Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum canceled an exhibit about antisemitism and hate after employees walked out to protest Israel.
Well, it is hard to promote an exhibit about hate when you hate people:
In May, over 2 dozen employees at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle walked off the job following the opening of the museum’s “Confronting Hate Together,” about racism faced by the Asian, black, and Jewish communities. The boycott focused on a panel in the exhibit which showed a local synagogue after it had been vandalized by anti-Israel activists. The panel read, “Today, antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism.” Employees objected to the panel and walked off the job, shuttering the museum for weeks.According to a statement from the Washington State Jewish Historical Society (WSJHS), “It is with great disappointment, pain, and sadness we share that, due to circumstances out of our control, the Confronting Hate Together (CHT) Exhibit will not be presented jointly to the community in a public venue by the Black Heritage Society (BHS), Washington State Jewish Historical Society (WSJHS) and the Wing Luke Museum (WLM).”
The museum tried to justify shutting it down but couldn’t they get volunteers? The statement alone shows the importance of having the exhibit:
Throughout this process, the WSJHS has been open and responsive to feedback from partners, sensitive to the international climate and challenges, and we have leaned into honesty and transparency. We worked tirelessly for months to prepare for the CHT exhibit. Furthermore, since the initial launch on May 21st, we made adjustments and modifications to help people better understand the exhibit by clarifying language regarding the exhibition’s intent to focus on confronting hate locally by three historically redlined communities.Immense harm has been caused to the Jewish community by not being able to show the exhibit. The anti-Jewish ideas and attitudes that fueled the WLM employee walkout (whether conscious or not) have yet to be adequately acknowledged. And, at the same time, the greater Seattle community will be deprived of an important cross-cultural educational opportunity.Antisemitism today is at its highest levels in over 40 years, and more allyship is needed to help meet the moment. We need partners who are stakeholders in the safety and well-being of the Jewish people and who stand with us even when it gets hard. Ironically, in an exhibit that was supposed to be about coming together to confront hate, hate has won. And, our community feels more alone as a result.
Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat equated the cancelation to book banning: “So we basically just book-banned a cultural exhibit. It also doesn’t seem like anyone’s really objecting to it.”
Even Democratic State Senato Jesse Salmon criticized the museum: “It is becoming increasingly politically challenging in this area to express ideas outside of a narrow bandwidth without unreasonable blowback.”
The employees protested one panel in the exhibit:
The boycott focused on a panel in the exhibit which showed the Herzl Ner Tamid Synagogue on Mercer Island after it had been vandalized by anti-Israel activists which read, “Today, antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism.” The panel stated that the phrase that was spray painted on the synagogue, “Stop the killing,” was in spirit to the idea that “the Jews of Mercer Island could control the actions of the Israeli government.”The panel continued, “On university campuses, pro-Palestinian groups have voiced support for Hamas (which is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government) and a Palestinian state stretching ‘from the river to the sea,’ a phrase defined by the erasure of Israel.”
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