The Playgoer: Kushner/CUNY update

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Thursday, May 05, 2011

Kushner/CUNY update

Following yesterday's news about the board of the City University of New York voting to "table" a proposed honorary degree for Tony Kushner...

Kushner has now vociferously responded in an open letter, posted on the site for Jewish Voice for Peace. Understandably, what upsets him more than being deprived of an honorary doctorate from John Jay College is the truly slanderous representation of his views on Israel that were carelessly (or just mendaciously) floated at the meeting by one Jeffrey Wiesenfeld--CUNY board member and neocon hatchet-man. Despite Wiesenfeld's sleazy charges, Kushner has in face (as he says in his letter) never supported a boycott of Israel and never denied Israel's right to exist.

Also today, Patrick Healy has written up the fracas in the Times.

So how does this happen? How could the board of the city's public university not know it would be controversial to so publicly diss one of the city's most famous and admired writers?

Maybe because these rich squares don't really know who he is. A partisan hitman like Wiesenfeld can march into a meeting waving printouts from boogeyman Norman Finkelstein's blog and ask, Why is John Jay giving an award to someone not a friend of Israel? And, as we're discovering, hardly anyone at the table attempted to refute that. (Or not enough people. Healy reports that Kushner was done in by falling two votes shy of the nine out of twelve required. Seven were ok with Kushner, five voted against.)Why? Maybe they were just lazy and wanted to end the meeting already.

Also: the Israel question has become so radioactive in respected circles that any whiff of controversy scares the board to death. (See "Corrie, Rachel.")

One wonders if a majority of the board understood that Tony Kushner is more than a commentator on Israel. And if they do know his literary and dramatic credentials, do they assume he's just one of those pinko gay theatre artists always asking for patronage from such illustrious board members?

Stay tuned....

1 comment:

cgeye said...

Aw, hell -- now it's on like Calculon....

They picked a knife fight with a man who brought a rhetorical howitzer. This *will* be fun....

captcha: dolor.
Only for the tools on that board....