Mansour had every right to tell his story. He lived it. He was born in Birzeit in 1947 into circumstances he did not choose, he was arrested repeatedly, he watched his colleagues barred from travel and their work confiscated, and he made a body of work out of it. In 1989 he stopped using imported oils and started working in mud, and he talked later about being anxious over the cracks before he understood that the cracks were the point. That is a real artist thinking out loud. You can find his politics indigestible and still recognize the observation as powerful.

So I want to be precise about what I am objecting to. It is not Mansour. It is the vehicle ARTnews built around his obit.

Let’s dive in.

I say Doha, you say Dubai

The obituary reports that Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, “in Dubai,” mourned his death.

Well, this is awkward.

Mathaf is in Doha. It has been in Doha since it opened in December 2010, in Education City, in a converted school building renovated by Jean-François Bodin, under Qatar Museums. It holds the largest collection of modern and contemporary Arab art in the world. It is not a boutique operation in a side street. Getting this wrong in a Palestinian art obituary is roughly the equivalent of writing that MoMA is in Boston.

I raise this not to score a cheap point about a copy desk, though it is a cheap point and I am scoring it (judge if you will, I secretly love it). I raise it because the same article, eleven paragraphs later, is going to tell me, and confidently no less, how many people have died in Gaza and whether what happened there meets the legal definition of genocide. If the reporting cannot place the region’s most important museum in the correct country, I would like to understand what standard of verification was applied to the harder claims.

The founding of a country, told by its adversaries

Here is how ARTnews handles 1948. Mansour was born, readers learn, “months before the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel (an event known in Arabic as the Nakba, or ‘catastrophe’).”

Ah, yes. I often go to ARTnews to understand geopolitical conflicts, so this one slaps.

So let’s read that beautiful opener again, slowly. The creation of Israel appears in this sentence exclusively as a modifier attached to a catastrophe. No partition vote. No 1947. No mention that five Arab armies invaded the day after the declaration. No mention of the roughly 850,000 Jews expelled from Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, Sana’a and Casablanca in the years that followed, a population that includes people I am related to (my father’s family was from Aleppo, Syria). The founding of a sovereign state recognized by the international body that voted for it is rendered here in the vocabulary of the side that tried to strangle it in the crib. But why bore ourselves with such details?

Name another country whose founding the Anglophone press narrates using only the loss word supplied by its enemies. I will wait. Do your thing, Alexa. Ireland gets independence. India gets independence, and Partition gets its own noun and its own million dead, which somehow does not become the definition of India. Israel alone gets to be an event in someone else’s grief. In ARTnews coverage, however, it’s a settled fact.

“Uprising”

ARTnews describes the First Intifada as “the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation.” Neutral, historical, no notes.

I want to be fair, because the piece I am writing has to hold to a standard the piece I am criticizing did not. The First Intifada, which I recall vividly as a resident of Israel at the time, in its early years was substantially stones, strikes, tax refusal and boycotts. That is genuinely different from what came later. Mansour’s New Visions movement grew out of that period’s philosophy of self reliance, and the material story is interesting on its own terms.

But the word does not stay parked in 1987, and every editor at that publication knows it. (Or do they? Maybe they’re busy moonlighting fact checking at NY Magazine. Mystery.) When people chant the word today, Intifada, they are not chanting about a tax boycott, and the word does not convey the poetic justice of an uprising. So let me spell out what the word carries.

June 2001, the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv: 21 dead, 16 of them teenagers waiting outside a nightclub. August 2001, the Sbarro restaurant on King George Street in Jerusalem: 16 dead, including seven children and a pregnant woman visiting from New Jersey. March 2002, the Park Hotel in Netanya, during the Passover seder: 30 dead, many of them elderly, some of them Holocaust survivors who had sat down to read about deliverance from Egypt. Across the Second Intifada, more than a thousand Israelis killed, with civilians accounting for something close to eight in ten.

Exploding buses, pizzerias, discos, a seder table. If a publication wants to use the sanitized noun, it can, but then it does not get to present itself as the responsible adult in the room on questions of political violence.

The arithmetic, because the math is not mathing

Credit where it is owed: the obituary does say “Hamas’s October 7 attack.” It names the perpetrator. Good.

Now count the words. Hamas’s massacre gets four of them and no numbers at all. Not the 1,200 murdered in a single morning, with unspeakable sexual violence against victims and hostages documented by UN investigators. Not the 251 taken into Gaza, some of them children. Not the Holocaust survivors murdered in their homes that day. Not the Nova festival. Nothing.

The parenthetical that follows, by contrast, is generous with figures, because ARTnews is just a giver: “at least 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces, a military campaign deemed a genocide by UN independent commission earlier this year.”

No attribution for the number. Wonder why. Hmm. I’m going to take a wild shot, guys, but an unshakeable hunch tells me it comes from the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not separate combatants from civilians, which means ARTnews has just published a figure that counts a Hamas rocket crew and a nine year old as the same data point and has not told its readers so. That is not a rounding error in a war fought by an organization that has made a doctrine of operating from schools, hospitals and residential blocks. To be extra clear: every one of those civilian deaths is a catastrophe. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy. The number is also not what the sentence pretends it is.

And “deemed a genocide by UN independent commission” is doing extraordinary heavy lifting in eight words, which I suspect is the most exercise art writers normally get. So let’s look at that commission a little closer.

It was three people, appointed by the Human Rights Council, chaired by Navi Pillay. Her colleague Miloon Kothari told an interviewer in 2022 that social media is “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby” and that money had been thrown around to discredit the commissioners; two senior US diplomats called the remarks antisemitic and “outrageous, inappropriate, and corrosive.” Pillay’s response, as reported at the time, was to dismiss the outcry as a diversion. The third member, Chris Sidoti, had already gone on record accusing Jewish groups of throwing antisemitism allegations around “like rice at a wedding.” All three submitted their resignations in July 2025, two months before the genocide report was published, and left the commission six weeks after it. They filed on the way out the door. The heroism.

That is the body ARTnews is citing. Not a vote of the UN. Not a ruling of the International Court of Justice, which has issued provisional measures, has not ruled on the merits, and will not for years. Israel did not participate and rejected the findings outright. Serious scholars are split, publicly and bitterly. You can believe the commission got it right. I do not, and reasonable people disagree with me. What you cannot do is drop the most serious accusation in international law into a parenthesis in an obituary for a painter, in the passive voice, with no counterweight, and call it reporting.

Oh, and about that eulogy

The obituary opens its tributes with Emily Jacir, who is quoted movingly about a friendship of thirty years. She is described by her Golden Lion, which she won in 2007 and deserved.

