Hyperantisemitic

Hyperallergic has spent two weeks using the largest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust as an opportunity to lament the Palestinian plight. If only they were unique in the art world.

In 2020 I distressed people whom I care about by characterizing Hyperallergic as an antisemitic project. The social price I paid for them notwithstanding, my remarks were prompted by seemingly back-to-back shootings in Pittsburgh (ultraconservative attacker, Jewish targets) and Jersey City (Black Israelite attackers, Jewish targets), followed by nine assaults on New York City Jews recorded over the eight nights of Chankukah in late 2019, as Hyperallergic repetitively scolded the art world for its supposed white supremacy, conservatism, and lack of commitment to social justice.

While regular Hyperallergic contributor John Yau has continued to direct such complaints mostly at Jewish critics, which began with a pathological loathing of Clement Greenberg and seem to have generalized, Hyperallergic’s BDS-supporting editor Hrag Vartanian started to run occasional pieces that treated Jewish subjects with the same regard given to other identity enclaves. This resulted in some positive portrayals of Jewish art, though it was motivated by an identitarian form of progressivism that strikes everyone from reactionaries to economic socialists as reductive, corrosive, and vicious.

Two weeks ago the masks slipped. On October 7 the terrorist organization Hamas attacked multiple civilian targets in Israel, including a music festival. They murdered 1,400 Jews. They raped women next to their murdered friends and then executed them. They marauded several kibbutzim and butchered the inhabitants, including infant children. Hyperallergic moved immediately to minimize Hamas’s culpability for brutalizing Israelis and maximalize Israel’s culpability for the situation of the Palestinians.

Shortly after the attack, an email leaked to StopAntisemitism.org revealed that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had instructed reporters not to report that the Israeli occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, and not to refer to the attackers as terrorists. This has typified anti-Israel coverage of the event throughout the mainstream media as well as at Hyperallergic. Maya Pontone, October 9, “After Hamas Assault, Israeli Strikes Destroy Mosques and Buildings in Gaza: Cultural heritage in the occupied Palestinian territory is caught in the crossfire as the death toll continues to climb.”

Amidst rising death tolls in Gaza and southern Israel after war broke out in the region over the weekend, a number of cultural sites in the occupied Palestinian territory of Gaza Strip have been hit by Israel’s intense airstrikes and artillery fire.

Since Saturday, October 7, when Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an aerial assault against Israel and infiltrated heavily fortified barricades to storm Israeli border settlements and a music festival, Israel’s barrage of retaliatory airstrikes targeting the besieged Gaza Strip has devastated the occupied Palestinian territory where some two million people currently live, among them an estimated 1 million children.

War broke out, as if by itself, affecting a million Palestinian children, as if Israel has none of her own.

It is important to understand what identitarian progressives mean by “occupied Palestinian territory.” Dan McLaughlin, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Moral Rot of Anti-Zionism:

“We are writers and artists who have been to Palestine to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature. . . . We have exercised our privilege as international visitors to move around historic Palestine in ways that most Palestinians are unable to.” To Palestine, you say? The festival, in referring to events “in cities across Palestine,” appears to include events held this year in places such as Haifa, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem. Advertising the first of three Haifa events in 2023, the organizers said on their website that they were “thrilled to bring Saleem Haddad to Palestine for the first time.”

Haifa is the third-largest city in Israel. It sits on the northern Mediterranean coast; relative to Israel’s small size, there are not many places in the country further from the borders of Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. To claim that even Haifa is part of “Palestine” is to assert that everything in Israel is “Palestine.” Coates has signed his name to a document whose very premise is that the State of Israel has no right to exist.

They mean “Israel.”

Back at Hyperallergic, Rhea Nayyar, October 9, “Documenta Criticizes Curatorial Group for Liking Pro-Palestine Posts.”

Documenta Managing Director Andreas Hoffmann described the engagement with the posts as “unbearable and unacceptable” in light of Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians this weekend. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally announced the beginning of a war on Sunday, October 8 and has since declared a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, cutting off electricity, water, and food access to the densely populated territory as the Israel Defense Forces conduct fatal airstrikes. More than 1,000 civilians have died and over 120,000 Palestinians have been displaced.

Hamas carried out an “attack,” deaths unspecified; Israel responded with “fatal airstrikes.”

