By Kyle Smith
Friday, July 07, 2017
In New York City today a strange spectacle is being
staged: Theater artists are taking a stand against theater.
When the Lincoln Center Festival announced it was staging
a four-night production this month that is subsidized by the state of Israel,
dozens of big-name professionals from New York’s theater world, including
highly regarded actors, writers, and directors, demanded the play be scrapped.
An open letter published by the activist group
“Adalah-NY, the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel” was signed by,
among others, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwrights Tracy Letts, Lynn Nottage,
and Annie Baker; the acclaimed director Sam Gold; actress Greta Gerwig; rock
star Roger Waters; and the playwright-actor Wallace Shawn and his My Dinner with Andre costar Andre
Gregory. They claim that the scheduled performances of David Grossman’s play To the End of the Land will help “the
Israeli Government to implement its systematic ‘Brand Israel’ strategy of
employing arts and culture to divert attention from the state’s decades of
violent colonization, brutal military occupation and denial of basic rights to
the Palestinian people.”
In other words: How dare Israel back a play that isn’t
about how horrible Israel is to the Palestinians. And Lincoln Center must steer
clear of this moral atrocity by canceling the play. Baker, who is herself
Jewish, added, nonsensically, “I think the phrase ‘cultural boycott’ scares
people, and it’s important to remember that a) it’s not a boycott against
individual artists or nationalities, and b) it has historical precedent as an
extremely effective way to call attention to apartheid (yes, Israel is an apartheid
state) and influence policy.”
This is straight-up balderdash from the BDS playbook.
Boycott? The letter says, “We call on Lincoln Center to avoid complicity with
Brand Israel by cancelling these performances.” These artists are free to avoid
any play sponsored by any entity they don’t like, but now they are trying to prevent everyone else in New York from seeing this
play. This is very much more sinister than a mere boycott.
The point these artists are making is ludicrous on two
levels. First, though the play is sponsored by Israel’s Office of Cultural
Affairs, it’s an anti-war piece, not simple-minded cheerleading for the state
of Israel. David Grossman, the author of the novel from which the play is
adapted, lost his son Uri to fighting on the last day of Israel’s offensive in
Lebanon in 2006. Since then, writes Judith Miller in Tablet magazine in her review of the play, “Grossman has become
among the most outspoken Jewish Israeli voices against war and occupation. He
has frequently protested the demolitions of houses in East Jerusalem and the
West Bank.” Miller calls the piece “deeply pessimistic,” citing a disquieting
image of a mother who stays constantly in motion because she fears that her son
will be killed at war and she reasons that if military notifiers can’t find her
to tell her of his passing, he can’t be dead. In one scene, Miller adds, the
play makes it clear that it’s an act of “supreme insensitivity” toward a
Palestinian taxi driver to tell him to drive an Israeli to a military registration,
causing the driver to erupt in an “impassioned outburst” about his people’s
plight.
Even assuming you agree that Israel’s treatment of
Palestinians is unconscionable (and I don’t), why should Israel’s theater
community be punished for this by denial of state subsidies? Alternatively, is
alleged cruelty to Palestinians the only subject allowed in state-sponsored
Israeli theater? These artists wouldn’t hold their own country to that
standard: They certainly wouldn’t demand that any National Endowment for the
Arts–subsidized play recount the horrors of slavery or the administration of
Donald Trump, though you can be sure that they abhor these two institutions in
equal measure. Adalah scolds the two Israeli theater companies that produced
the play for performing in West Bank settlements, but would they apply that
guilt-by-association logic to any other artistic group on earth? The Rolling
Stones once performed in Cuba. Would these artists demand that Madison Square
Garden ban them from the building because the Stones are guilty of having
normalized a repressive authoritarian regime?
You would think that progressive-minded artists who toil
in an industry that is heavily dependent on public subsidies would be the last
ones to suggest that a political test be imposed on any government-backed
theater. How well is that policy likely to work out for them in eras when
Republicans control Congress? The term of the current chairman of the NEA, Jane
Chu, expires in less than a year. It would be condign punishment for America’s
artistic community — no, it would be hilarious
punishment, the equivalent of God reaching down and personally administering to
Wallace Shawn a cosmic wedgie — if Chu were to be succeeded by Dinesh D’Souza.
To her credit, the president of Lincoln Center, Deborah
Spar, politely told Adalah-NY to stuff it, and the play will go on. But the
episode is a reminder that the ugly behavior by a pair of Trump supporters who
tried and failed to shut down a performance of Julius Caesar in Central Park this summer was an outlier. To the
extent art is threatened by the censorious impulse, that threat usually bears
the stamp of the Left.
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