Notes from the Basement

Why would a play that ran successfully in London and was headed for New York City suddenly have the rug pulled out from under it?

Rachel Corrie, a young American peace activist, died three years ago beneath an Israeli bulldozer in front of a Palestinian pharmacist’s house in Gaza. She was 23 years old, and she left some words behind. Her words don’t clarify the murky circumstances surrounding her death, but they paint a moving picture of her life and her beliefs, according to those who have seen My Name is Rachel Corrie in London.

The Nation has attempted to answer the question posed above, in an editorial (“An American Inquisition?”) and an article by Philip Weiss (“Too Hot for New York”). Weiss’s article shows many people dancing around the elephant in the room, everyone reluctant to pinpoint the cause. And, truly, it seems the cause is too diffuse to capture in a word or phrase. But the general outlines emerge, and Weiss produces them at the article’s end, after quoting theater blogger George Hunka’s description of the controversy as “an extraordinarily rare picture of the ways that New York cultural institutions make their decisions about what to produce.”

Hunka doesn’t use the J-word. Jen Marlowe does. A Jewish activist with Rachelswords.org (which is staging a reading of Corrie’s words on March 22 with the Corrie parents present), she says, “I don’t want to say the Jewish community is monolithic. It isn’t. But among many American Jews who are very progressive and fight deeply for many social justice issues, there’s a knee-jerk reflexive reaction that happens around issues related to Israel.”

Questions about pressure from Jewish leaders morph quickly into questions about funding. Ellen Stewart, the legendary director of the theatrical group La MaMa E.T.C., which is across East 4th Street from the [New York Theatre] Workshop, speculates that the trouble began with its “very affluent” board. Rachel’s father, Craig Corrie, echoes her. “Do an investigation, follow the money.” I called six board members and got no response. (About a third appear to be Jewish, as am I.) This is of course a charged issue. The writer Alisa Solomon, who was appalled by the postponement, nonetheless warns, “There’s something a little too familiar about the image of Jews pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes.”

Perhaps. But [NYTW artistic director James] Nicola’s statement about a back channel to Jewish leaders suggests the presence of a cultural lobby that parallels the vaunted pro-Israel lobby in think tanks and Congress. I doubt we will find out whether the Workshop’s decision was “internally generated,” as [Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony] Kushner contends, or more orchestrated, as I suspect. What the episode has demonstrated is a climate of fear. Not of physical harm, but of loss of opportunities. “The silence results from fear and intimidation,” says Cindy Corrie [Rachel Corrie’s mother]. “I don’t see what else. And it harms not only Palestinians. I believe, from the bottom of my heart, it harms Israelis and it harms us.”

Kushner agrees. Having spent five months defending Munich, he says the fear has two sources: “There is a very, very highly organized attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel’s policies, and it’s a very unpleasant experience to be in the cross hairs. These aren’t hayseeds from Kansas screaming about gays burning in hell; they’re newspaper columnists who are taken seriously.” These attackers impose a kind of literacy test: Before you can cast a moral vote on Palestinian rights, you must be able to recite a million wonky facts, such as what percentage of the territories were outside the Green Line in 1949. Then there is the self-generated fear of lending support to anti-Semites or those who would destroy Israel. All in all, says Kushner, it can leave someone “overwhelmed and in despair—you feel like you should just say nothing.”

Who will tell Americans the Middle East story? For generations that story has been one of Israelis as victims, and it has been crucial to Israeli policy inasmuch as Israel has been able to defy its neighbors’ opinions by relying on a highly sympathetic superpower. Israel’s supporters have always feared that if Americans started to conduct the same frank discussion of issues that takes place in Tel Aviv, we might become more evenhanded in our approach to the Middle East. That pressure is what has stifled a play that portrays the Palestinians as victims (and thrown a blanket over a movie, Munich, that portrays both sides as victims). I’ve never written this sort of thing before. How moving that we have been granted that freedom by a 23-year-old woman with literary gifts who was not given time to unpack them.

I’ve noted many times that one is more likely to find an open, multisided discussion of the Palestinian issue in the Israeli press than in the American media. Kudos to The Nation.

On the broader issue of the power and influence of the “Israel lobby,” see this recent article by two American scholars—in the London Review of Books.