The Corrie Affair
When Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer two years ago, I shrugged. It was awful, but Corrie was a troublemaker. I don't like troublemakers. Don't try telling me that troublemaking is effective. Patriots on the right can wail that it was lack of support at home that cost us the Vietnam War, but this is nonsense. The war ended when it became clear that it could never be won. Now we're on a similar trajectory in Iraq, only, this time, opponents of the war are careful to honor soldiers, not revile them. To people in power, demonstrators are unarmed terrorists - and all the more contemptible for that.
I say this knowing that the struggle for equal civil rights for all Americans required a lot of troublemaking. Trying to figure out how to respect people who fight for a good cause with my bone-deep, profoundly bourgeois dislike of disorder keeps me busy.
I make an exception, very characteristic, for troublemakers who are very amusing, but I don't believe that there was anything amusing about the idealistic twenty-three year-old Washingtonian who suffered such a horrific death. Whether I'd change my mind about Rachel Corrie is pretty much a matter of how I felt about My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Like most people, I didn't even know that a production had been slotted, if not scheduled, until the day its cancellation was announced. It was dreadfully discomfiting news, because it seemed that unnamed "Jewish interests" were pushing for censorship. Perhaps the play ought to have opened somewhere else in the United States. When I was growing up, they used to say that there were more Jews in the Metropolitan Area than there were in Israel. Is that still true? I somehow think not. But anti-Semitic folks can expect to be made very uncomfortable in the Big Apple.
And, as Bernard-Henri Lévy asserted at the end of January, anti-Semitism = anti-Zionism. By a quick equation, Rachel Corrie = terrorist supporter. In "Why These Tickets Are Too Hot For New York," Philip Weiss's clear-eyed account of the very much ongoing Corrie affair, in the current (April 3) edition of The Nation, playwright Tony Kushner explains his own reluctance to step forward in to denounce the New York Theatre Workshop's self-censorship, attributing it to fatigue. In part, he has just been through a similar brouhaha about Munich, which he co-wrote. But the longer perspective is daunting.
There is a very, very highly organized attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel's policies, and it's a very unpleasant experience to be in the cross hairs. These aren't hayseed from Kansas screaming about gays burning in hell; they're newspaper columnists who are taken seriously. ... [They leave challengers] overwhelmed and in despair - you feel like you should just say nothing.
When Tony Kushner is too worn out by wingnuts to speak out, I conclude that my canary is about to give up the ghost, and that I'm in trouble.
Regardless of what I feel about Rachel Corrie, a play that memorializes her words - drawn from her diaries, the show professes her to be its playwright - should be mounted without hindrance. At a minimum, the NYTW's director, James Nicola, owes us a list of the names that brought pressure upon him not to open My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
Readers of Mr Weiss's story will discover that there is a constellation of New York theatre blogs. Oui bien sûr! The impatient can start reading Parabasis, Superfluities, and Playgoer right now.