Here is what ARTnews leaves out, which is notable, because ARTnews is the publication that reported it. In October 2023, the paper covered the cancellation of a Jacir talk in Berlin and noted that Boris Pofalla of Die Welt had flagged an Instagram story of hers showing a woman Jacir herself identified as an Israeli kidnapped by Hamas, captioned with a line describing her as a captured settler.

And remember the open letter Artforum published on October 19, 2023, the one signed by some 8,000 members of the art world that called for a ceasefire without mentioning Hamas or October 7 at all? The image running above it was Jacir’s Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948. Our Golden Lioness crowned the thing. The acknowledgment of 1,200 murdered Jews was added four days later, and only after the dealers Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy and Amalia Dayan published a response pointing out that it was missing. It took three art dealers to get the massacre into the letter. That detail, too, was eventually reported by ARTnews.

Jacir has since said, at length and on the record, that she was the target of a coordinated smear campaign, and the campaign against Palestinian artists in Germany during that period was real and often indiscriminate. Both things can be documented because both were documented, by ARTnews.

Nobody is asking for a prosecution in an obituary. But the paper that ran those stories in 2023 was, at minimum, in a position to know that its lead mourner is a contested figure to a large number of its own readers. It quoted her as a grieving friend, full stop, and let the archive stay in the archive. That is not an oversight. That is an editorial position wearing a press pass.

What was actually lost

Mansour said he believed in art as a social instrument and not as decoration for wealthy people’s houses. It is a great line, honestly. It is also, uncomfortably for ARTnews, an indictment of exactly what the publication did with him.

Because this obituary is decoration. It is a piece of moral furniture arranged in the house of the Western progressive art reader, who gets to feel the correct feelings on the correct schedule and close the tab. The man’s mud, his cracks, his forty years of building an infrastructure so that other Palestinians could have careers, all of it gets flattened into a delivery mechanism for a set of contested political claims the paper cannot be bothered to source or attribute.

He deserved a critic. And a fact checker.

The cracks in Mansour’s clay carried something honest. Raw. Powerful. The cracks in this obituary carry something else, and it is not journalism. It is advocacy that has stopped noticing its own advocacy.

Somewhere in Doha, a museum is still waiting for its correction.

Disclosure: I serve as Co-Chair of the ADL New York Volunteer Group and Advisory Board. Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL's CEO, is quoted in the reporting discussed below.

Two museum stories broke within a week of each other. Read side by side, they are a case study in the difference between institutional courage and institutional selectivity, and in how easily one gets mistaken for the other.

Winnipeg

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has mounted Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present, an exhibit on the displacement of Palestinians in and after 1948. Let me be precise about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing the show should not exist. The displacement of roughly 750,000 Palestinians is a fact of history, it produced generations of consequence, and it belongs in a museum devoted to human rights. Palestinian Canadian stories are underrepresented in Canadian institutions. The museum is right about that.

My objection is not that the exhibit was mounted. It is what the exhibit leaves out.

According to CBC’s reporting, the panels omit that Arab leaders rejected the 1947 United Nations partition resolution. They omit that Canada itself lists Hamas as a terrorist entity. And they omit the near total erasure of Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa that followed Israel’s founding, an expulsion that ended more than two thousand years of continuous Jewish life in the region.

The museum’s response is that these subjects appear elsewhere in the building. That answer misunderstands how a visitor actually moves through a museum. Nobody walks into a themed exhibit, absorbs its argument, and then assembles the counterweight from a timeline two floors up. Curatorial context is not a distributed asset. It lives in the room, on the wall, next to the object. An institution that knows this, and every institution knows this, cannot claim the missing half is technically on premises.

Where are the Jews of the Arab world?

Here is the material the exhibit does not contain. These are Israeli Foreign Ministry figures, and estimates vary somewhat by source, but the direction of travel is not in dispute.

Morocco. 265,000 in 1948. About 2,000 today.

Algeria. 140,000 in 1948. About 50 today.

Iraq. 135,000 in 1948. Fewer than 10 today.

Tunisia. 105,000 in 1948. About 1,500 today.

Egypt. 75,000 in 1948. Fewer than 10 today.

Iran. Roughly 100,000 before 1948. About 9,500 today.

Yemen. 60,000 in 1948. Fewer than 10 today.

Libya. 38,000 in 1948. Fewer than 10 today.

Syria. 30,000 in 1948. About 30 today.

Lebanon. 7,000 in 1948. About 20 today.

More than 850,000 people, by conservative count. Some scholars put it closer to a million. Roughly 99 percent of those communities are gone.

Sources: 1948 populations and current figures per Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reported in The Jerusalem Post*, November 30, 2025. Iran figure as of 2025. Aggregate totals per the World Jewish Congress, which puts the number forced out of Arab countries at more than 850,000 across the two decades following 1948.*

They did not evaporate. In Baghdad, the Farhud pogrom of June 1941 killed some 180 Jews and gutted the Jewish quarter. In Aleppo, where my own family is from, December 1947 riots drove 7,000 of the city’s 10,000 Jews out and burned synagogues that had stood for centuries. In Cairo, bombings in the Jewish quarter in 1948 killed more than 70. In Aden, pogroms following the partition vote killed 82. In Libya, a regime that had already deported more than 2,000 Jews to desert camps during the war finished the job afterward. Iraq made Zionism a capital offense. Syria froze Jewish bank accounts and seized property. Egypt declared its Jews enemies of the state after 1956.

A museum that teaches 750,000 about one side and not 850,000 on the other is not teaching human rights. It is teaching a position. Curators know that omission is an argument. That is the whole reason we hire them. Present a founding as nothing but catastrophe, strip out the catastrophe that preceded it in Europe and the one that followed it across nine other countries, and you have not built an exhibit. You have built a brief.

And here is the institutional cost, which should worry the museum more than any of us. A human rights museum’s only real asset is that visitors believe it is telling them the whole thing. Gail Asper put it plainly: her fear is that all the work will be for naught if people stop trusting the museum. That is not a partisan observation. That is a governance observation, from someone who spent two decades building the institution.

The street outside

On June 1, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney stood at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto and said that Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians. He noted that more than two thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in Canada target a community that is one percent of the population. He committed 75 million dollars to security infrastructure for faith institutions, and said it pained him that the money was necessary.

He was right about the diagnosis. But that’s where credit for the PM ends. He was, as several Canadian commentators noted immediately, unwilling to name the mechanism. He did not say the word Israel. He did not address how anti-Zionism is being used to launder hostility toward Jews as such. You cannot treat a condition you decline to name.

The numbers around that speech:

• B’nai Brith Canada recorded 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the highest total since it began tracking in 1982, an average of 18.6 per day and a 145 percent increase over 2022.

