Dear Professor Skloot,
I am responding to your letter of June 6th in which you decry the statement issued by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) about the City University of New York Board of Trustees’ award of an honorary degree to the playwright Tony Kushner. The statement expresses distress about several features of this award, including what we saw as the CUNY Board of Trustee’s peremptory suppression of debate on the matter.
As you have been a supporter of SPME, you letter deserves a considered response. My fellow Board members Profs. Awi Federgruen and Judith Jacobson of Columbia University are separately sending you their reply. While I agree with it, I have decided to send you my own. Please be aware that, though I too am a board member, this is indeed my own response and should not be construed as SPME’s.
You make several assertions of falsehood in the SPME statement, on the grounds that there is no evidence for them. As I will have to provide evidence, I am afraid that that my letter will have to be rather longer than yours.
I must start by conceding that you are right: you know far more about Tony Kushner’s plays and essays than I and, I suppose, the vast majority of SPME members. And I do not anticipate remedying my shortfall anytime soon, as my tastes do not incline me toward tendentious political drama. But I do not thereby concede that I must relinquish my judgment on Kushner’s statements, his political involvements, or the CUNY trustees’ acts. To the contrary, as one who has been observing and ever more intensely studying the rise of the new antisemitism, which operates through the global demonization of Israel, I feel rather qualified to comment.
Was the Award Politicized?
The most widespread misperceptions about the whole matter, shared in all reporting I have seen, is that that CUNY’s granting of an honorary degree amounted a sort of literary award. You imply that perception in your own letter: You are astonished, you say, that “that making this award to one of the most acclaimed, taught, and produced playwrights in the United States can be criticized for its ‘politicization of the university.’”
Honorary degrees are baubles that universities intermittently distribute so as to reward patrons, excite alumni, bask in the presence of celebrities and, at best, drive home a moral point to students. Most universities have wide latitude within which to select. My reading is that the CUNY trustees’ own guidelines give narrower than normal scope and may well have been tailored to help them, had they abided by it, to avoid just the kind of mess into which they stepped.
The trustees’ first criterion calls for awardees to be “Persons of national or international reputation in an academic discipline that holds a significant place in the curriculum of the awarding college.” I myself teach a professional subject and have respect for fire science, police studies, forensic computing, etc., taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the CUNY unit that proposed the award. But I can’t for the life of me see what significant place Kushner holds in this curriculum. Of the five criteria on the list (see my appendix below), he qualifies remotely only by the fifth and none requires an evaluation by literary merit.
The original nominator at John Jay College was visiting economics professor Michael Meeropol, one of the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who has his adoptive parents’ name. I would not mention the matter of his name, nor the childhood tragedy he underwent, were it not that he constantly identifies himself publicly with it and publicly claims to have political lessons from it. As an academic, he is known for a book asserting that Bill Clinton was just as bad as Ronald Reagan. As to his more specific political leaning, we can take a clue from his statements of deep respect and friendship for Noam Chomsky, American academia’s demonizer-in-chief of things Zionist. In a recent speech, Meeropol claims that the Soviet Union’s receipt of the atomic bomb had benefits after all, despite Stalin’s having turned out to be a very bad man, because US capitalist-imperialist warmongering would have otherwise been even worse, perhaps killing off every person in Vietnam. His parents, it seems, had done the world a favor.
I cannot tell whether Kushner’s literary perpetuation of the Rosenberg innocence myth in Angels in America was a factor in Meeropol’s having nominated him. Nor can I say for sure whether Kushner’s acquaintance with at least one of the Meeropol brothers through the Jewish Voice for Peace (on which more below) mattered What I can point out, though, is that Kushner’s nominator has no visible connection with theater, but plenty with the variety of left-wing politics that Kushner espouses.
I am not saying that Kushner should have been rejected because of his political views. I am saying he seems to have been nominated because of them, making political and moral questions legitimate matters of debate. The best I can tell, the nomination was then rubber stamped in ascending stages, until it reached the CUNY Board of Trustees, whose duty it would have been to reflect on the merits. As we shall see, the trustees then succumbed to intense public pressure and politicization, and abrogated that duty.
Did the CUNY Trustees Suppress Debate and Succumb to Intimidation?
