The City University of New York (CUNY) is to honor playwright Tony Kushner, the worst kind of anti-Israel unJew!
The City University of New York (CUNY) was going to give playwright Tony Kushner an honorary degree but its Board of Trustees denied the motion, which sparked an uproar in the media.
The outspoken Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, is a longtime Israel’s supporter and a member of CUNY’s board of trustees. He convinced four of his colleagues that honoring Kushner, who believes Israel’s founding was a mistake and resulted from ethnic cleansing would be inappropriate. Kushner needed nine (9) votes out of twelve (12) to receive the degree. He got only seven (7).
But then, responding to the Leftist, anti-Israel public pressure, CUNY’s board’s executive committee seven-member, which does not include Wiesenfeld, overturned the decision and voted to grant Kushner the honorary degree after all.
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who grew up in the Bronx, is a principal at Bernstein Global Wealth Management, an activist for Israel who heads the National Yiddish Theatre for the revival of Yiddish theater, and worked for the FBI, as well as, for years, in the service of New York politicos Ed Koch, Alfonse D’Amato and George Pataki. He is not the kind of a man one dismisses.
To the chagrin of many, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld stood firm and spoke. He stated that Tony Kushner is disingenuous, dissembling, an extremist, and if his libelous statements against Israel were made by anyone outside the Jewish community, that person would be labeled an anti-Semite.
He went on to state that when you hold the State of Israel, a nation in a struggle for its survival from its inception and a constant target for the misogynist, racist, anti-western, dictatorial regimes that surround it, to a standard you would not hold any other nation under normal circumstances, let alone under such exigencies, and when you spew libel against the USA sole regional democratically for “crimes” concocted by its delegitimizes, you’re an anti-Semite.
I say, in CUNY and other learning institutes, the right to free speech depends on who you speak freely about.
It is the Jewish Nation’s tragedy; we must all admit that there are many Tony Kushners among us, in Israel and the Diaspora. And these unJews are equally the enemy of Israel and Jews as the Nazis were, as the Arabs are and as the anti-Semite-anti-Israel delegitimizes are.
Corrective measures must be made.