The frustration, and joy, of Walt and Mearsheimer’s golden spike of 6 years ago — The Israel Lobby– was that it should have rung in a golden age of journalism about the Israel lobby. How large a force is this in our public life? How much of our foreign policy has it affected? Georgia? India/Pakistan? Do our universities really need Israel Studies departments? When did the American Enterprise Institute convert to Zionism? Do George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter believe that they were one-termers because they went up against the lobby? Ask them. How much of American Jewish donorship has a pro-Israel bias? Talk to the money-boys. Etc. Etc.
These are great stories, and I thought that Walt and Mearsheimer would inaugurate a feast of reporting.
Well it didn’t happen. But maybe it’s starting to? The Washington Post’s Peter Marks does some fine reporting here on the decision by the D.C. Jewish Community Center to end the hosting at its Theater J space of Peace Cafes organized by Andy Shallal, a charismatic Muslim restaurateur who runs Busboys and Poets. It is funny to me that the most important part of the story is in a parenthesis (the funding issue!), but Marks is correct to say that the incident is “further evidence of the corrosive turn that the political and artistic dialogues over matters related to Israel have taken of late in this country…” Yeah: it’s a huge story, and the grass roots are pushing it in.
Now to the censorship.
[S]uddenly, a few months ago, a curtain was drawn. The [Jewish] community center’s then-chief executive officer, Arna Meyer Mickelson, told Shallal that the Peace Cafe could no longer use the facilities of the center, at 16th and Q streets NW. “She said, ‘We appreciate what you’ve done, but we can’t have Peace Cafes at Theater J anymore,’ ” Shallal recalls. “I think she was waiting for the right moment to cut the strings.”…
In cities such as New York and Washington, ad hoc watchdog groups have formed to pressure Jewish federations to cease funding nonprofit groups that they deem critical of Israel. Locally, a portion of their ire has been directed at Theater J, one of the nation’s most successful — and dramatically adventurous — theater groups operating from within the structure of a Federation-funded Jewish community center.
In March, a group calling itself Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art, headed by Potomac lawyer Robert G. Samet, asked that the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington look at imposing curbs on financing for Theater J. As evidence of the theater company’s intent to produce works that “demonize Israel and the Jewish people,” Samet cited “Return to Haifa,” a work by an Israeli playwright, Boaz Gaon, that was performed at Theater J last winter by Israel’s most renowned company, the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv…
In a March 6 letter to the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art said the play [Return to Haifa] “distorts history” by comparing the death of a Jewish child in the Holocaust “to the fabricated and utterly fantastical story of an Arab child allegedly abandoned by his fleeing parents in Haifa in 1948.” Arguing that through its Peace Cafes, Theater J had featured “groups and speakers . . . intensely hostile to the existence of the State of Israel,” the group questioned “the appropriateness of Federation funds being used to support activities by its partner agencies that undermine Israel’s legitimacy and security.”
… (The Washington Federation gives about $600,000 a year to the DCJCC, which in turn supports Theater J by giving it a theater space, the Goldman, and providing other amenities such as utilities, officials say. Theater J balances its $1.4 million annual budget through ticket sales and donations.)
Oh and by the way, Theater J is an outfit (I believe there are others) that declined to stage David Zellnik’s glorious n magnificent treatment of Zionist history, Ariel Sharon Hovers Between Life and Death and Dreams of Theodor Herzl. When will I get to see this play on a big stage?
