NOTE FROM THE TW4C PACBI WORKING GROUP
Theater workers across the world have witnessed 14 months of genocide in Palestine. Watching Israel's US-backed war on Palestine and Lebanon from a distance can make us feel powerless, but for artists committed to building a better world, tuning out the horrors funded with our tax dollars and going about our daily routines is not an option. So, how are we going to fight for the people of Palestine?
Theater Workers for a Ceasefire (TW4C) formed in early 2024 as a space for theater workers to join the struggle against Israel's genocidal campaign. Answering the call of the international Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, TW4C joined the BDS campaign and has already brought dozens of theater organizations across the US on board.
Endorsed by virtually all major Palestinian cultural organizations, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) represents the cultural wing of the BDS movement. Our PACBI campaign supports and urges theaters to demonstrate concrete solidarity with the Palestinian people by upholding the boycott of arts institutions and cultural products that are complicit in Israel’s apartheid and genocide.
For theater organizations, a PACBI endorsement is an act of solidarity that goes beyond public statements and representation. While there's a value to making statements and platforming Palestinian voices, theater can only be a site of transformative change when theaters reject violence, racism, and oppression in both word and deed.
This zine features conversations with four U.S.-based theater organizations that have taken up the PACBI call: Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, National Queer Theater, Radical Evolution, and GLYK Kolektiv. We're inspired by these groups' firm solidarity with the Palestinian people. Their stories serve as an example to theater workers organizing PACBI campaigns in their theater institutions and communities.
This zine was assembled by members of the Theater Workers for a Ceasefire PACBI Working Group. Like you, we are tired of seeing picture after picture of Palestinian bodies subjected to Israeli brutality. We must not forget that each of these images is of a living, breathing person; each image is a story that ended too soon.
In Solidarity,
The TW4C PACBI Working Group
What was your organization’s relationship to Palestine solidarity before endorsing PACBI? How did PACBI fit in with or help expand your organization's existing work and values?
Theatre of the Oppressed NYC
TONYC knew of and admired the work of Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners at Combatants for Peace.
As TONYC’s mission includes explicitly challenging and upending oppression, solidarity with Palestinians has aligned with our values. Signing on to PACBI fit in as a next step after organizing pro-Palestine cultural events.
National Queer Theater
As a social justice organization, NQT believes in uplifting the voices of marginalized artists and communities. We'd also worked with several Palestinian artists in the past, and felt it was important to stand publicly with them in this time of urgent need. We put out a ceasefire statement in November 2023, and have partnered on a number of cultural solidarity events since.
GLYK Kolektiv
GLYK is a queer Yiddish theatre collective. We choose to write, act, work, and play in a language that developed and flourished under near-constant state suppression. We still know little about the lives of the “step-children of the shtetl” — mishkev-zokhernikes (sodomites), shabse-tsvinitses (female followers of [false] messiah Shabbetai Tsevi), klezmorim (musicians for hire) and ganovim (thieves) — those queer and otherwise deviant Jews whose lives and archives were largely effaced in the 20th century by genocide. When we read pogrom literature today, we see Gaza. But we do not need these resonances with our own history to oppose Zionism; all we need are eyes and a conscience.
Prior to endorsing PACBI, we had verbally discussed our antizionist politics — we’d raised money for Palestinians evacuating Gaza, performed Palestinian poetry translated into Yiddish, and found an antizionist orientation implicit in the work we chose to do — but we had not previously taken the chance to sit down and articulate those values on paper. Drafting the statement together helped us clarify our politics and why we make the art we make.
Radical Evolution
Prior to signing onto PACBI, Radical Evolution’s street theatre crew had co-created a short, satirical play that critiqued mainstream media coverage of the genocide in Gaza. We made the piece in early 2024 after aligning on what we felt we specifically, as folks who are not of Palestinian descent but are a group comprised of many different backgrounds, ethnicities, and perspectives, decided how we specifically wanted to participate in the conversation. We have performed the piece at community events and actions. One of the more meaningful performances of this work was on the steps of The Public Theater this past May, where theatre-goers attending shows in the building literally had to go around the action to get into the Public Theater lobby.
As an organization that prioritizes international exchange through theatrical collaboration, we had partnered with the Friends of the Freedom Theatre to support a member of the Freedom Theatre giving a workshop on physical theatre techniques here in NYC in the spring, but his trip was sadly delayed due to visa complications. We plan to support the workshop when he is able to travel to the US.
Aside from our artistic work, we have gathered our collaborators to show up for marches and actions, including the Cultural Resistance March in Jan, the Land Day action in March, and most recently the action commemorating one year of Genocide and one year or resistance.
We had also heard a bit about PACBI over the past year of engaging in these activities, and were intrigued by the concept, but didn’t really know what it would mean to take a concrete step on this idea, especially because we don’t have any existing collaborations that would be considered a PACBI violation. TW4C reached out to us about endorsing and talked to us about making a public statement about PACBI as part of a group of orgs, which we decided was a strategic move that makes sense for us, given our already clear position on Palestine.
