View of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Met, the largest art museum in the Americas, New York City. Photo: IMAGO/robertharding via Reuters Connect
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Thursday released a new initiative that details the exclusion and suppression of Jewish and Israeli artists, performers, and writers in American culture.
“State of the Arts: Advancing Jewish Inclusion in Arts, Entertainment, and Culture” is a research and digital platform documenting the representation of openly Zionist talent in museums, live entertainment, and publishing.
For its assessment about museums, the ADL conducted an evaluation of antisemitism and Jewish representation at 40 leading art museums in the US in consultation with a 15-member external expert panel of artists, curators, collectors, and museum leaders. The institutions were rated based on their policies and internal standards, art and artist representation, and partnerships and programming.
The Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive in California received the best rating, while others that performed well included The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Broad in Los Angeles were among the museums that received the lowest possible rating of “critically deficient.” Only one of the 40 museums recognized Jewish American Heritage Month this year. The museums were invited to review and corroborate their grading before the ADL published its findings on Thursday, but only 23 museums participated and the rest ignored the ADL, according to the organization.
“Jewish artists are being canceled, blacklisted, and pushed out of American cultural life. We knew the situation was bad, we just didn’t know how bad, and no one had documented it this way before,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a released statement. “Forty leading museums, not one includes Jewish identity in its DEI commitments. Authors are being told to strip Hebrew words and change Jewish character names just to get published. Jewish and Israeli performers are being harassed off stages and dropped from lineups. This is antisemitism and anti-Israeli discrimination, plain and simple, and the arts and culture sector needs to wake up before Jewish voices are silenced entirely.”
To aid in its assessment of Jewish representation in publishing, the ADL conducted more than 30 interviews with authors and publishing professionals. The organization revealed seven core anti-Jewish trends in the industry since the Hamas-led terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, including the boycotts of Israeli publishing and institutions, review-bombing, blacklists, and the suppression of books with Jewish, Israeli, or Zionist characters and themes.
The ADL’s “State of the Art” initiative also documented 65 cases across 41 locations in the US in which Jewish or Israeli performers were canceled, faced harassment, backlash, protest, or disruptions to their performances. The incidents took place across live music, comedy, dance, filmm and campus programming. An accompanying investigation piece from the ADL’s Center on Extremism discussed the networks that anti-Israel activists used to promote the exclusion of Jewish and Israeli talent.
Source: www.algemeiner.com