• Violent incidents alone reached 27 in the first half of 2026, more than double the 10 recorded across all of 2025.

And the incidents themselves, in sequence. The Bais Chaya Mushka girls’ school in Toronto shot at three separate times in 2024, once on Yom Kippur. Toronto-area synagogues shot at in spring 2026. A man smashing a window at Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom in June and trying to set a fire inside. Coordinated assaults in Outremont on July 3, Hasidic men beaten and robbed walking home from Friday night services, their shtreimels taken. Gunfire at a Kiva’s Bagel Bar location in Toronto in late July, an hour after vandals smashed the windows of another branch. And on the morning of August 1, Nöam, a kosher restaurant on Décarie Boulevard in Côte-des-Neiges, burned to the ground. It happened overnight on Shabbat, when the restaurant was closed. Surveillance footage from a neighboring garage caught a young man setting the fire. Montreal’s arson squad opened a hate crime investigation.

I want to be careful here, because the loose version of this argument is both wrong and easy to dismiss. An exhibit in Winnipeg did not light a match in Montreal. No one in that curatorial department wants a restaurant burned.

The claim is narrower and, I believe, harder to escape. Violence requires a permission structure. It requires a widely available story in which Jewish national existence is nothing but a crime against someone else — a catastrophe, if you will — in which Jews are the party with power and never the party with history. Every institution that ratifies half of that story adds a brick. A national museum ratifying it carries more weight than a pamphlet, because a national museum is precisely the thing people cite when they want to say this is not prejudice, this is documented. When the country’s designated authority on human rights presents Jewish sovereignty as pure catastrophe and Jewish dispossession as a footnote elsewhere in the building, it is not causing the arson. It is furnishing the vocabulary that the arsonist has already learned.

The irony, and the pattern

The Asper family foundation gave more than 23 million dollars toward the museum’s construction. Gail Asper gave another 1.4 million personally, and led the campaign that brought the institution into being after her father’s death. That family has now paused a 50,000 dollar gift intended for a Holocaust exhibit. The money will likely go instead toward security at synagogues and Jewish schools. Sadly, that is a better use of their funds.

Read that sequence twice. A Jewish family builds a national human rights museum. The museum mounts a show that its founding donor believes cannot be trusted. And the philanthropy gets redirected from a Holocaust gallery to guarding the doors of Jewish buildings. That is not a funding dispute. That is a community being told, by an institution it built, to fund its own protection instead.

We have watched a version of this before. Anita and Poju Zabludowicz ran one of London’s most consequential platforms for emerging artists out of a converted Methodist church in Chalk Farm, more than a hundred free exhibitions and 640 free events over sixteen years, giving UK debuts to artists who went on to major institutional careers. From 2014 onward they were the target of a sustained boycott campaign built explicitly on their ties to Israel. In 2021, 25 artists publicly disaffiliated from their own work in the collection. The space closed in December 2023. The Collection has consistently said the closure was unrelated to the boycott, and I will take them at their word on their own motives. What is not in dispute is the sequence, and what is not in dispute is the message the campaign was designed to send and did send: that this money and this platform were unwelcome, and that artists who touched them would pay for it.

The ledger nobody wants to itemize

Walk through any major museum in the West and read the walls. The Robert Lehman Wing at the Met. The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. The Temple of Dendur in the wing the Sackler family paid for. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The David Geffen Wing at MoMA, a 100 million dollar gift from a kid from Borough Park, alongside the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Building. The Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern, the largest single financial donation in the history of British museums.

This is not a claim to deference, and I want to be exact about that, because the sloppy version of this argument does real damage. Philanthropy does not buy a veto over curatorial content. It should not. A museum that lets its donors edit its walls has stopped being a museum, and any Jewish institutional leader who argues otherwise is arguing for a principle that will be used against us within a decade.

But philanthropy of that scale does buy something, and it is the thing every museum already extends to every other constituency as a matter of routine professional practice: consultation. Being in the room while the thing is designed, not summoned to the lobby after it opens. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights was criticized before this exhibit even opened for a lack of consultation during its development. That is not a curatorial dispute. That is a process failure, and process failures are the easy kind to fix, which is what makes this one so hard to forgive.

New York

Which brings me to the other museum story of the week.

Before announcing John Galliano as the subject of next spring’s Costume Institute exhibition, the Metropolitan Museum of Art went and sat down with rabbis and Jewish organizational leaders. Not after the announcement. Before. Anna Wintour and curator Andrew Bolton convened a series of meetings that included Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and rabbis from significant New York congregations. Galliano himself was in the room.

The subject was not academic. In 2011, Galliano delivered an antisemitic tirade in a Paris bar that cost him Dior and has shadowed his career since. He would be only the third living designer to receive a Costume Institute show, after Yves Saint Laurent and Rei Kawakubo. This is an honor, and everyone involved understood that awarding it now, in this geopolitical climate, was a live problem rather than a solved one.

So the Met treated it as a live problem. Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism, who attended a May meeting, came away struck by Galliano’s sincerity and the fact that he spoke without the cadence of rehearsed talking points. Greenblatt said the ADL considers Galliano to have genuinely worked through what produced the outburst, that the apology was accepted long ago, and that the repair effort deserves credit. And Bolton, rather than pretending the timing was neutral, said the opposite: the current rise in hate makes the question more urgent, not less. His framing of the curatorial task was to “hold artistic achievement and ethical accountability together” without letting either cancel the other. The show will open with an orientation gallery that addresses the 2011 rant directly, before a single garment does the talking.

That is not artwashing. It’s the opposite. Artwashing is the silent version, the one where the wall text has a hole in it exactly where the difficulty should be. What the Met did is the opposite procedure: identify the hardest thing about the material, go find the people with the greatest stake in it, put them in a room with the subject himself, and then build the difficulty into the architecture of the show.

I will grant the obvious objection. Some people will say the Met should not be handing Galliano a monographic show at all, that rehabilitation is not the museum’s business, and that a survey is a laurel regardless of what the orientation gallery says. That is a serious argument and the show’s reception will test it. Other institutions are reportedly lined up to take the exhibition on tour, and their directors are watching. But notice that the objection is now a debate held in the open, with the affected community’s most prominent voices already on the record. Compare that to Winnipeg, where the affected community found out what the institution thought of its history by buying a ticket.

The standard

The Met did not avoid a controversial subject. It did not sand it down, and it did not hide behind the claim that context lives somewhere else in the building. It went toward the difficulty, brought in the people with the most to lose, and used a bad political moment as a reason to do the harder version of the work rather than the safer one.

That is the standard. It is not a Jewish standard, it is a curatorial one, and it applies in every direction. It would apply if the subject were Palestinian dispossession and the room to be consulted were Palestinian Canadians. It should have applied in Winnipeg in both directions at once, which is exactly what a human rights museum is for.

