Yes, We Need to Track Antisemitism in the Arts

How much of this is going on? How bad is it? Those are always the questions I urgently want answered—and I can’t be the only one—when I hear a story about the rising hostility toward Jews in cultural spaces. Antisemitism in higher education, complaints by Jewish authors that publishers are giving them the cold shoulder, comics afraid of hecklers and, ticking away in the background, the all-encompassing fear of losing access to the mainstream: It’s nearly impossible to quantify these worries, or separate them out from sometimes tendentious reporting.

Drilling down on individual examples doesn’t always help. In their much-discussed account of the publishing industry, “A Silent Moratorium,” PEN America quotes a literary agent who reps Israeli books, who’s been deluged by authors seeking representation after their own agents backed away, skeptical of their chances of selling Jewish content. Jewish Currents asks the same agent if she’s taken any of these supplicants on; she says no, but she might have “if anything had come in that I thought was really good.” I’m annoyed at my own skepticism, but I can’t help feeling like one of the !ve blind men touching the elephant, wondering if I’ve got hold of a leg or a whisker and whether I’m exhibiting hysteria or heartlessness.

This hunger for hard data helps explain the popularity of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) “campus antisemitism report cards,” which assigned grades to universities after October 7 and famously gave Harvard, Princeton and a handful of other prominent campuses flat F’s. Despite a drumbeat of complaints that they oversimplified what was happening at schools, the ADL counts the report cards as a big success, and it has now followed them up with a new package dubbed “State of the Arts,” focusing on antisemitism in publishing (“Missing Chapter”), in performance venues (“Dark Stage”) and in art museums (“Behind the Frame”).

Unlike the reports on performance spaces and publishing, which still resist measurement, the museum study comes across as an infusion of welcome rigor—only to prove the most chimerical and frustrating of all. The ADL surveyed 40 major museums, awarding them ratings of Gold Standard, Good Showing, Work in Progress, Not Inclusive or—most ominously—Critically Deficient. Ten of the 40 museums are given this failing mark, complete with an alarming bright-red vase icon. The failures include such standout institutions as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the de Young and the Broad in San Francisco, the Institutes of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. This is not just a red vase; it’s a flashing red light.

Look a little closer, though, and the impression wobbles. The calculus being applied is not of harassments, or cancellations, or graffiti. Rather, the report scores museums on broader policy matters: Jewish and Israeli representation in the collections, ongoing educational partnerships with the Jewish community, dedicated channels for complaints about bias. Does the museum train personnel on harassment and discrimination? Does it observe Jewish American Heritage Month? Sound policy prescriptions, maybe, but the lack of them is not what most people think of as an antisemitism crisis.

“We know we are in an emergency, based on things people have told us off the record,” says Luda Isakharov, the project’s lead researcher and associate director of the ADL’s Ratings and Assessments Institute. “There’s immense pressure on museums—Jewish members forced off boards, curators threatened with career damage if they show Israeli artists.”

Grading the museums on policy, she says, is a forward-looking strategy: “We’re not calling museums antisemitic; we’re creating the space and applying the pressure for them to get better. What they have on the walls now is no guarantee of the future.”

A separate report from the ADL’s Center on Extremism covers the present, describing “incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, threats, offensive literature distribution and protest directed at museums and their leaders, both in person and online.” This report does have some hard numbers. From 2020 to 2023, it tells us, there were 47 such incidents; in the three years after October 7, 2023, there were 120.

So maybe that’s the emergency? Or is the real problem that more museums don’t observe Jewish American Heritage Month? Returning to the report cards, I clicked around the “critically deficient” institutions, looking to be shocked, or at least concerned. L.A.’s famous MOCA, for instance, lacks partnerships with Jewish organizations, and while the museum has significant holdings in Jewish art, it showed no Israeli art or artists during the “scoring window.” (For full marks, Isakharov suggests a significant Israeli exhibit at least once a decade.) The ADL approves of MOCA’s policy prohibiting all demonstrations and leafleting; however, there is no “explicit policy prohibiting antisemitism” and “no obvious public pathway specifically for bias or discrimination complaints.”

One can approve of all these prescriptions (or not) and still come away perplexed. “This is a way to move forward,” Isakharov says, “to make sure we are seen.” Maybe so. Or maybe it’s what we see in museums that’s the most important thing, and not the steps they’ve taken to see us?

Amy E. Schwartz is Moment’s opinion & books editor.