Your write that “there is no evidence that the CUNY Board’s acknowledgment that a grave error in judgment was made has ‘suppressed debate.’ …There is no evidence that the Board and CUNY is ‘susceptible to public intimidation.’ There is no evidence that the Board’s ‘making considered judgments’ has been ‘undermined.’”
Let me remind you that this tempest began when CUNY trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, at what seems to have been a normally pro-forma meeting to affix the final rubber stamp, raised several points about Kushner’s public role as demonizer of Israel.
I suspect that you and I agree, whatever your specific views on Israel’s policies, that such demonization is no minor sectarian matter and is worthy of discussion. We live in a time when despots, militant Islamists, neo-communist utopians, and naïve fellow travelers find common cause in depicting Israel as humanity’s enemy, and even college faculties and student groups take votes to boycott Israel. CUNY had already awarded an honorary degree to Mary Robinson, the person who presided over the 2001 Durban conference, the watershed event during which humanitarianism underwent its ultimate degradation. It became, in Durban, the smiley-face mask for antisemitic incitement and new variations on blood libel. Having once already awarded a degree to someone who had allowed such debasement, CUNY trustees had every reason to take a closer look at Kushner.
As is proper in such circumstances, the trustees decided not to reject Kushner, but to “table” the nomination. In the parlance used in American deliberative bodies, this means to put it aside for later discussion. To table is the right decision when there is little time and other pressing matters must be considered. But then The New York Times, the blogosphere, and academic union email lists went wild, and activist faculty began a letter-writing campaign. For evidence on what ensued, I will restrict my comments to the Times coverage, which carried an interview of sorts with the dissenting trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld.
The author of the Times May 5 interview was reporter Jim Dwyer, who begins by immediately misrepresenting the trustees’ actions as an attempt to “block an honorary degree,” though they had in fact just tabled it. Then he asks Wiesenfeld “about the damage done by a short one-sided discussion of vigorously debated aspects of Middle East politics…” This was again misleading. It was the future meeting for which the trustees voted that would have made fuller discussion possible. Quoted elsewhere, another trustee, Charles Shorter, says what the outpouring of angry condemnations uniformly disregarded: “I didn’t vote against Kushner; I voted for more discussion.”
The reporter again tries to draw Wiesenfeld out: “But is there no reason to hear from Tony Kushner, or have a more through airing of his views?” Wiesenfeld replies to the reporter that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. This is a correct if undiplomatic answer. An honorary degree is a unilateral soap-box, not a panel, not a lecture, and not an opportunity for dialog. The trustees were under no obligation to reserve the soap-box to Kushner.
The reporter then catches Weisenfeld’s bad phrasing in referring to the terrorists who use children for suicide bombing as “not human.” Minimally responsible, or minimally competent, reporting would have asked Wiesenfeld what he meant. Perhaps Weisenfeld actually meant that such use of children is “inhuman.” That is not the way the reporter handles it. “Did he mean that the Palestinians were not human?” the reporter asks rhetorically of the reader, placing imagined meaning in the interviewee’s mouth, archly insinuating that what he, the reporter, had in front of him was a racist-Zionist. The phrase that the Times put into the trustee’s mouth, “Palestinians are not human,” is now a permanent fixture in the vast spaces of the anti-Zionist internet, forever a slur against the CUNY trustee.
It seems from the article that Weisenfeld also complained about CUNY’s earlier honorary degree to Mary Robison. The reporter takes it upon himself to explain “Many who see the world as Mr. Wiesenfeld does [this kinds of reasoning is fit to print?] also revile Ms. Robinson for having presided over a conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, at which a number of delegates were unabashedly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel.” Lest any reader then think there could have been some legitimate questions raised about the Robinson honorary degree, the Times reporter (or just as bad, his editor) takes a chunk of space to defend Robinson. And he uses Google knowledge to do it.
He quotes a Robinson comment from the conference “When I see racism in this cartoon booklet…I must say that I am a Jew-for those victims are hurting.” She also said “I must tell you that I am a Jew, and I will not accept this fractiousness to torpedo the conference.” Those of us who follow the legacy of Durban know that these are the stock quotes by which her role has been defended ever since 2001 and they are nice words. But in the actual event she did much more to protect the Israel haters than the Jews. She did not let the racists torpedo the anti-racism conference; she late them board it, take command, and steer it.