Three questions, then, that any institution mounting difficult material should be able to answer before it opens:

1. Who has the greatest stake in this material, and did we speak with them while it was still possible to change something?

2. What is the strongest version of the argument we are omitting, and can a visitor encounter it inside this room rather than elsewhere in the building?

3. If our most committed supporters walked through this show, would they recognize it as complete, or as an argument wearing the costume of an education?

The Met answered those questions before it announced. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is being asked them now, after the fact, by the family that built it, while a kosher restaurant in Montreal sits gutted on Décarie Boulevard.

One of these institutions understood that a museum’s authority comes from being trusted with the whole thing. The other is about to learn what it costs to spend that authority down.

I have spent 25 years in the art world, at Christie’s, Phillips, and Artsy, and now building Bridgewell Arts. I can tell you that nowhere is her diagnosis more precise than in the cultural sector. If you want to see what a coordinated campaign looks like when the other side has shared language, shared goals, and a long-term plan, look at what has happened in the arts since 2014. And if you want to see what fragmentation costs, look at how we have responded.

The campaign is systemic. Our response is not.

PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, did not stumble into the art world. It built infrastructure there. Boycott Divest Zabludowicz, the group that spent a decade targeting collectors Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, operates explicitly under the PACBI umbrella. Its playbook was patient and precise: a petition signed by over 600 artists and organizations, a campaign pressuring 25 artists to “deauthor” their own past work in the collection, and years of sustained reputational pressure. In 2023, the Zabludowicz Collection closed its London space after 16 years. That space had launched hundreds of emerging artists’ careers. The campaign did not care. The Zabludowiczes’ offense was not what they collected. It was their ties to Israel.

Warren Kanders was pushed off the Whitney Museum’s board in 2019 by a campaign nominally about tear gas, but anyone who followed it closely watched Israel woven through the messaging as a recurring through-line. The pattern since has only accelerated: Israeli artists dropped from exhibitions and gallery rosters, curators declining to touch anything Israel-adjacent, artists signing open letters boycotting colleagues for a variable those colleagues do not control, their nationality. And because roughly 90 percent of global Jewry has family, history, or identity bound up with Israel, the demonization of anything Israel-adjacent functions, by proxy, as the demonization of Jews. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is how exclusion works in practice.

The press has not been a bystander.

Publications like Hyperallergic, ARTnews, and Artforum have covered this campaign with a consistency and sympathy that the targets of the campaign have never received. When protesters disrupted the February 2024 Director’s Talk at the Jewish Museum between James Snyder and Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky, whose exhibition depicted the aftermath of October 7, seventeen activists rose in four rehearsed waves, reading from a prepared script. Hyperallergic’s coverage appeared with remarkable speed and remarkable intimacy: quotes from the organizers’ script, installation photography credited to its own staff, video pushed out on its social channels. Readers can draw their own conclusions about how a publication comes to be so well positioned for a “spontaneous” protest. At minimum, the choreography between activists and the outlets that amplify them deserves far more scrutiny than it has received. The campaign has a media arm. We should stop pretending otherwise.

What Hadara’s framework demands of the art world

Her prescription translates directly to our field, and I want to be specific about what it looks like.

First, collectors need to be corralled and emboldened. Not to boycott. I want to be emphatic about this, because the distinction is the entire point. Boycotts punish artists for who they are. Accountability asks institutions to answer for what they do. Collectors hold enormous leverage with galleries, and today most of them exercise none of it. When a gallery looks the other way as its artists sign petitions boycotting colleagues over their nationality, or worse, post blood libel and antisemitic tropes about Jews and Israel, collectors should be asking that gallery direct questions and expecting direct answers. Individually, a collector who raises this is a nuisance. Fifty collectors asking the same question in the same season is a strategy.

Second, donors need to apply the same discipline to museums. Institutions that platform artwashed, radicalized ideology dressed as social justice should hear from their patrons in the language institutions understand: withheld gifts, redirected commitments, and clear conditions for restoration. This is not censorship. Donors are not obligated to fund their own delegitimization.

Third, the monitoring organizations and the arts organizations need to be introduced to each other. ADL and its peers have built world-class capacity to identify and track hate. A constellation of Jewish arts organizations is already on the ground doing educational programming, artist support, and bridge-building. These two ecosystems barely speak. Synced, the watchdogs’ data would give the arts organizations early warning and evidentiary rigor, and the arts organizations would give the watchdogs cultural fluency and standing in rooms where they currently have none.

Someone is already doing this right.

Here I want to give credit where an enormous amount is due. UJA-Federation of New York made arts and culture its fourth pillar, a decision whose significance the broader community has not fully absorbed. UJA is not simply writing checks to cultural initiatives. It is doing the thing Hadara says almost no one does: bringing its grantees together, in the same room, to connect, share strategy, and grow in influence as a field rather than as isolated projects. That is the difference between sustaining institutions and building influence. It is a working model of coordinated cultural investment, and it deserves to be studied and replicated by every federation and foundation that claims to care about this fight.

Back to the strategy gap

Hadara closes her piece with a question we should all be asking ourselves: knowing everything we know about the campaign against us and about our own fragmentation, if we do not act together now, when will we?

In the art world, the answer has consequences measured in careers. Every season we spend responding institution by institution, another Israeli artist loses a show, another Jewish philanthropist decides the abuse is not worth it, another young curator learns that Israel-adjacent is a professional liability. The infrastructure working against us in the cultural sector shares language, shares targets, and plans in decades. We have the collectors, the organizations, the donors, and the moral clarity to match it. What we do not yet have is the decision to act as one field.

Hadara is right. The gap is not resources. It is strategy. And strategy gaps can be closed, if the right people decide to close them. In the arts, that decision is overdue.

Shlomi Rabi is the Founder and Executive Director of Bridgewell Arts, building bridges between Jewish and Israeli creative communities and the broader contemporary art world. He spent 25 years in the art world at Christie’s, Phillips, and Artsy, and serves as Co-Chair of the ADL New York Advisory Board.

I’ve spent 25 years in this industry, at Christie’s, at Phillips, at Artsy. I know how an art world narrative hardens. So I read the Reader piece carefully. And I want to show you what’s actually in it, because the article quietly refutes its own headline.

Start with the sentence the Reader prints once and never revisits. According to the school’s own correspondence, as reported by the Reader, the investigation concerns whether the assignment may have been retaliatory toward the complaining student, who had previously filed a Title IX complaint against a fellow student for allegedly revealing privileged information from that confidential process in a piece of artwork. Talwar served as that student’s advisor.

