Jewish Artists Not Welcome Here
A rabbi and a writer walk into a bookstore. . . .
It’s not the beginning of a joke. It was supposed to be the beginning of a discussion between noted Reform Rabbi Andy Bachman and writer Joshua Leifer about Leifer’s new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life.
Slated to take place at POWERHOUSE Arena, a Brooklyn, New York, bookstore, the event was canceled before the men had their conversation. Why? The rabbi is a Zionist.
Both Leifer and Rabbi Bachman advocate for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and oppose Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Yet, anything less than the total denunciation of Israel was enough for the then-manager of POWERHOUSE to deplatform the duo.
An hour before the event, Leifer’s publicist told him “the bookstore had ‘concerns’ about Rabbi Bachman because he was a ‘Zionist.’”
While Leifer was en route to the bookstore, the manager called and refused to host the conversation. “When I arrived, I asked her why she would not permit the event to go forward as planned,” Leifer wrote in The Atlantic. “Her response: ‘We don’t want a Zionist onstage.’”
Planning to leave her position already, the store manager “decided to accelerate her departure from POWERHOUSE by arbitrarily injecting her own personal biases and prejudices where they were unneeded, unwanted, and unauthorized,” POWERHOUSE later stated. It identified her actions as blatant antisemitism:
She forced Leifer and Rabbi Bachman’s planned event to discuss the complex evolution of American Jewish identity in the 21st century to instead become a case study in the shocking re-emergence of anti-Semitic hostility that continues to rear its head in spaces and communities where all of us would least expect it to.
Leifer agreed. “It is straightforwardly anti-Semitic to ask, as the bookstore manager did with her blanket ban on Zionists, that Jews support Israel’s dismantling as a criterion for participation in intellectual life,” he wrote.
This incident is not an anomaly. Protests and repeated calls to boycott writers and artists who show even a modicum of support for the Jewish state have surged.
In June 2024, anti-Israel protesters crashed Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s show in Melbourne, Australia. One heckler shouted at him, “You support genocide!” Security quickly removed the heckler, who chanted the antisemitic cry, “From the river to the sea,” as he left.
In May 2024, Eden Golan, Israel’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest in Sweden, was targeted by anti-Israel protests simply because she is Jewish. Prior to her appearance at the Eurovision finale, Golan reportedly received death threats. Anti-Israel protesters gathered outside the venue where Golan performed, resulting in the arrest of many, including environmentalist Greta Thunberg. Golan’s performance elicited loud and persistent boos from the crowd.
Also in May, a spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a zionist?” surfaced online. Created by an X user named Amina, the now-removed document listed authors whose names were color-coded by their level of support for the Jewish state. It also described what they have done or said that marks them as supporters of Israel.
Jewish novelist Talia Carner found her name on the list. “What shocked me was the blatant anti-Semitism—and that it’s politically correct, that it’s OK to do something like that,” she told the New York Post.
In the early 1930s, the Nazis held book-burnings throughout Germany to destroy books they considered “un-German,” many by Jewish authors. Less than 15 years later, they had murdered more than 6 million European Jewish people.
Targeting Jewish ideas and expression is no less dangerous than targeting Jewish people themselves. As German poet and writer Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821, “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”
History bears out this declaration.