The reporter then tells us that Weisenfeld was appointed a trustee by then former New York State Governor Pataki, a republican, “for whom he worked a political fixer.” His work, the reporter continues, “put him at the center of a scandal over paroles that had been allegedly sold…,” an accusation for which, the reporter admits, Wiesenfeld had never been charged. The Times hatchet man hastens to add that a prosecutor had in a memo more than a decade before called Weisenfeld’s behavior “outrageous,” that being the entire quotation from the memo.
I have neglected to mention the most common way in which the Wiesenfeld dissent was mocked. The Times reporter puts it as follows: “Was this the way for one of the great public universities of the world to discuss the views of one of the leading dramatists of modern times, the author of the epic ‘Angels in America’?” Never mind that university never got to discuss it, in large part because of this reporter’s intervention and the Times’ power. The understood point was that anyone who contested the nomination must be an ignoramus.
So in the space of a few paragraphs we learn from the New York Times that the dissenting trustee is a racist, political fixer, alleged criminal, reviler of innocent Mary Robinson, suppressor of speech, ignorant knave, and worst of all, Pataki appointee. The New York Times was not the only attacker. The CUNY faculty union’s listserv postings (I was sent some of it) were especially hysterical.
Many among the New York literati would rather undergo water treatment at Gitmo than such public humiliation by the Times. Certainly CUNY trustees weren’t going to let themselves be called ignoramuses for long.
I paraphrase Alex Joffee in Jewish Ideas Daily on what happened next: the trustees shut up, wagged their tails, and approved the degree. Or rather, the trustees’ executive committee did so, somehow overturning the larger board’s original call for further discussion. The board’s chairman, Benno Schmidt, a former Yale president, explained that the earlier vote had been a grave mistake, because “Freedom of thought and expression is a bedrock of any university worthy of the name.” I would seem that trustees must not restrict nominees’ sacred right to express themselves. The nominee, one can infer, has the right to be an honoree.
The Times hatchet job appeared on Thursday. By Friday, the Times was reporting as follows; note the first three words: “Under mounting pressure, the City University of New York board of trustees moved on Friday to reverse its decision earlier this week to withhold [not true, “postpone decision on” would be correct] an honorary degree from the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner because of one trustee’s concerns about Mr. Kushner’s views regarding Israel.”
There is the evidence for you, or rather a small part of it. It is a sorry thing when university trustees surrender their judgment, even the very rationale for their existence, to mendacious reporters, ideology-driven bloggers, and campus activists on a witch hunt. That is exactly what CUNY did. It succumbed to political pressure and stifled debate. SPME was right to deplore it.
Does Kushner Provoke Antisemitism? Part 1
The SPME statement deplored Kushner’s practice of making “incendiary and biased accusations against Israel, thereby feeding the fires of antisemitism, hatred, and genocide incitement now prevalent in the Middle East.” In reply, you say that “There is no evidence that Kushner’s remarks ‘feed the fires of antisemitism’ etc.”
I will not dwell on the extensive compilation by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, known as CAMERA, of Kushner’s remarks about Israel, since many others who criticize him have done so. I know for a fact that CAMERA is a reliable organization. The anti-Israel bias the compiled quotations reveal casts doubt on Kushner’s self-perception, no doubt very sincerely held, that he knows what it means to be a friend of the Jewish people. That he references his co-edited book, Wrestling with Zion, hardly helps prove his bona fides, since it give legitimacy through inclusion to some of the most venomous revilers of Israel in American intellectual life. Some are so disgusted by “Zionism” that they hate the sound of the very word and casually attribute to it a litany of evils.
Certainly, Kushner is right that quotations should be judged in context. Let me judge in context only his use of the words “ethnic cleansing” to describe the origin of the Palestinian refugees. He repeats these words in a letter published in the May 4 letter in Jewish Week that rebukes the Trustees for their short-lived vote to allegedly deny (actually, table discussion of) his honorary degree.
