How the Mideast War Has Shaken Americas Cultural Institutions

The owner of the prestigious journal Artforum fired its top editor for publishing an open letter supporting “Palestinian liberation,” prompting resignations and a boycott by writers and artists. A prominent Hollywood agent stepped down from a leadership role at Creative Artists Agency after sharing images on social media that used the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

The interim chief executive of a San Francisco art museum resigned after artists and employees demanding divestment from Israel issued what she characterized as “vitriolic and antisemitic backlash directed at me personally.” And last month, the longtime chief executive of PEN America stepped down after months of intense criticism from authors who said that the free expression group had not taken a forceful stand against Israel’s actions, with some blaming the former executive, who is Jewish, for “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.”

Shock waves from the war have been felt throughout the arts and cultural world, with movie productions, museums and book festivals — not to mention universities, institutions and entire industries — experiencing bitter conflict over what qualifies as tolerable speech about the conflict and its combatants. But many observers say that the narrowing of the discourse in artistic spaces since Oct. 7, 2023 — when Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and abducting nearly 250, prompting an Israeli military campaign that has killed tens of thousands in Gaza, many of them civilians — does not bode well for the cultural world’s traditional commitment to free and open-minded expression.

“My hope was that Oct. 7 would allow us to create some sort of consensus around small-L liberal pluralism, and that has not come to pass,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, a controversy over a Palestinian literary festival that was held on its campus weeks before the attack last year boiled over afterward, leading to a donor revolt. The university’s president resigned last December after she seemed to evade a question in a congressional hearing about whether students who called for the genocide of Jews should be punished.

A look at cultural institutions over the past year reveals a pattern: It has largely been institutional management — such as executives and owners — who have sought to suppress perspectives critical of Israel, while lower-level employees and less-prominent artists were often those attempting to silence perspectives expressing solidarity with Israel.

In recent months, for instance, a Brooklyn bookstore employee derailed a book event because one interlocutor was a Zionist rabbi, and two authors declined to appear on a panel at the Albany Book Festival with a pro-Israel author.

On the other hand, the firing of three workers at the Noguchi Museum in Queens for wearing kaffiyehs, a Palestinian symbol, came after the museum’s leaders began enforcing a new policy prohibiting some workers from wearing clothing or accessories that express “political messages, slogans or symbols.”

Naomi Firestone-Teeter, the chief executive of the Jewish Book Council, argued that supporting Israel has become disqualifying in certain quarters. “Seeing terms like ‘Zionist’ and ‘Israeli’ as a blanket pejorative — it being normalized as a word you can use and it means something negative, it can be used to cancel in all these different ways — it’s disheartening,” she said.

It also has a stifling effect on cultural expression, she added. “We’re in a literary community where we proudly want to uplift a multitude of voices, create dialogue and debate,” she said.

Musa al-Gharbi, a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University who studies elite discourse, said support for Israel remains strong across cultural organizations because “the pro-Israel side of this equation is much better organized in the practical institutional sense, in terms of exerting pressure on decision makers.”

Broadly speaking, older Americans — the ones more likely to occupy senior positions at cultural institutions — have been more supportive of Israel’s military campaign than younger Americans, who typically work lower-level jobs. Among adults under 30, nearly half — 46 percent — viewed Israel’s response to Hamas’s initial attack as unacceptable, compared to just 29 percent of those 50 and over, a Pew Research Center poll earlier this year found.

In earlier protest movements, students and artists who opposed the Vietnam War and the apartheid system in South Africa often demonstrated against university administrations and powerful corporations.

The dynamic this time, while broadly consistent, has not been uniform.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, established by the group that presents the Oscars, earlier this year revised an exhibition about Hollywood’s Jewish founders after Jewish professionals objected to how those past studio heads were depicted, particularly in light of the Oct. 7 attack. And hundreds of Jewish actors, producers and other industry figures condemned remarks critical of Israel that the director Jonathan Glazer made in March on accepting an Oscar for his film about the Holocaust, “The Zone of Interest.” (Still other Jewish film artists defended Glazer, who is Jewish.)

But more often, it is administrators who have been uncomfortable with strong pro-Palestinian speech, while stakeholders with less influence have chafed at this climate. Consider developments at 92NY, one of Manhattan’s pre-eminent cultural spaces.

Last October, 92NY, a Jewish cultural center formerly known as the 92nd Street Y, indefinitely postponed an appearance by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, citing his public statements critical of Israel in the wake of Hamas’s attack. The episode in turn prompted several other writers who supported Nguyen’s statements to cancel their own appearances at 92NY.

Then, in recent months, a handful of pro-Palestinian 92NY staff members quit rather than comply with a new policy barring employees from expressing political views, NPR and Hyperallergic reported. While the policy also applies to pro-Israel viewpoints, the departed workers had wished to show solidarity with Palestinians.

“I witnessed increasing censorship and retaliation against staff expressing solidarity with victims of genocide, alongside the institution’s clear stance of unequivocal support for Israel,” Hazel Elsbach, an artist who left her part-time job as a teaching assistant at 92NY in August, said in an email.

No one has been fired over the rule, 92NY said in an emailed statement, describing it as “a broad policy meant to address political advocacy of any kind.”

The potency of the pro-Israel position can seem counterintuitive to American Jews, many of whom have felt vulnerable amid rising antisemitism in the United States. After the horror of last October, many Jewish employees of cultural institutions felt betrayed by colleagues who did not condemn the Hamas attack.

But the strength of official and institutional support for Israel reflects “the way in which the organized Jewish community has been successful at having a foot in different institutions in American life,” said Lila Corwin Berman, a history professor at Temple University who studies Jewish philanthropy. “And that’s not happenstance — it’s been a strategy of security, of safety.”

For those hoping to express solidarity with Palestinians, the primary obstacle is structural power, said Laura Raicovich, the author of “Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest” and a former director of the Queens Museum.

“The power imbalance between Israel and Palestine is really clear, and that is very much playing out,” she said. “There’s a sense of desperation to be heard. Attempting to balance power is a fool’s errand.”

For those seeking to balance commitments to open discourse with sympathy toward Israel, the tumult of the last year has presented a quandary. And it has been perhaps most vexing for American Jews in cultural spaces, who might validly feel discomfited or worse by some expression even as they feel an instinct to defend open dialogue.

“For Jews especially, we’ve come to a fork in the road,” Zimmerman, the Penn professor, said. In cultural spaces, he added, Jews could either demand protection from hurtful talk or they could embrace the rough-and-tumble of unsettling discourse as the price of free and spirited debate.

Zimmerman prefers the second option: “Our entire project,” he said of public thinkers and artists, “is premised on free exchange.”