Did you encounter any worries or struggles in the process of releasing your PACBI statement?
Theatre of the Oppressed NYC
We did wonder if it would impact any funders, especially without them telling us. We also talked about whether signing is enough, and meaningful if we do not have much international collaboration. Our work has been so specific to local NYC issues, it was a moment to redefine what it means to be engaged and how global issues impact our lives as local community.
National Queer Theater
We had already been pretty openly talking about Palestine and BDS, both as an organization and as individuals, before being asked to sign on to the PACBI endorsement. We're a small organization, so joining in solidarity with other cultural organizations made sense to help us broaden our reach. We're not immune to the concerns many nonprofits are having about losing donors or funders because of political speech, but one of our core values is Fearlessness, and that means speaking out even when it's hard.
GLYK Kolektiv
We don’t have many of the same funding considerations as larger orgs, and we think that is an asset. It means we don’t have to bite our tongue and waste our scant spare time and energy worrying about optics or donors or whatever other excuse.
In lieu of institutional funding, we have people power. GLYK is only the work we put into it. Forgoing institutional support is not a sacrifice. It is the only way we can create the art we want: weird, gay Yiddish theater unencumbered by the respectability politics of mainstream Jewish institutions.
Our one concern was that, unfortunately, the National Library of Israel holds the only well-indexed digital records of many Yiddish periodicals, and we have relied on their free digital archive to find performance texts. We were unsure whether endorsing PACBI might prevent us from those texts going forward, but the BDS national committee concluded that using their search tools does not violate any PACBI guidelines as we are not officially affiliated with the library (as visiting scholars, etc), nor do we publically credit them.
Radical Evolution
It was a bit of a challenge to think through what to say in statement, in part because we are not generally statement people. We typically maintain the position that our beliefs can and should be ascertained through the actions we take (or don’t take), in conjunction with our artistic work. However, after meeting with TW4C, we understood that our taking a negative action is a lot more meaningful and strategic if accompanied by a public statement that would make our position known, help build pressure on other cultural organizations, and be a part of a coalition so that no single or small group of arts orgs would have to speak out alone. That, combined with the fact that this request was coming directly from Palestinian PACBI organizers made a compelling case for us.
We then set out to draft something we felt was simple, clear and true for us. Once we had the goals and priorities of the statement in mind, the drafting came relatively easily, but we still made sure we were crystal clear on every word, and ran it by our board for their thoughts prior to the public release of the statement. It is worth mentioning that our board had been in the PACBI endorsement conversation from the beginning, and was both thoughtful about what it meant to endorse, and fully supportive after discussing it as a group.
Why do you think releasing a PACBI statement is important?
Theatre of the Oppressed NYC
For de-normalization, making it explicit this is not normal, and we should not be going about day-to-day as if it were. Saying nothing is saying something, so this does not leave our position up to interpretation. To hold ourselves and others accountable and support a structural effort. To signal to other folks looking to build solidarity.
One of our team mentioned this quote from Julian Beck of the Living Theater: ”If we could really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering.”
National Queer Theater
When anyone stands up against injustice, they make it easier for others to follow suit. By signing onto PACBI, we collectively reject complicity in genocide and dehumanization. Cultural institutions have tremendous power in shaping public dialogue. Oppressive regimes target and silence artists because they know art is a powerful tool of resistance. Art allows artists to preserve culture and traditions under threat, and tell their stories on their own terms. Art and artists help us imagine different worlds and futures free of oppression. Art gives us hope, and what could be more dangerous to an unjust status quo?
GLYK Kolektiv
The Jewish artist — indeed, anyone making art under our capitalist system of non-profit patronage — is well-acquainted with the thought, “We can take their tainted money and make something beautiful.” PACBI reminds us this is a fantasy. It is not simply that it is selfish: it is impossible. All money comes with strings, explicit and implicit. These constraints shape an artist’s work as surely as their own hands.
Every time a Jewish artist says yes to a “simple” condition — “don’t say Palestine,” “don’t say genocide,” “don’t make anyone uncomfortable” — that artist re-enforces a logic that casts Palestinians as secondary, as less than fully human. It is this logic that has flattened the hospitals, mosques, churches, and schools of Gaza, driven millions from their now-destroyed homes, and starved an entire people. It is this logic that has murdered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including over 16,000 children this year alone. It is this logic that has turned lives into numbers.
It is incumbent on us as Jewish cultural workers to create new models of artistic production that do not feed this genocidal logic. We must then move beyond the bare minimum recognition of Palestinian humanity to true solidarity and action.
tl;dr: Both the mainstream progressive Jewish world and the theatre world have a culture of silence around Palestine. Releasing a PACBI statement, not just making private commitments, is an important step in challenging that.
Radical Evolution
As citizens of the US empire who enjoy the relative safety and benefits of living in the Imperial core and whose government is constantly sending bombs to Israel with our tax dollars, taking this (for RadEv, relatively low level) risk felt important. While we’re always focused on making sure our organizing efforts are undergirded by good strategy and strong analysis, it felt important that we also have some sort of personal stake in taking this particular step, and for us, stating our endorsement clearly and publicly felt like a part of that stake.