I should say that much of the letter is leveled against Mr. Wiesenfeld, whose New York Times drubbing was still one day away. We learn that Wiesenfeld used his four minutes at the trustees’ meeting to deliver a “diatribe” containing “slander” and “false” description that “publicly defamed” Kushner and did so “like most bullies” in an “unfair fight” not only against him, the celebrated Pulitzer winner and multi-millionaire screenwriter, but also against the fine Mary Robinson, Ireland’s former prime minister. Wiesenfeld relies on “internet gossip,” we are told, whereas Mr. Kushner adheres to a higher standard: he actually reads, and most importantly, struggles with ideas, an example being the alleged ethnic cleansing.
“I believe the record shows, incontrovertibly,” he writes, “that the forced removal of Palestinians from their homes as part of the creation of the state of Israel was an ethnic cleansing, a conclusion I reached mainly by reading the work of Benny Morris, an acclaimed and conservative Israel historian whose political opinions are much more in accord with Mr Wiesenfeld’s than with mine; Mr. Morris differs from Mr. Weisenfeld in bringing to his examination of history a scholar’s rigor, integrity, and seriousness of purpose and commitment to telling the truth.”
Whether Morris is a conservative (he writes for the liberal New Republic) is of course irrelevant. What’s more important is Kushner’s endorsement of him. That’s the problem for Kushner: Morris has repeatedly and in great detail made clear that there was no policy of ethnic cleansing. He does so for example in a fine lecture delivered in Norway in June 2009, the sad part being that he got an audience far smaller than the Israel-hating Norman Finkelstein gets for his speeches there.
Morris did indeed study the Israeli archives for the 1947-48 war. He says that in the first period of the war, tens of thousands among Arab elite in Palestine fled to avoid the war, perhaps in hopes (I am the one adding this point) of a judenfrei return. In second period, leaderless, 300,000 Arabs fled from war, not from expulsion. In the third, the “ten day” period in July 1948, when the Jews were under the most acute danger of destruction, another 100,000 Arabs fled; of them about 50,000 were expelled from homes by local Israeli commanders under battle conditions. Then in the final phase of fighting along the Northern and Southern fronts, another 200,000 fled from war, with some scattered cases of forced expulsion. In short, there were dispersed cases of forceful removal of Arabs from some villages, within a far larger picture of mass flight from war. Possibly many Jews would have fled the fighting too, but there was nowhere to go. Morris makes clear that in the vast depository of diaries, scribbling, meeting-minutes, and memoranda, there is no evidence of a policy of ethnic cleansing.
The Arab-Israel battles are, however, just one context. There is also the larger context of the Holocaust barely ended, the post-war pogroms in Eastern Europe, the threats of the Arab League to wholly massacre the Jews, the siege of Jerusalem to attempt to expel Jews through starvation, the total ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank, the Jews’ mass escape from dhimmi status in the Arab nations, and lest we forget, the invasion by four or five armies…where do I stop?
Tony Kushner doesn’t like that his words are quoted out of full context. He wants his critics to familiarize themselves “with my plays, screenplays, essays and speeches.” But he has no compunction in removing the Jews’ struggle for survival from historical context. Nor does he refrain from the calumny “ethnic cleaning,” now the internet’s favorite slur against Israel, besides “Nazi.” However self-assuaging his self-perception may be, Kushner has shown himself to be a distorter of historical context and a spreader of slogans that fan the flames of global antisemitism.
Does Kushner Provoke Antisemitism? Part 2
The SPME statement to which you object deplores Kushner’s role as Member of the Board (sometimes called “Board of Advisers”) and celebrity endorser of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization identified by the Anti-Defamation League as one of the top-ten vilifiers of Israel. As its webpage proudly proclaims, it is a lead instigator of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli Jews. The group has sometimes narrowed its boycott calls to certain companies doing business with Israel, but explains that such moves are tactical, meant to get motions passed where more ambitious calls for boycott would fail. It is no surprise that the group has a history of soft-pedaling terrorism, ignoring Arab rejection and, for a war now almost 80 years old, solely blaming Israel.
Maybe this group is anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. So it presents itself and so Kushner certainly thinks of it. But it takes just a bit of looking to discover that it walks arm-in-arm with some of America’s most virulent antisemites.
