There’s been a lot of fallout over the heinous decision by the Washington Jewish Community Center to fire Ari Roth, the artistic director who had staged a drama that explored the Nakba, from the Israeli perspective. Yet the firing was necessary: it demonstrates that the Jewish establishment has solidified on the McCarthyite right in the wake of the Gaza slaughter.
First The New York Times reports that the pressure on Ari Roth to toe the line on Israel worsened after the Gaza atrocities of last summer. The establishment has closed its mind, he says.
Mr. Roth said he was fired after unsuccessful efforts to negotiate an agreement to allow him to do some of his most contested work as a freelancer, or to make Theater J, which is producing six shows this season and has a $1.6 million budget, financially independent from the Jewish Community Center. He said he had recently been reprimanded for speaking to the news media without permission, and that he believed the J.C.C. wanted him gone to eliminate a possible source of concern for donors during a coming capital campaign.
“This was a long time coming, but it was becoming clear that for the theater to fully express itself, not just on the Middle East but on a whole range of issues, there was a growing artistic impasse,” he said. He said the issues had worsened significantly after the war in Gaza this summer.
“There has been a closing of the minds in the established Jewish community in support of Israel — a narrowing of whose pain we acknowledge, whose deaths we acknowledge,” he said.
Next, here’s a statement read on Friday night on the stage of Roth’s former shop, Theater J, by cast members of “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures,” by Tony Kushner. The cast members expressed “shock and dismay at this violation of principles we cherish” and read a statement by playwright Kushner, that said in part:
This decision is of grave concern to theater artists and audiences alike.
Ari wasn’t fired as the executive committee has claimed because of insubordination. That is a preposterous and cowardly whitewashing of the truth
Ari was fired because he believes that a theater company with a mission to explore Jewish themes and issues cannot acquiesce to the demands of uncritical acceptance of the positions of the Israeli government regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict or to an insistence on silence.
Ari was fired because he refused to surrender to censorship…
Ari was fired because he believes that freedom of speech and freedom of expression are both American values and Jewish values.
Mitchell Plitnick has an excellent summary of the issues in the case up at his site:
It’s all sheer rubbish, and it’s quite obvious that the JCC doesn’t want to explicitly state that they are firing Roth because his program has too often staged performances (usually written by Israeli Jews) that were sympathetic to the Palestinians. It is as plain and simple as that. Roth only held on this long because he has been such a wildly successful artistic director for Theater J and it is highly unlikely the JCC will be able to maintain that success with whomever his replacement is, as that person will, perforce, be far less independent-minded and courageous than Roth. These things actually do matter in theater.
It’s only the latest, tragic episode within the Jewish community, my community. It is a community horribly divided, between a generally older and more Orthodox generation whose numbers are dwindling but who have a great deal of wealth and use that wealth to squelch any debate, or even serious discussion, of Israeli policies, its history, and, certainly, the nature of Zionism; and their children and grandchildren, who are not the donors who pull the strings, but are far more inclined to either have critical but supportive views of Israel, have come to believe that Jewish nationalism is a failed path or have checked out of the Israel issue altogether.
The behavior of the donors and board members, not only the DC JCC, but of boards of Jewish Community Relations Councils, JCCs, synagogues and large, national Jewish organizations all across the United States only betrays the fundamental weakness of their position on Israel. Somewhere in all of their hearts, they know that Israel’s occupation, its discrimination against its own non-Jewish citizens and the growing nationalism that is getting uglier by the day within the Israeli right cannot be defended to most American Jews, let alone to non-Jews. But they cannot wean themselves from their own nationalism, which has, for most or all of their lives, dictated a simple philosophy: “Israel, right or wrong.” So, they move to use their most powerful tool, donations.
The Forward broke the original story about the middle east festival that was so controversial, and the Roth statements to the press that were a factor in the board’s annoyance.
Finally, Benjamin Freed reports in The Washingtonian that J Street concedes that donors are mucking up free speech in the Jewish community.
[J Street communications director Alan] Elsner believes the loud, hawkish voices that attack people like Roth are a slim portion of the the American Jewish community, but they do include some wealthy donors flexing their political clout. But those reactions, Elsner says, come at the expense of the Jewish population’s future.
And Freed has this from John Judis on the widening split in the Jewish community:
“There is a looming split in that part of the Jewish community between an older generation that sees Israel entirely as a victim and any criticism of it as verging on anti-Semitism, and a new generation that goes from J Street to Jewish Voice for Peace to Open Hillel that believes that a commitment to Palestinian as well as Jewish rights is intrinsic to a Jewish ethical outlook,” Judis writes. “What’s at stake here is not simply artistic censorship, but the attempt to snuff out works of art that recognize that Jews and Palestinians share a common humanity.”
Thanks to Adam Horowitz.
“What’s at stake here is not simply artistic censorship, but the attempt to snuff out works of art that recognize that Jews and Palestinians share a common humanity.” –
So incredibly evil.
So, North Korea shuts down a release of a film they find objectionable, National Media goes wild, and Israel shuts down a play, nothing.
The most important group that was pressuring this organization is based in Potomac, MD, one of the richest suburbs of D.C.
It was also pressure from donors that made the Metropolitan Opera abandon simulcasts and radio broadcasts of its production of The Death of Klinghoffer.
Why does the audience show up? To throw their own books in the burning stack?
I have this analagous story from somewhere. It’s about these two pregnant women, and one of them–bless her soul–loses her baby. The other woman has a good birthing, and her child is healthy. The first woman becomes jealous and steals the healthy baby, claiming it as her own. The mother takes her case to a wise judge. He listens to both stories and weighs them in his heart. He declares that the baby is to be cut down the middle, and each woman will get half.
And then Israel says, “go ahead, I’ll just use force to take back the rest eventually, in pieces if need be. I have doctors who can put it all together and bring it back to life. You’ve heard of Dr. Frankenstein?”