What have been the effects, positive, negative, or otherwise, among your staff and community by signing PACBI?
Theatre of the Oppressed NYC
We appreciate being able to support a collective organizing effort, as we continue to explore our own continued actions. It has opened the opportunity to have the discussion with people who see themselves as anti-oppression but are not aligned with PACBI. We get to see who has signed on, and learn about some new cultural organizations. We also see who hasn’t.
National Queer Theater
Our community of artists, staff, volunteers, board, and audiences have expressed gratitude at seeing us standing in solidarity with Palestine. It's been heartening to read cover letters from people who are excited to work with an organization that has endorsed PACBI and shares their values. There's a lot of conversation about what organizations risk losing by speaking out against injustice, but it's easy to forget that silence also comes with costs.
GLYK Kolektiv
When we signed onto PACBI, we received overwhelming support from our core audience. But that support did not extend into the broader Jewish world. About a week after we released a statement on instagram endorsing PACBI, the Forward—the largest Jewish publication in the country—published an article which used us as the face of young Jews breaking away from Zionism within the Yiddish community. That article stated that “anonymous Yiddishists” were disappointed in our decision, which made us wonder who’s so afraid of a queer theater troupe that they won’t criticize us to our faces.
We also weren’t asked for comment, which indicated to us that the Forward is more interested in using us as a symbol of wayward youth than engaging on a serious level with what we have to say. A week later, an Israeli writer for the Forward — who, like the initial writer, seemed very willing to condemn us despite never having seen our work — published a rambling screed that has since been edited down to HR-approved genocide apologism, once again citing GLYK and our statement in support of PACBI.
On October 6th, 2024 we were invited to publish an Op-Ed of our own. While we had trepidations about publishing in the Forward, we believed there was value in platforming PACBI in a mainstream publication in the hopes of reaching Jewish artists who consider themselves to be on and of the left but are nervous about making public commitments. We prepared the Op-ed in English and Yiddish, the languages in which we work. Our Op-ed was quickly downgraded to a letter to the editor, and, against the norms of most publications, aggressively edited for content in addition to the more standard length. Jodi Rudoren, Editor in Chief of the Forward, personally took on editing the letter. While we were eventually able to push back on many of her early edits, she insisted we remove “ethnic cleansing” from our definition of the Nakba and told us we could not refer to Palestinians under 18 as children. When we refused to budge on these points, our invitation to publish in the Forward was rescinded.
At any rate, our good-faith attempt to use this platform to communicate with our community was rejected. We concluded that publishing an anti-genocide op-ed in an outlet that refuses to use even the phrase “ethnic cleansing” is, frankly, not worth our time — or yours, either!
Radical Evolution
The positive effects have largely been that it prompted thoughtful and meaningful conversations with members of our community about how we position our art-making in the context of our politics. We have also thought deeply about boycott as an organizing tactic and the collective power of our cultural sector.
Frankly, we have also experienced some disappointment at some theaters’ reluctance to engage or endorse, and others who are actively avoiding the issue of Palestine while attempting to program “relevant” or “politically engaged” productions in their seasons. Thus far, we have not experienced any direct negative feedback or effects as a result of PACBI, but are realistic about the fact that this may still happen in the coming weeks and months.
Now that your statement is released, what will you do next?
Theatre of the Oppressed NYC
We will continue to be intentional about our programming and funding relationships. We are interested to be in conversations with other organizations who have yet to sign. We hope to find ways we can bring our resources and tools to support Theatreworkers for Ceasefire.
National Queer Theater
While we also believe in speaking truth to power through statements like our PACBI endorsement, we are still a theater at heart, and are deeply invested in the transformative power of art and storytelling. Part of our mission is to provide a home for unheard storytellers and activists, so we're continuing to do that. We're excited to be collaborating with a team of partners on development and production of a new Palestinian show, and look forward to seeing what new conversations and perspectives emerge.
GLYK Kolektiv
We’ll work on our next show! We’ll keep shouting about Palestine. And we’ll keep finding more ways to sustainably donate proceeds towards Palestinian aid funds.
Radical Evolution
We are engaging our friends and colleagues who run cultural organizations to see if there are other orgs who would be willing to sign on to PACBI. We’re also making efforts to support Palestinian cultural production, whether it is attending artistic events and fundraisers or directly supporting Palestinian artistic work taking place in the city.
We believe that one of the most important functions of theatre, and the arts as a whole, is to build a vision of cultural and social equity toward shaping our liberated future. To that end, we will continue to be a part of the powerful cultural organizing that TW4C and others have been doing in the cultural sector to build solidarity for Palestine and to force the power structures within our sector to reckon with our complicity in an ongoing genocide. We also hope to be a part of building alternate structures that put justice and humanity at the center, and that support our collective struggle to co-create a brighter future for us all.