Rhea Nayyar, October 11, “Disinformation Runs Rampant in Images Related to Israel-Gaza War: Posts pertaining to atrocities have gone viral before fact-checkers could identify them as old footage and even video game clips.”

In the thick of it, Elon Musk’s ultra-lax approach to disinformation and extremism on X, including but not limited to cutting the platform’s trust-and-safety team, creating paid subscriptions for verification status, reinstating banned accounts, and putting the onus on platform users to fact-check through the “community notes” feature long after false claims have gone viral, has enabled rumors to proliferate. False stories about the hospitalization of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US President Joe Biden’s $8 billion aid package to Israel, and an edited video of Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo holding the Palestinian flag were spreading rapidly on the platform last weekend, while a three-year-old video from the Syrian civil war was repurposed to look like it was taken within the last few days.

Nayyar gave no examples of disinformation designed to bolster the Palestinian cause, even though there’s so much of it (and it’s frequently so ridiculous) that it has its own term, Pallywood.

Elaine Velie, October 16, “Guardian Cartoonist Ousted Over Netanyahu Drawing”:

The Guardian says it will not renew the contract of cartoonist Steve Bell after the artist submitted a drawing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holding a scalpel to a Gaza-shaped scar on his stomach. Following an attack by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, Netanyahu ordered a full siege on Gaza, where 2.3 million people are without electricity and clean water, 1 million people were ordered to evacuate their homes, and thousands have been killed in the airstrikes that have destroyed entire neighborhoods, according to the region’s Health Ministry.

By the second week after Hamas’s terrorism, Hyperallergic had become flexible about acknowledging that there had been any Jewish deaths at all.

Elaine Velie, October 16, “Gaza Artist Killed With Her Children in Israeli Airstrike: The 39-year-old artist had two young boys and worked at a public school.”

At least 2,865 Palestinians and 1,400 Israelis have been killed since Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on October 7. These figures are expected to rise as Israel prepares for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip.

Lost in this phrasing that the 1,400 Israelis died all at once in Hamas’s initial assault. Were there any artists among them, or public school teachers? We’ll never learn from Hyperallergic.

Elaine Velie, October 17, “Jewish Groups Call for Gaza Ceasefire in White House Protest: Photographers captured the massive gathering in Washington, DC, as Israel continues its deadly retaliation on Palestinians following Hamas’s attack.” Note that the retaliation was deadly, not the attack.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Washington, DC, yesterday, October 16 to demand that President Joe Biden call for ceasefire in Gaza as Israel continues its deadly retaliation on the region after Hamas’s attack. Monday’s action, organized by If Not Now and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), centered the voices of American Jewish people….

Israel launched a bloody offensive in Gaza last week after Hamas’s attack on October 7. Since then, Israel has declared a siege on Gaza, rendering the region’s 2.3 million residents without electricity, internet, and clean drinking water. Israeli forces have killed at least 2,800 Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, and entire neighborhoods have been razed. This morning, 500 people were reportedly killed when a hospital in Gaza was bombed, according to the Gaza-based authority. Hamas militants have killed over 1,400 Israelis and taken almost 200 hostages, per Israeli authorities.

Again, bloody offensive versus attack. It’s not clear that Israel was responsible for the hospital blast but the Hyperallergic story has not been amended.

Rhea Nayyar, October 19, “Leading Artists and Scholars Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza.”

Over 4,200 Palestinian civilians have been killed and more than 1 million displaced as the continued Israeli airstrikes reduce large sections of the Gaza Strip to rubble and resources like food, water, and medical supplies run scarce. Roughly half of Gaza’s population of over 2 million is made up of young people under the age of 18…. The ongoing siege on Gaza comes after the territory’s governing fundamentalist military movement Hamas launched a multi-faceted attack on Israel on October 7, killing over 1,300 Israeli civilians and taking nearly 200 of them as hostages.

“Multi-faceted,” like a well-rounded education. What fraction of Israel’s population is under the age of 18?

Maya Pontone, October 20, “Art Organizations Around the World Go on Strike in Support of Gaza: Artists, galleries, and museums are closing their doors to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israeli strikes have killed upwards of 4,200 Palestinian people.” The headline doesn’t mention to what those strikes were a response.

