Dershowitz Bashes Cynthia Nixon For Backing Israelis Who Boycott Settlements
Cynthia Nixon, the actress who announced her campaign for New York governor on Monday, is already facing attacks from pro-Israel activists over her support for a petition backing Israeli artists who were refusing to perform in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
Lawyer and Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz launched a preemptive strike against Nixon on Friday, claiming that she had “collaborated with Israel haters.”
“Do not support her bigotry,” Dershowitz wrote.
Yet according to a 2010 report in the Forward on the petition Nixon signed, Nixon was in the company of a large number of prominent Jewish and Israeli actors. Other signatories of the petition included Theodore Bikel, Stephen Sondheim, and Mandy Patinkin. Israeli artists who signed a parallel petition refusing to perform in Ariel included many of the country’s most prominent writers, including A. B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz, and David Grossman, according to a contemporary article in Ynet.
Though Nixon is not Jewish, both of her children are. In 2013 she hosted an event for T’ruah, a leftist rabbinic human rights organization.
Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO