Dershowitz Bashes Cynthia Nixon For Backing Israelis Who Boycott Settlements

Image by Getty Images
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.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Make a Passover Gift Today!
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Opinion What Jewish university presidents say: Trump is exploiting campus antisemitism, not fighting it
- 4
Opinion Yes, the attack on Gov. Shapiro was antisemitic. Here’s what the left should learn from it
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Harvard president: As a Jew, ‘I know very well’ that concerns about antisemitism are valid
-
Fast Forward Ben Shapiro, Emily Damari among torch lighters for Israel’s Independence Day ceremony
-
Fast Forward Larry David’s ‘My Dinner with Adolf’ essay skewers Bill Maher’s meeting with Trump
-
Sports Israeli mom ‘made it easy’ for new NHL player to make history
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.