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Dershowitz Bashes Cynthia Nixon For Backing Israelis Who Boycott Settlements

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.

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