The Museum of Jewish Heritage sacrifices its reputation on the altar of wokeness.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage sacrifices its reputation on the altar of wokeness.
A fter months of planning, New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage was just weeks away from hosting the Tikvah Fund’s Jewish Leadership Conference when it learned that Florida governor Ron DeSantis was among the speakers. It immediately told the conference organizers that Governor DeSantis would not be allowed to speak. As Tikvah’s chairman and executive director Elliott Abrams and Eric Cohen write in the Wall Street Journal, museum staff said that DeSantis doesn’t “align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity.”
The governor’s planned speech, “The Florida Model and Why It’s Good for Jews,” could hardly be characterized as offensive to Jews: The whole point of the speech is to welcome Jews to Florida, where they are not subject to hate crimes on a regular basis while an “inclusive” mayor looks the other way, as in New York City.
So what did the museum find so contrary to its “message of inclusivity” that it would risk a major backlash from millions of Floridians?
People for whom politics is chiefly a vehicle for instant indignation have a funny habit of getting the most indignant over things that didn’t bother them at all just a few years ago. Say a word against gay marriage today, and you could lose your job, but Barack Obama was against gay marriage just a decade ago, and progressives thought he was miraculous.
It’s easy to imagine Obama agreeing with parents who think that young children should be protected from teachers seeking to influence their sexual orientation. But because a firebrand Republican governor has embraced that position, it has become the latest cause célèbre of cancel culture, leading Disney’s astonishingly clueless management to immolate some 20 percent of their company’s market value in a doomed fight against a bill they didn’t bother to read, having bought the mainstream media’s false characterization of it as a “Don’t Say Gay” law.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage apparently decided that it wanted to follow Disney down the plank, but it doesn’t even have the courage of its convictions. Now the museum is backing away from what it told Tikvah staff and is instead cravenly accusing Abrams and Cohen of making up the whole thing.
Here is the museum’s suspiciously vague denial, which bears careful reading:
Friday, May 6, 2022
The following statement was issued by the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust regarding a factually inaccurate opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal about a proposed rental event:
“The Wall Street Journal opinion piece, ‘Persona Non Grata at a Holocaust Memorial,’ written by the leadership at The Tikvah Fund, contains many factual inaccuracies, including fictionalized quotes.
No one was banned or cancelled. The fact is that no contract with the Tikvah Fund was ever signed for this rental event to be held at the Museum and no deposit was ever made.
This is not a free speech or censorship issue. The Tikvah Fund is trying to create a fight where none exists. This was simply a contractual and logistical decision.
We welcome Governor DeSantis and elected officials from across the spectrum to visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust for a tour of our new exhibition, The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, when it opens this summer.”
Juries are often called upon to decide who is telling the truth and who is lying in cases where the evidence is ambiguous. What helps juries decide such cases is that the truthful person sounds more truthful the more you listen, while the liar becomes increasingly hard to believe.
I am an alum of Tikvah Institutes and have many friends there, but bias aside, it doesn’t take long to see who is lying here. According to Tikvah staff, who shared with me their careful notes of key conversations along with much of the relevant correspondence, this is what happened: Tikvah has held several events at the museum over the years, including its inaugural Jewish Leadership Conference in 2017, so in January of this year, they decided to hold the conference there again. They reserved the space, and in the months since then, staff at Tikvah and the museum worked through the many details of such a major conference — catering, audiovisual, security. Those details were all but finalized when the museum sent Tikvah a final contract in an email that said, simply, “Agreement attached.” Tikvah signed the contract and sent it back to them while initiating the ACH deposit.
Shortly thereafter, museum staff realized that DeSantis was among the speakers. Almost immediately, a contractor who handles events at the museum called Tikvah staff to say that there was a problem, that the event could not be held if DeSantis was among the speakers, and that they should stop payment on the deposit.
At first, the contractor was vague as to what the problem was, pointing generally to the museum’s summer exhibit, The Holocaust — What Hate Can Do. Pressed to speak candidly, the contractor finally admitted that the Florida governor doesn’t “align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity.”
The Tikvah staff immediately asked to speak to a senior museum person, and half an hour later Executive Vice President Elyse Buxbaum called to reaffirm that DeSantis would not be allowed to speak because he “does not align with the museum’s values of inclusivity,” using the same familiar Newspeak as the contractor.
The next day Tikvah’s executive director, Eric Cohen, spoke with museum CEO Jack Kliger, who now began to change the story. Now the problem with DeSantis was simply that he’s a politician, and the museum, Kliger said, avoids hosting political speakers of left or right. That was brazenly false and easy to disprove, given that the museum has hosted many political figures, including at Tikvah’s own events there in previous years, and including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a close congressional ally of Rashida Tlaib, who might as well be a spokesperson for the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas) and former mayor Bill de Blasio, who has a particularly checkered history with the Orthodox Jewish community.
The day after that, Kliger informed Eric Cohen that the decision was final. The event at the museum was canceled, along with the governor of Florida.
The museum’s attempt to turn the controversy into a he-said/she-said dispute seems particularly pointless because those who celebrate the cancellation were delighted to believe Tikvah’s version of events. Here’s a tweet by Daniel Uhlfelder, Democratic candidate for attorney general in Florida:
While DeSantis is busy banning books and abortions, the NY Museum of Jewish Heritage just rightfully banned DeSantis from its grounds because he "didn't align with the museum's values and its message of inclusivity." Please follow @MJHnews for standing up to this bigoted tyrant.
— Daniel Uhlfelder (@DWUhlfelderLaw) May 5, 2022
Regardless, the museum accuses Abrams and Cohen of multiple fabrications in their Wall Street Journal piece, “including fictionalized quotes.” That’s quotes plural. But there is only one direct quote in the whole Wall Street Journal piece attributed to the museum — namely, the key quote about inclusivity, which was repeated in no less than two separate phone calls with museum staff. The other quotes in the piece are either idiomatic expressions or a matter of public record, such as the quote from a book by Natan Sharansky. So as a matter of simple arithmetic, the museum’s statement is false on its face.
And in fact, while breezily accusing Tikvah of “multiple inaccuracies,” the statement does not actually deny a single factual allegation in the entire Wall Street Journal op-ed. The museum claims that the parties didn’t have a contract and it’s now trying to pass the whole thing off as merely “a contractual and logistical decision.”
But they don’t event attempt to explain what contractual or logistical issue motivated that decision. And it is pretty clear that the parties did in fact have an enforceable contract. I happen to be a member of the New York bar, and if I remember New York contract law correctly, the contract that came from the museum was an “offer” and Tikvah’s signature was “acceptance.” If so, the museum’s subsequent countersignature would be a mere formality, not necessary to an enforceable contract.
But the final detail in the museum’s statement is the real killer: The governor is invited to visit the museum’s exhibit on how “hate” was at the root of the Holocaust. Of course, we all know by now that “hate” is just code for any deviation from the new orthodoxy of Marxist social-caste bigotry, which all too often goes hiding behind the word “inclusivity,” and that such deviations are to be punished by silencing the guilty, without any possibility of reprieve or consideration of redeeming qualities.
In other words, Governor DeSantis is welcome to visit the museum as a penitent, to watch and listen and perhaps accept his guilt, but even if he does, he’s not welcome to speak. So a museum that claims to avoid politics is willing to insult a popular governor, along with millions of his supporters, thousands of whom are (or were) also supporters of the museum, all for the purpose of sending that malicious and mean-spirited message. Call it a performative exhibit of intolerance in the name of “inclusivity,” no less depressing for how commonplace such displays have become.