Let’s sit with that. A graduate student files a confidential complaint. Details from that confidential process allegedly surface in a classmate’s artwork. The professor advising that classmate then gives the complainant’s small seminar a case study that, in the school’s view, raised retaliation concerns serious enough to investigate. You can believe the investigation will exonerate Talwar completely. But that is the question under review. It is not, and never was, whether faculty may say the word Palestine.

And the Reader’s own reporting hints there is more here than the article pursues. By the paper’s account, this assignment did not arrive in a vacuum: it followed a Title IX complaint, artwork alleged to reveal privileged information from that confidential process, and an advising relationship connecting Talwar to the accused classmate. A semester-long chain of events that culminated in the assignment, not a story that begins with it. That timeline raises questions any reporter covering this case should be asking. Was this case study part of the course as planned at the start of the semester, or introduced in its final weeks? Did the artwork at the center of the earlier complaint draw on material from a confidential proceeding, and was there ever a plan to exhibit it? What role, if any, did the advising professor play? I don’t know the answers. Neither do you. And after three major features totaling more than ten thousand words, neither do the publications that have already delivered their verdict. That is the tell. Real reporting asks the questions that complicate its thesis. Advocacy skips them.

Don’t take my word on the larger frame. Take the provost’s, printed in the Reader itself: SAIC has many dozens of faculty who regularly teach about Palestinians, Palestine, and Gaza, and none has faced investigation or sanction. The article quotes this directly. It then declines to engage it for the remainder of the piece, returning instead to a premise the school explicitly disputes on the record: that this is about a word.

Now consider who speaks in this article. Talwar, at length. Her attorney. Anonymous students sympathetic to her. Students who were investigated and cleared. Faculty union leaders. Count the Jewish or Israeli voices. In my reading of all three features, I could not find one. The student at the center of the story is given a pseudonym, described entirely through the accounts of people in conflict with her, and dispatched with a single line: she did not respond to email requests for comment. The previous Israeli student who sued the school is likewise never interviewed. In any other context, the art press would recognize this pattern instantly: a story about a student in a protected class, told exclusively by the people she accused.

The article’s thesis is that SAIC reflexively kowtows to antisemitism complaints. Its own reporting says otherwise. By the Reader’s account, the 2023 lawsuit was dismissed. The complaint against three classmates was investigated and dismissed, with no policy violation found. Every complaint the article describes was ultimately rejected by the school or the courts. If the institution were captured by these complaints, the record the Reader itself assembles would look very different.

A word on that dismissed lawsuit, since the article treats dismissal as proof the underlying claims were baseless. Hostile environment claims under Title VI face one of the most demanding standards in civil rights law. Courts dismiss such cases routinely without finding that the experiences described were false. Meanwhile, the provost’s letter, quoted in the Reader, refers to multiple prior complaints alleging a hostile environment within this specific department. The article treats that history as an inappropriate factor. A department leader’s conduct, evaluated in light of a documented complaint history in her own department, is not an inappropriate factor. It is context. The article has context for everyone except the students who complained.

And notice the language doing quiet work throughout. The subheading tells us claims of antisemitism devastated the department. Not the environment that produced years of complaints, a lawsuit, a professor previously placed on leave, and a paused admissions cycle. The claims. The people who reported the problem are cast as the problem, a construction the art press would never accept for any other group of students, and rightly so.

Let me be clear about what I am not arguing. SAIC’s administration comes off badly in this piece, and some of that criticism has merit. The AAUP’s procedural concerns deserve answers. The three students who endured a six-month investigation and were cleared deserved better, and their frustration is legitimate. Due process is not a partisan value. I want it for Talwar, for those three students, and, apparently alone among people writing about this case, for the student who complained.

Because here is the precedent being set, and it should worry every reader regardless of where you stand on the Middle East. Three major publications have now established a template: when a Jewish or Israeli student uses a school’s own civil rights process, the response is to profile her anonymously through hostile accounts, decline to seek her perspective beyond a pro forma email, and convert her complaint into evidence of a national campaign against academic freedom. That template is portable. Whatever group finds itself politically inconvenient next will inherit it. The art world, of all places, should understand that a press that only investigates in one direction is not a free press. It is a chorus.

Six students sat in that seminar. One of them has now been written about three times and heard from never. Until that changes, these articles are not journalism about a controversy. They are participants in it.

This week, five groups, including the American Muslim Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council and Muslims Israel Dialogue, launched the Unbreakable Bond Coalition, a campaign to counter BDS by collecting one dollar apiece from 500,000 supporters and investing the funds in Israel bonds. The proceeds will flow to coexistence organizations like Sharaka and Debate for Peace, an Arab-Jewish student group. They chose to launch on the 21st anniversary of BDS itself. That’s not just a campaign. That’s a thesis statement.

Their logic is disarmingly simple: Israelis and Palestinians are deeply connected economically, and broad boycotts hurt the very people they claim to champion. They’re right. When a prominent Brooklyn food co-op passed a BDS resolution this spring, four of the eight companies it boycotted were run by Arab Israelis or sold products from Arab-owned factories. Read that again. A movement claiming to fight for Palestinians ended up punishing Palestinian and Arab livelihoods. Sheikh Musa Drammeh, one of the coalition’s leaders, called boycotting Israel anti-Palestinian for exactly this reason.

We are constantly told about the “dark forces that seek to divide us.” Fair enough. Let’s name them. The dark forces are the ones trafficking in blood libel and centuries-old tropes about Jews and money, dressed up in the language of justice. The dark forces are the ones who tell artists that a gallery, a residency, a stage must first be cleansed of Jewish or Israeli presence before art can happen there. Division is not a side effect of that project. It is the project.

And here is a Muslim-led coalition in New York saying: no. We will build economic bridges because bridges lead to dialogue, dialogue leads to understanding, and understanding leads to peace. They understood something the art world, of all places, should have understood first: exclusion is a portable weapon. Once you normalize banishing one group from cultural and economic life, you have built the machinery for banishing any group. The precedent doesn’t check your politics before it comes for you.

I’ve spent 25 years in this industry. I know what it looks like when institutions find their courage, and I know what it looks like when they outsource their conscience to the loudest voice in the room. The art world has spent nearly three years doing the latter, quietly dropping Jewish and Israeli artists from rosters, panels, and exhibitions while the trade press looks away.

This is exactly why I founded Bridgewell Arts. Not to build a fortress, but to build bridges: between Jewish and Israeli creative communities and the global art world, in every direction, with everyone willing to walk across. The Unbreakable Bond Coalition proves that this model works, that people of goodwill across faiths and communities are hungry for connection over condemnation. I look forward to launching activations that showcase side by side brilliant artists -- Jewish and Muslim, Israelis and Palestinians -- who understand that the truest measure of an artist’s practice is not who they exclude but what they dare to build together.

