Dershowitz Bashes Cynthia Nixon For Backing Israelis Who Boycott Settlements
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By Josh Nathan-Kazis March 19, 2018
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 nathankazis@forward.com or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.
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