There was a torrent of phone calls, emails, event ticket acquisitions, and scathing remarks posted on the museum’s website.
By 8:15 Thursday evening, New York time, the museum had folded. The Jewish Museum was no longer going to feature an event called “Wish You Were Here,” featuring Judith Butler. Many pro-Israel New Yorkers were glad to learn that Butler was “not going to be there.”
WHO CANCELLED
But there was one more curious issue regarding the Butler, Jewish Museum, kafkaesque episode.
The notice put out by the Jewish Museum, on its website, and via Twitter, was that Judith Butler canceled the speaking engagement. The Jewish Daily Forward posted that it had received an email in which Judith Butler claimed she was the one who canceled the event.
The Jewish Press, however, spoke with a reliable source who did not want to be named in this article. That source stated that members of the Jewish Museum’s board of trustees, as well as donors, began to feel the fiscal pressure as phone calls of disgust began to reach those high stakes holders.
At the point where a fiscal angle was recognized, “they saw that the potential cost of their ‘open-mindedness’ was not worth their ‘principle.'” The museum, not Butler, canceled the event.
So why the subterfuge? The museum misjudged the extent to which ardent supporters of Israel would dig in their heels and complain about Butler. So why did the museum not present the situation as though the Museum board cares about its patrons, feign ignorance but now enlightenment, and move on?
The Jewish Museum management was contacted for a statement about this specific issue, but it declined to respond.
So the following is conjecture: Someone made the determination that it would look better for the Museum as well as for Butler, if those complaining about hosting Butler were turned into the villains. Treat the cancelation as an indictment of the hysteria or bullying of those complaining, rather than an exposure of the malevolence towards Israel by Butler, and the ineptitude – or worse – of the Museum officials.
Indeed, this theory fits with the way in which the museum’s statement, linked via a tweet sent at 8:15 p.m., canceling Butler’s talk was worded. Read this carefully:
The Jewish Museum announces that Judith Butler has withdrawn from portraying Franz Kafka at the March 6th “Wish You Were Here: Franz Kafka” program. Judith Butler is a noted scholar and author who has lectured and written extensively on Franz Kafka. She was chosen on the basis of her expertise on the subject matter to be discussed. While her political views were not a factor in her participation, the debates about her politics have become a distraction making it impossible to present the conversation about Kafka as intended. Butler offers this comment: “I was very much looking forward to the discussion of Kafka in The Jewish Museum, and to affirm the value of Kafka’s literary work in that setting.”The March 6th program “Wish You Were Here: Franz Kafka” will not take place. [emphasis added]
Judith Butler is hardly the leading Kafka scholar in America, and her most recent and best known writing on Kafka was a determined effort to remove the German author from the pantheon of Jewish Zionist scholars. These facts make it hard to believe that Butler had not intended to insert her anti-Zionist passion into the talk at the Jewish Museum.
It would be helpful if those in a position of authority at New York’s Jewish Museum would explain what transpired. At this point, they are the ones who are under a figurative indictment.
