At first, the Tony Kushner controversy at the City University of New York was a matter of the cultural establishment going bonkers about a refusal to honor the playwright because of his anti-Israel politics. Then it became an effort to turn Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, the board member who stood up against Kushner, into a pariah. The next step is the way the anti-Israel crowd will use it as a crowbar to pry American Jews from Israel.
That’s the goal of New York Times columnist Roger Cohen’s latest effort. Cohen not only lauds the ideologically driven playwright, but also puts him on the same pedestal as the late Tony Judt, the historian and writer who sought to bring anti-Zionism out from the margins of American intellectual life and into the mainstream. Cohen compares the recent brouhaha over Kushner to the general opprobrium to which Judt was subjected for his 2003 essay “Israel: The Alternative” in the New York Review of Books, where he called for the end of the Jewish state.
Although this comparison doesn’t quite fit with the arguments that Kushner and his defenders have advanced in the last week, falsely claiming that Wiesenfeld’s allegations were false, Cohen is right to link the two. Both Kushner and Judt are prominent Jewish intellectual opponents of the pro-Israel community who have questioned not only the justice of Israel’s creation but sought to delegitimize it altogether.
Cohen is hoping that Kushner’s victory at CUNY will be the signal for Israel’s critics to seize the initiative in the debate about the Middle East. He quotes Kushner as agreeing with him that. “There is a very significant change underway,” Kushner says. Americans are realizing there is “a terrible need for a dose of debate” on Israel and that “silent acquiescence” to those “whose politics are based substantially on fantasy and theological wishes” is dangerous.
Yet what is it exactly that Kushner wants to debate about Israel? Israel has repeatedly offered the Palestinians a two-state solution, but the Palestinians keep turning down the offer. Cohen seems to want even more concessions to a Palestinian Authority which has now entered into a formal alliance with the Islamist terrorists of Hamas. He speaks ominously of a change in the air and the “growing impatience” in the White House about Israel. Like Judt, however, Kushner goes to the bottom with his criticism. He has always been more interested in disputing Israel’s legitimacy than in the peace process.
Kushner will receive his undeserved award from CUNY, but Cohen is mistaken if he thinks this heralds the transformation of American Jewish politics. Although reliably liberal, and thus predisposed to treat leftist artists like Kushner with respect out of proportion with their achievement, most Jews remain steadfast in their support for Israel. As Ted Lapkin of the Institute for Public Affairs observed yesterday at The Drum, “[T]he theory of Jewish detachment from Israel” has been thrown “into serious intellectual disrepute” by recent academic research surveys, which suggest that attachment to Israel is deepening among American Jews—especially among younger American Jews.
Roger Cohen may be on the wrong side of history, but he is right to see the Kushner controversy in the context of efforts to undermine solidarity with Israel. By crowing over Kushner’s victory, he is demonstrating all too clearly why Wiesenfeld was right in the first place.