So consider this an invitation. If Muslim community leaders in New York can stand up and declare that boycotts of Jews and Israelis are a dead end, then curators, dealers, and museum directors can too. Imagine a coalition of galleries committing to show Israeli and Palestinian artists side by side. Imagine institutions funding dialogue instead of policing identity. Imagine an art world that treats bridge-building as the radical act it actually is.

They just showed us the blueprint. All we have to do is pick it up.

In the early morning hours of December 6, 2023, a Jewish-owned business on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was vandalized. Two large posters were affixed to the street-facing windows of the Lévy Gorvy Dayan gallery. They were printed in a style that mimicked the gallery’s own signage. In large letters, one announced, “We Were Wrong.” The other displayed a four-paragraph text with the heading, “We Were Wrong: An Apology for the Open Letter of October 20.” It was attributed to the gallery’s owners. Curiously, the incident was reported only by the insular art-world press. Hyperallergic ran a story headlined, “Faux Apology Lampoons Pro-Israel Art Dealers,” calling it “a guerilla action by an unknown group.” Hyperallergic placed the word “vandalized” in quotation marks, as did ARTnews, whose mocking headline announced, “New York Gallery Whose Founders Denounced Artforum Gaza Letter Is ‘Vandalized’ with Apology Message.” Both outlets reported—as if by way of explanation—that David Velasco, the senior editor of Artforum, had been fired for publishing the “Open Letter from the Art Community to Cultural Organizations” to which Dayan, Gorvy, and Lévy had dared to respond.

Posted on October 19, the anonymous letter published (and presumably written) by Velasco garnered 8,000 signatures. Appearing on Artforum’s website just twelve days after the massacre and kidnappings of October 7—of which it made no mention—and a week before Israel began its military operations in Gaza, the letter accused Israel of “escalating genocide” and cited its “occupation” as “the root cause of violence.” (Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, forcibly removing thousands of its own citizens. But facts are beside the point. Bigotry thrives on ignorance.) At a time of inconceivable pain for Israelis, and imminent peril for Israelis and Palestinians alike, the open letter displayed a tragicomic combination of grandiosity and cluelessness, insisting that cultural organizations “show solidarity with cultural workers and call on our governments to demand an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered.”

This supposedly representative letter did not, in fact, speak for all members of the art community, as it brashly claimed to do. Quite the opposite, it was for some of us a bone-chilling response to a horror whose gruesome contours were still being drawn. Not only did it deny the reality of our experience (not to speak of its ghastly erasure of the October 7 victims); it also placed us firmly and unequivocally outside the tent, branding us as outsiders to the art community we had formerly claimed. The gallery partners Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, and Amalia Dayan immediately and courageously penned a short response “condemn[ing] the open letter for its one-sided view” and “denounc[ing] all forms of violence.” The faux apology pasted on the window of their gallery six weeks later by a group of mock-heroic “guerilla” fighters read in part, “Further conversations and consideration—as well as the horrifying death toll in Gaza and the ongoing censorship of pro-Palestinian voices—have convinced us that our letter on October 20^th expressing our ‘distress’ at artists and art workers calling for an end to Zionist crimes against the Palestinian people was deeply, tragically misguided.” The self-congratulatory conclusion dripped with condescension: “We apologize deeply for our previous letter which has contributed to the chilling, censorial environment around pro-Palestinian voices. We are learning and welcome the signees of our original letter to learn with us as we raise our voices for clear and unambiguous justice.”

Neither Hyperallergic nor ARTnews noted the rank hypocrisy of a statement that purported to disclaim censorship while performing it. The perpetrators coopted the voices of the gallerists to punish them, staging their silencing at their place of work. The image of this erasure—which was also a public flogging and a warning—recalled to me the marking of Jewish-owned businesses in Germany during the “Jewish boycott” of April 1, 1933, not to speak of the destruction of Jewish storefronts during Kristallnacht. I have to admit, though, that the form of the vandalism at Lévy Gorvy Dayan was novel, heralding an advance in the field of censorship. Using strategies of appropriation—think Barbara Kruger’s trenchant posters, and parafiction—consider the Yes Men, who make fictional pronouncements in the guise of corporate executives, these vandals innovated cutting-edge, art-world-approved intimidation tactics.

Less au courant was the vandalization a month later of the Jewish-owned Pace Gallery, which was targeted for the crime of representing the Israeli artist Michal Rovner. As reported by the Times of Israel, the Chelsea building was splashed with red paint and tagged with phrases like “Intifada” and “Free Palestine.” It was plastered with posters, including one that read, “We charge Pace Gallery and Zionist Michal Rovner with: genocide epistemicide plundering looting incitement dehumanization historical revisionism.” Once again, the faceless vandals performed a canny inversion, accusing their targets of the very things they themselves had done. Is vandalism not an incitement? Is it not dehumanizing to be demonized and accused of crimes one has not committed? The charge of epistemicide—the destruction of systems of knowledge—is particularly rich coming from so-called pro-Palestinian activists who recklessly distort the historical record while simultaneously shouting down and disappearing Jewish voices from the discursive field. I was in the audience at the Jewish Museum in February 2024 when protesters twice disrupted a conversation between the museum’s director and the Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky.

Trolling, blacklisting, boycotting, bullying, shaming, silencing, demonization, isolation, inversion, and gaslighting are all part of the antizionist toolkit. It has been said before, but it bears repeating: No other minority group would be asked to accept the erasure or cooption of their voice, history, identity, and lived experience as the cost of doing business. Yet this is the reality today for many in the art sector and beyond. I deliberated about putting my name to this essay. Can I afford the risk? Honestly, no. But I am a member of the Jewish people and a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. Collectively, we can’t afford not to call out the hate movement in our midst.

Rachel Federman, PhD, is a writer and curator. She has curated exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Morgan Library & Museum, and the Princeton University Art Museum. Her writing covers artists such as Bruce Conner, Betye Saar, Rick Barton, Paul McCarthy, Maurice Sendak, Joan Semmel, and many more. She is currently completing a definitive biography of the legendary American art dealer and artist Betty Parsons.

These are not Israeli government buildings. They are publicly funded cultural institutions dedicated to centuries of Jewish life in Europe. They have no position on Gaza. They have no connection to the Israeli Defense Forces. They are museums. And they are being treated as legitimate targets because, in the logic of the current moment, being Jewish is close enough to being Israeli, and being Israeli is close enough to deserving whatever comes next.

