Last week, I wrote an op-ed for the Jerusalem Post in which I criticized J Street’s endorsing the production of Seven Jewish Children, by the British playwright Caryl Churchill, in Washington, DC. For those of you not familiar with the 10-minute play (the full text of which is available here), it is enough to say that it draws a direct parallel between Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews and Israel’s contemporary treatment of the Palestinians. In the words of the prominent British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson, it is “wantonly inflammatory” and unquestionably anti-Semitic. In my op-ed, I questioned the propriety of a purportedly “pro-Israel” organization going out of its way to endorse the production of such material.

In a letter to the Post defending his organization’s stance, J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami writes:

J Street didn’t, as Kirchick noted, endorse all the words or sentiments in the play’s script. So it must be that Kirchick objects to providing a stage to a work that might provoke a conversation about the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality.

I do not “object to providing a stage” to any theatrical work, and never did I give the impression that I do. Indeed, I wrote that “complaints over the propriety of [Seven Jewish Children’s] production…should not be confused with a call to ban it.” And if Jeremy Ben-Ami thinks that a lurid, anti-Semitic screed “might provoke a conversation about the impact of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality,” then perhaps he should find work in a field unrelated to Jewish causes.

Not content to merely imply that I oppose freedom of speech, Ben-Ami comes right out and falsely accuses me of it directly:

Would Kirchick really ask theaters not to run plays which disagree with his political viewpoints? What country does he think he lives in?

Nowhere do I say that productions of Seven Jewish Children should be shut down because of what I believe to be the play’s utterly contemptible content. Let a thousand flowers bloom, and a million leftist, self-hating Jewish theater companies put on performances of anti-Semitic propaganda. It’ll only hurt their fund-raising appeals when they try to hit up Jews for money. Ben-Ami invents his charge out of whole cloth, painting me to be a censorious, close-minded, proto-fascist who would go around shutting down drum circles and readings of Palestinian love poetry.

What I questioned was the motivation of those who lead an ostensibly “pro-Israel” organization endorsing the dissemination of anti-Semitic material, and, moreover, justifying it as something beneficial to the “Jewish soul and Jewish morality.” There is a vast difference between an argument over the right of theaters to stage whatever plays they wish (where I consider myself a free speech absolutist) and the cultural value of the play’s content (an entirely subjective matter). So the debate here about J Street is not analogous to the one about the legality of neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois. The controversy over J Street and Seven Jewish Children, rather, is analogous to Jewish organizations at the time celebrating such an ugly spectacle because it “might provoke a conversation about the impact of the [Nazi-Jewish] conflict on the Jewish soul and Jewish morality.”

“Are we so vulnerable and weak as a community that we can’t endure a debate sparked by a 10-minute play at the JCC with some controversial dialogue?” Ben-Ami asks. The Jews are a resilient people, and they’ll certainly “endure” whatever phony “debate” is “sparked” by a bigoted play (notice how even the most lurid anti-Semitism never rises above the level of “controversial dialogue” to Ben-Ami and Jews of his ilk). What most Jews won’t endure, I predict, is the self-loathing masked as communal angst exemplified by J Street.