Editor of Community