This did not come from nowhere. It was organized.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as BDS, was launched in 2005 by Omar Barghouti and a coalition of Palestinian civil society groups through what became known as the PACBI, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. Its stated goal is to pressure Israel through economic and cultural isolation until it meets a set of demands that, taken together, would effectively end Israel as a Jewish state. BDS is explicit about this. Barghouti himself has said he opposes a two-state solution and that Jewish Israelis do not constitute a people entitled to self-determination. This is not a peace movement. It is an elimination strategy dressed in the language of civil rights.

Over the past two decades, BDS has made significant inroads in academic and cultural institutions across the Western world. It has been adopted, formally or informally, by student unions, university departments, art organizations, and cultural publications. In the United Kingdom, the Boycott Divest Zabludowicz campaign spent more than a decade targeting one of London’s most generous arts philanthropists, ultimately helping to drive the Zabludowicz family out of the art world entirely, not because of anything they did, but because of who they are and what they support. In the United States, the movement found its most high-profile cultural moment in October 2023, when an open letter circulated through Artforum and gathered nearly 8,000 signatures from art world professionals calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

The letter was published twelve days after October 7th. Israel had not yet launched its ground offensive. In some cases, it had not yet finished identifying the dead. The letter did not mention Hamas. It did not name a single hostage. It did not describe what had happened on October 7th as an atrocity, a massacre, or an act of terrorism. It described Israel’s response, which had barely begun, as requiring immediate cessation. Eight thousand people in the art world signed a document that treated the murder, rape, and kidnapping of 1,200 people as an acceptable predicate for a political statement about Israeli military conduct. That letter remains one of the most morally grotesque documents the contemporary art world has produced, and the people who signed it have faced essentially no professional consequences.

What they have produced, collectively, is an environment in which Jewish museums across Europe are struggling to stay open.

The Times piece reveals something the art world would prefer not to examine too closely. The museum directors interviewed describe a “frustrating misconception” that their institutions are somehow associated with Israel. They explain patiently that they are locally funded, that they focus on European Jewish history, that they have no political position. They are right about all of that. And it does not matter. Because the logic of BDS does not distinguish between Jewish institutions and Israeli ones. That distinction was never part of the design.

A vote for BDS is not a vote for peace in the Middle East. It is a vote for the proposition that Jewish presence, Jewish funding, Jewish culture, and Jewish institutions are acceptable objects of collective punishment. That is not solidarity with Palestinians. That is antisemitism with a cause attached.

So what do we do about it?

First, schools should partner formally with Jewish museums. Not as a gesture, but as curriculum. Every student who learns European history should also learn Jewish history as part of it, and Jewish museums are among the most sophisticated institutions in the world for exactly this purpose. When a teenager in Copenhagen sees his peer group verbally attack a museum employee for wearing a logo, that teenager has failed somewhere in his education. Partnerships between schools and Jewish museums, with state funding to support them, are a direct intervention against that failure.

Second, subsidized and free admission should be standard. The Jewish Museum Amsterdam lost nearly 40,000 visitors between 2023 and 2025. Part of that is intimidation. Part of it is social pressure. But part of it is also that the people most likely to benefit from visiting, young people with no existing relationship to Jewish history or culture, face a ticket price as a barrier. Sponsors, foundations, and governments should fully underwrite admission costs at Jewish museums as a public good. A museum that no one visits is a story that no one hears.

Third, non-Jewish museums should stop treating Jewish institutions as separate from the broader cultural ecosystem. Joint exhibitions, shared programming, and state-subsidized collaborative initiatives between Jewish and non-Jewish museums would signal something the current climate has made it dangerously easy to forget: that Jewish cultural life is part of the common inheritance of every society that hosts it, not a special-interest annex to be visited only by people who already care. When the Tate and the Jewish Museum London co-present a program, when the Pompidou and the Museum of Art and History of Judaism share a series, it becomes harder to treat Jewish institutions as partisan actors and easier to see them as what they are: repositories of history that belongs to everyone.

None of this is complicated. All of it requires the will to prioritize it.

Here is what I want to say to the art world directly, and to the people within it who have spent the past two and a half years signing letters, joining boycotts, pressuring colleagues, and treating the support of Jewish cultural institutions as a political liability.

A society that normalizes the boycotting and silencing of Jewish voices is not building toward peace. It is rehearsing something. History has shown us what comes after the rehearsal. The Jewish Museum of Belgium knows it firsthand. In 2014, a gunman walked into that building and killed four people. Now, eleven years later, the same museum is emerging from renovation to find its facade covered in graffiti while its reopening stalls and its community waits.

The museum’s director, Barbara Cuglietta, said she is not going to be shut down. She is not going to be canceled. She plans to reopen in spring 2027 and get back to the work of supporting Jewish life in Belgium.

The least the art world can do is show up when she does.

The exhibition is called “Palestine Uprooted: Nakba Past and Present.” Let us start with the name.

Nakba is the Arabic word for “catastrophe.” The exhibition uses this term to describe the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Think about what that means. Think about what it requires an institution to accept before it has even hung a single photograph on the wall. The existence of Israel is the catastrophe. That is the premise. That is baked into the title. I would like to know how many other countries on earth have had their founding described as a catastrophe by a federally funded museum in a Western democracy, with the full endorsement of its curatorial apparatus, and with ARTnews treating the whole thing as a courageous act of storytelling.

Just one, as it happens.

The exhibition centers on the displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. That displacement is real, documented, and worth examining. What is not in the exhibition, according to every account of its contents, is any meaningful contextualization of the 3,000-year indigenous Jewish presence in that same land. The argument that Israel represents a settler-colonial imposition depends entirely on the erasure of that history. Without it, the framing holds. With it, the framing collapses. A human rights institution that omits that context is not curating history. It is curating a verdict.

There is more that is absent. The exhibition explores displacement in the region while making no mention of the 70,000 Israelis who were themselves displaced from their homes by Hezbollah rocket fire in the north. It builds a narrative of Palestinian suffering while offering, by its own curatorial logic, no room for the 1,200 people massacred on October 7th, the 250 taken hostage into Gaza, or the families who are still waiting. Canada’s Heritage Minister Marc Miller said publicly that he found it “regrettable” that the curators did not identify Hamas as a terrorist organization and did not mention the Jews killed on October 7th. The museum’s sole Jewish trustee, Mark L. Berlin, resigned from the board and published an op-ed calling the exhibition “intellectually dishonest” and “inevitably one-sided.” An Israeli legal organization has threatened litigation over the use of federal funds to, in their framing, fuel hostility against the Jewish community.

ARTnews covered all of this. And then, with perfect timing, reached for the oldest trick in the art press playbook: the tokenized Jewish endorsement.

Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the Jewish Faculty Network, and the United Jewish People’s Order Canada published an open letter praising the museum’s “commitment to this exhibition.” ARTnews cited this prominently. What it did not do is tell you what these organizations are. Independent Jewish Voices Canada is a fringe anti-Zionist group whose primary purpose is to provide Jewish cover for anti-Israel positions. It does not represent Canadian Jewry. It represents itself. Using its endorsement to counter the resignation of the museum’s actual Jewish trustee is not balance. It is the appearance of balance in service of a predetermined conclusion.

This is a pattern. Whenever ARTnews covers Jewish concerns about antisemitism in the art world, the piece finds a way to locate a Jewish voice that dismisses those concerns, and then uses that voice to close the argument. It is a technique, not journalism.

Let us also ask the question the article never asks: who funded this exhibition? The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is a federal institution. Canadian taxpayers are underwriting this. But exhibitions of this scope, with advisory networks of scholars and video testimonials and the full apparatus of contemporary curatorial production, do not materialize from thin air. Who are the donors? Who are the advisors? Who built the network? The article is not curious about any of this.

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently acknowledged that Canada has failed to protect its Jewish community. That is a significant admission from the leader of a G7 country. In that same political moment, a federally funded museum opens an exhibition whose organizing premise is that the State of Israel is a catastrophe, that Jewish presence in the region is colonial, and that the displacement of Palestinians is the defining human rights issue of the age with no corresponding acknowledgment of Jewish displacement, Jewish indigeneity, or Jewish victimhood in the same conflict.

The Canadian government funds this. ARTnews celebrates it. And Canadian Jews are asked to feel represented by Independent Jewish Voices Canada.

Museum CEO Isha Khan said the institution is “asking: How do we find our shared humanity through our storytelling?” That is a beautiful sentence. It is also completely disconnected from an exhibition whose title describes a country’s existence as a catastrophe and whose content was incomplete enough that a Jewish trustee resigned rather than put his name to it.

This is not shared humanity. This is one side of a war, given federal money, curatorial legitimacy, and a human rights museum’s imprimatur.

Call it what it is.

For three decades, this couple built one of the most consequential private collections of contemporary art in Europe. They acquired 8,000 works by roughly 600 artists, many of them unknown at the time of purchase. They opened a nonprofit exhibition space in a former Methodist church in Camden and ran it for years at their own expense, staging ambitious shows, hosting residencies, and giving platforms to artists who had none. In its final year, the space drew nearly 14,000 visitors across 20 exhibitions and events. They funded a residency program on a remote Finnish island. They ran programming out of Times Square. They were, by any honest accounting, among the most generous and visionary patrons the contemporary art world had produced in a generation.

Now 100 works from their collection are going to Christie’s. And the headline artnet chose for this moment? “Christie’s Zabludowicz Sale Raises Questions.”

Raises questions. About what, exactly? What questions does a Jewish couple selling art at Christie’s raise that the estate of any other collector would not?

The article itself eventually gets to the point, after enough throat-clearing. People close to the family say the Zabludowiczes became “disheartened.” That they felt “abused by these people that they had supported.” That they faced “public bullying and even death threats simply because they were Jewish.” Dealer Joel Mesler, who sold them several of the works now going to auction, put it plainly: “We are getting out. Goodbye.”

The art world drove them out. And then wrote a headline suggesting there is something suspicious about their exit.

Let us be precise about what happened. In 2014, a group calling itself Boycott Divest Zabludowicz surfaced. Its manifesto, which remains online, refers to the couple’s philanthropic activities as “artwash” and calls their collection “an advertisement for apartheid.” It demands that cultural workers “refuse to work with, visit, or otherwise support” the Zabludowicz Art Trust. It calls on artists to “scab” if they continue to participate in programming the couple funded. It grew to include the Goldsmiths Student Union, Artists’ Union England, Arts Catalyst, Mute Magazine, the PCS Tate United Branch, and hundreds of individual signatories, including prominent artists and academics. The group is, and has always been, anonymous in its leadership. No names. No faces. No accountability.

This is not political criticism. This is a coordinated, decade-long campaign to destroy the philanthropic reputation of two Jewish people because of their ethnicity and family background, dressed up in the language of solidarity.

Poju Zabludowicz’s father survived the Holocaust and built a business in arms manufacturing. Poju himself transitioned the family holdings to real estate and technology investments, and has been a supporter of BICOM, a pro-Israel lobbying group in the United Kingdom. These are the stated grounds for treating his wife’s nonprofit arts institution as a vehicle for “genocide.” Not his own policies. Not any specific harm. His ethnicity. His origins. His support for the existence of a Jewish state.

When Martin Scorsese funds a film school, no one campaigns for emerging directors to refuse his money because of Hollywood’s labor practices. When a petrochemical fortune underwrites a contemporary art museum, the institution is celebrated. When hedge fund money builds a new wing at a major museum, the donor gets a gala dinner and a name on the wall. In each of those cases, the art world accepts the money, praises the generosity, and moves on.

But when a Jewish couple from London, the son of a Holocaust survivor, dares to also support a pro-Israel lobbying group, the same art world organizes a boycott, pressures artists to withdraw their work, and publishes anonymous manifestos calling their philanthropy a crime against humanity.

The double standard is not subtle. It is not even trying to be subtle anymore.

And the institutions that signed on to this boycott deserve to be named. The Goldsmiths, University of London Student Union, a body of an art school that benefits from philanthropic support, joined a campaign to destroy the philanthropic reputation of collectors who had spent decades building up the careers of artists exactly like its students. Arts Catalyst, a publicly funded arts organization in the United Kingdom, signed on to a campaign targeting a private couple for their Jewish identity and political beliefs. The PCS Tate United Branch, the union representing workers at one of the world’s most important public art institutions, lent its name to a boycott whose manifesto describes Jewish philanthropy as “weaponised” and demands that artists “refuse to scab.”

These are not brave political stands. They are the institutional laundering of antisemitism. They are precisely the kind of behavior that should disqualify an organization from public funding, not elevate it to moral authority.

The art world spent the last decade talking constantly about the ethics of patronage. Who funds the work? Where does the money come from? What are the obligations of institutions to vet their donors? These are legitimate questions when applied consistently. They are a harassment campaign when applied exclusively to Jewish collectors.

Anita Zabludowicz called the space in Camden a place “to support the ecosystem.” Her daughter Tiffany described the collection as being “driven by a belief in the future.” These are not the words of people engaged in artwash. They are the words of people who loved art, loved artists, and gave enormously to both, for decades, only to be told that their Jewishness made them unacceptable.

The art world let this happen. In many cases, it cheered.

And now, with 100 works going to Christie’s and a London exhibition space already closed, people are writing about what “questions” the sale “raises.”

Here is the only question worth asking: How many more Jewish collectors, board members, and philanthropists have to be hounded out before the art world admits what it has become?

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