Of special note is Norman Finkelstein, who has said that Jewish leadership concocted thousands of books about the Holocaust so as to excuse the oppression of Palestinians; that Elie Wiesel and Simon Wiesenthal were in it for the money; that Israelis were importing blond-and-blue-eyed Russians to turn themselves into an Aryan race; and that the children murdered by terrorists in a seminary in Jerusalem were being groomed to be “ubermenschen.” He is in short one of the main purveyors of the Jew-is-Nazi slur, the blood libel making its rounds on the internet right alongside the ethnic cleansing slur. Please do check for yourself how many times the JVP chapters have sponsored speeches by Finkelstein.
Then there is the web blog Counterpunch. It has carried articles claiming that the Mossad was the secret force that brought down the World Trade Centers; that Israelis went to Haiti to secretly kill Haitians for their body parts…and much more in the same vein. I hope you don’t need me to dig up much more of this reeking stuff to demonstrate that this site has become the anti-Zionist intellectual’s Der Steurmer. The JVP’s deputy director writes for it; the JVP frequently carries articles from it. Oh, there is also the Council for the National Interest, whose President Allison Weir holds, among many other interesting opinions, that there is there is evidence – hold for the revelation – that Jews did indeed murder children for Passover but Zionists have suppressed the news (so she has written in Counterpunch). JVP has worked with her group too.
Isn’t it rather hard to maintain that distinction between anti-Zionist and antisemitic? What’s remarkable is not that a Jewish intellectual dirties himself through involvement in this group. Anti-Zionism is a cesspool in which many deep thinkers swim. What’s surprising is that he takes such umbrage at the idea that anyone would think him anything but pristine.
Is He Deeply Caring and Profoundly Humane in his Deeply Jewish Focus on Social Justice?
I will mention just in passing, because I dislike personal revelation, that my own mother, in 1944, as a young woman who had had just six years of education in a girl’s yeshiva, and had never read Theodore Herzl, realized in a cattle car, squeezed in among the doomed, on the way from Nagyvàrad to Auschwitz, what fools her parents and other Jews had been to wait passively while their prospective killers amassed power of death over them. She realized, as she told me much later, that it had been up to the Jews to at least try to take their destinies into their own hands, and the only place on earth where they could do so was Palestine. In short, she had become a Zionist.
And that’s the point, that Zionism arises from the Jewish historical experience of surviving oppression. If “social justice” is really a branch of justice and not a trendy prevarication, then Zionism is the very epitome of a movement for social justice.
In his letter to Jewish Week, just before he puts forward his views on ethnic cleansing, Kushner writes as follows: “My question and reservations regarding the founding of the state of Israel are connected to my conviction, drawn from my reading of American history, that democratic government must be free of ethnic and religious affiliation, and that the solution to the problems of oppressed minorities are [sic] to be found in pluralistic democracy and legal instruments like the 14th amendment.”
It is hard to fathom the depths of this delusion.
European Jewry had just been nearly exterminated; the Arab world was conducting another total war against the Jews and for the first time in generations Jews were taking their defense into their own hands, having finally realized – God help us, how long it took! – that even those not directly stoking the incinerators of children had been all too ready to let them be shoved in. What were these children and their parents supposed to do, had they had the chance? If Kushner is to be believed, they were supposed to have offered their imminent killers pluralism and constitutional amendments. He sounds like Gandhi lecturing the Jews on what they should have done to remain worthy during the Holocaust.
It is also such peace-and-justice sentiments that lead him to defend the Jewish Voice for Peace, despite his having some disagreements with them. “I remain affiliated,” he writes in the Jewish Week letter, “because the women and men of JVP are courageous, committed people work very hard serving the interests of peace and justice and the Jewish people, and I’m honored by my association with them.” He hints that he might have thought about resigning from the JVP board, but writes that doing so “to escape the censure of [sic] likes of Mr. Wiesenfeld is repellent to me.”
I presumed for a while that Kushner simply suffered from the smugness that routinely infects accomplished people, the belief that his opinion must be good because he himself thought of it.
Though I still suppose there is some of that at work in Kushner, I no longer think that’s a sufficient explanation, because so many other Jewish intellectuals, much less renowned than he, suffer from the same infection. The sources are deeper than his ego. They reside, I have come to think, in his ideological certainty that he is for peace, justice, diversity, and human rights. He is, after all, an all-around humanitarian, in league with other like-minded humanitarians, such as those courageous peace-and-justice loving youth at JVP, and in opposition to repellent creatures like Mr. Wiesenfeld, Zionists, and perhaps me, and maybe my mother.
