Theater J incident illustrates larger dialogue on Israel at Jewish institutions

Andy Shallal, an Iraqi-born Muslim, was deeply proud of the open conversation channel he had maintained with Ari Roth, longtime artistic director of Theater J, a highly regarded branch of the D.C. Jewish Community Center. Together with another local theater lover, Mimi Conway, they’d created the Peace Cafe, an after-play forum, complete with plates of hummus and pita bread supplied by Shallal’s popular Busboys and Poets dining spots, that had become a mainstay of Theater J’s programming.

The makeshift cafe — established 10 years ago, during the run of a politically charged solo play about the Mideast by David Hare — has been important as an outlet for debate over issues raised in Theater J’s sometimes provocative repertory, especially for an outsider such as Shallal. “It was an emotional experience for me, to walk into a Jewish community center, to grow up as a Muslim, thinking of Israelis as really scary people,” he says. “I walked through that door, and it was a very beautiful experience.”

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Then, suddenly, a few months ago, a curtain was drawn. The community center’s then-chief executive officer, Arna Meyer Mickelson, told Shallal that the Peace Cafe could no longer use the facilities of the center, at 16th and Q streets NW. “She said, ‘We appreciate what you’ve done, but we can’t have Peace Cafes at Theater J anymore,’ ” Shallal recalls. “I think she was waiting for the right moment to cut the strings.”

Mickelson says that’s not completely true, that she was merely seeking to disassociate the DCJCC from aspects of the Peace Cafe “that we had no control over” and to re-brand the program. In any event, the Peace Cafe continues to function, on Shallal-run turf. Whatever the nature of the disagreement, the incident was further evidence of the corrosive turn that the political and artistic dialogues over matters related to Israel have taken of late in this country, particularly at, but not limited to, Jewish institutions.

The vitriol has been boiling ever more heatedly into public view as opinions have hardened over Israel’s settlement policies in the West Bank. Defenders of Israel’s Likud government are taking their attack to artists whom they consider hostile, especially those they think are sympathetic to or support the boycott, divestments and sanctions campaign, a six-year-old effort to force political change through economic constraints on Israel.

Artists and devisers of programming counter that a concerted move is afoot here to smother any type of critical examination of the Jewish state.

Earlier this year, for example, the Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner was nearly barred from receiving an honorary degree from New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice after one college trustee objected to what he viewed as Kushner’s vehement opposition to Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

In San Francisco, after the presentation by a Jewish group of a documentary about Rachel Corrie — an American pro-Palestinian activist run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza — a Bay Area organization, the Jewish Community Federation, imposed a ban on funding for any group espousing support for a political boycott of Israeli business interests.