Artists and arts organizations around the world are on strike today, October 20, in a show of solidarity with Palestinian people as Israel continues its deadly bombardment of Gaza. Across New York City, Amsterdam, Santiago, Berlin, London, and beyond, dozens of art galleries, museums, and individuals are closing their spaces and studios to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel’s air raids have killed upwards of 4,200 Palestinian people….

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack that killed 1,300 Israeli people and took 199 hostages, Israel’s escalating air raids and deadly siege on Gaza — a move that many human rights experts and organizations have referred to as genocidal — have killed nearly 4,000 Palestinians, with an additional thousand assumed to be buried under rubble from collapsed buildings and infrastructure, according to the UN. Israel’s onslaught of attacks on the strip has further displaced an estimated one million people, half of whom are children.

Hamas’s purpose for existence is the extermination of the Jewish people in the land of Israel and the formation of a single, entirely Arab state. This is what is being referred to in the slogan “from the river to the sea.” In what manner did human rights experts and organizations refer to the October 7 attack?

Finally, yesterday, Hyperallergic published a grotesque display of spurious moral equivalence, Dread Scott’s “Shall I Condemn Myself a Little for You? Behind the endless demands to ‘condemn Hamas’ is a strategy to silence and dehumanize Palestinians and their supporters.” After likening Arab citizenship in Israel to black slavery in America, he continues:

[P]ersistent calls for people to denounce Hamas’s actions serve to dehumanize Palestinians and their supporters. It is presumed that all human beings denounce the murder of all civilians. Questions about condemnation have been asked by people who presume to have the moral authority (and superiority) to evaluate whether a supporter of Palestinians has any right to speak. If a speaker does not first condemn Hamas’s actions, the questioners imply that nothing they say can be considered. In effect, the person being posed this question has to first justify their humanity. If they don’t condemn the brutality, it is implied that they are sub-human, possibly dangerous, and that they and their ideas ought to be suppressed — they are not to be considered part of “civilized society.” In fact, if you write or say anything now that is supportive of Palestinians, it is automatically presumed that you support Hamas’s actions unless you first explicitly denounce them. You might also be labeled “antisemitic.”

He frames this as unfair, but yes, you should be labeled antisemitic, no scare-quotes necessary, if you use the death by terrorism of 1,400 Jews as an excuse to characterize Israel as an “apartheid state,” which it is not, or “genocidal,” which it is not but her enemies are. And if there are “endless” and “persistent calls” for such denunciations—Scott gives no examples—we wonder who is answering them. As Katya Kazakina asked yesterday about the art world’s “deafening silence” regarding the October 7 massacre, Where Are You People?

The art world’s silence speaks volumes. As a Jewish woman, who’s been writing about art, artists, galleries, museums, auction houses, foundations, fairs, lawsuits for more than 17 years, I feel a mix of pain, disappointment, rage, and fear. Why are the Jews being slaughtered and the art world turns a blind eye—and goes on shopping at Frieze London as if nothing happened? Where is the solidarity? Where is the empathy? Where is the moral compass?… It’s been radio silence for the first week, with only a few lonely voices, including the Jewish museums around the country and an art industry newsletter, The Canvas, speaking up in solidarity with Israel after the attack.

This week, as the humanitarian crisis developed in Gaza following Israel’s retaliation, critical voices quickly drowned out those voices of support. Just yesterday, 8,000 artists signed an open letter, declaring their solidarity with the Palestinians, but conspicuously not saying a word about the largest Jewish massacre since the Holocaust. Published in Art Forum magazine, the letter called on institutions to break their silence. The signatories included prominent artists such as Nan Goldin, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger, Kara Walker, and Peter Doig.

All the art institutions who quickly and loudly clamored for justice for George Floyd and decried the Russian attack on Ukraine suddenly found themselves in the grip of unsurety when more than a thousand Jews were slaughtered. Their reticence lasted a couple of weeks until they deemed it safe to declare their support—for the Palestinians.

Several days ago, an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago publicly called Israelis “pigs. Savages. Irredeemable excrement.” She invited my Israeli family to go rot in hell. It’s exactly the kind of story that Hyperallergic would pick up, if this racist malignancy was expressed at any identity but mine.

In his First Diasporist Manifesto, R.B. Kitaj wrote:

Simon Dubnow, the great old theoretician of Diaspora, thought that his dispersed and despised people would find peace in the various places where they settled among enlightened hosts. Then the Germans shot him.

That’s what it feels like to be Jewish in the art world right now.

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