Whereas earlier generations of radical utopians had been socialists or communists or fascists (who had a racial utopia), the ones in our time, this decade into the century, are activists for social and ecological justice. And just as earlier utopians had to have a scapegoat against which to mobilize, today’s transnational humanitarians, too, need their anti-human. This is why Zionists of the anti-Zionist imagination must forever be committing secret genocides, even when Palestinian population growth rates have been among the highest in the world. The Zionists must be, they just must be, guilty of innumerable atrocities. For the mass movement for global peace-justice-diversity-and-sustainability, Zionists’ devilishness is essential; it is the very basis of transnational solidarity.
Tony Kushner’s problem, though, is that he feels close to Jews. So he must alternately love and hate in an endless self-contradictory self-deluding struggle not with Zion per se – as the ethnic cleansing matter indicates, he is not really interested in Israelis and their forerunners’ lived experience in context – but with the anti-Zionist’s Zion.
An Invitation
Professor Skloot, if you have read this far, I might as well say, for what is worth, that I am leaving open the possibility that I might actually like Tony Kushner. I am a Zionist because I value peace and justice, and I am a believer in open democracy because I trust in open debate, and both these beliefs lead me to understand that Israel is, as societies go in real living context, pretty good, and lead me to hope that I might have some moral kinship with Kushner after all.
So let us debate, in person, and please bring Tony along if you can. I will flip for lunch. I promise even to give another chance to his plays. We should respectfully invite Jeffrey Wiesenfeld too; I have never met him but he might turn out to be a nice fellow, not repellent at all.
If Tony Kushner should finally dump the young fanatics at Jewish Voice for Peace who find it so natural to consort with bigots, I will be glad to nominate him to the SPME Board. Not all of them identify themselves as Zionists, but all, like Kushner and me, value peace, and the contributions of open academic debate to it.
It takes time to set up a meeting like this, so I propose we hold it next year in New York City, about the time for the next CUNY graduation. We can look forward to seeing the next honorary degree go to David Mamet, whom the theater lovers at John Jay College will no doubt nominate in the meantime.
Sincerely yours,
Ernest Sternberg
Member of the Board, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Appendix:
My sources are mentioned in passing throughout the letter and can be found through simple searching. Michael Meeropol’s remarks on the America’s “dangerous expansionism” and hence the value of the USSR’s having gotten the bomb were given at something called the “Left Forum,” on an unspecified date, and can be found on YouTube. Some postings of the video confuse Part 1 and Part 2 of his speech. He made the statement in what is chronologically Part 2, though it is in some postings mislabeled Part 1. As of this writing, one link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbfclZrSfcI&feature=relmfu. To find CAMERA’s compilations, go to www.camera.org and search on its page for “Tony Kushner.”
On the CUNY Board of Trustees’ criteria for honorary degrees, I use a letter by Karen Kaplowitz, president of the faculty senate at John Jay College, to the CUNY Board of Trustees. Here it is verbatim:
Honorary degrees are intended to serve as a means by which the University can recognize the achievements of persons who have made significant contributions to the progress of the University, or to its colleges and to the principles for which the institutions stand or to their academic or professional disciplines.… In general, candidates for honorary degrees should fall in one or more of the following categories:
1. Persons of national or international reputation in an academic discipline that holds a significant place in the curriculum of the awarding college;
2. Persons who have made significant contributions in either thought or action to American Higher Education or in a professional field closely related to an academic interest of the University or the awarding college;
3. Persons who have made significant contributions over a sustained period of time to the development of major programs at the University or at one of its colleges;
4. Persons who have given long and distinguished service to the University or one of its colleges including those who have been in its employ and who have been retired or otherwise separated from the University or one of its colleges for a period of at least three years;
5. Persons who have made major contributions to furthering principles which are at the center of the University’s purpose and mission.
I ask you to please consider the values of our University and its reputation as well as your relationship to the faculty of CUNY and especially to its students, who are being denied the signal honor of having Mr. Tony Kushner join them as a member of John Jay’s graduating class of 2011.
Letter of May 4, 2011, from Karen Kaplowitz to CUNY Trustees and Members of the CUNY Chancellery
