Early on Thursday evening, June 6, right before the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s first-ever open-call exhibition opened to the public, dozens of anti-Zionist Jewish artists and supporters crowded the plaza in front of the institution in an action that included art-making, speeches, and the live destruction of a sculpture inside the museum.
The group’s 15 organizers, known as California Jewish Artists for Palestine (CJAFP), include 11 who originally submitted their work to the museum’s open call with a plan to flood the exhibition with anti-Zionist art. While four of the group’s applicants were rejected, the seven who were accepted all chose to withdraw their work, citing disagreement over the context of the term “anti-Zionist” and a contract that artists felt left them with little to no autonomy over how their work was presented.
The night’s actions were sobered by a grim statistic: In the seven months since Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
In response to the absence of the seven artists’ work, the Contemporary Jewish Museum left a large wall of the exhibition blank, with a placard explaining that to “authentically reflect the struggle for dialogue that is illustrated by the artists’ decisions to withdraw, the spaces where each of these works were planned to be displayed have been intentionally left empty.”
“It’s an empty gesture,” said artist and protest co-organizer Steph Kudisch of the blank wall. “It felt like a way of flipping the blame onto us to make us seem unreasonable.”
In a public statement released June 5, Executive Director Kerry King and board Chair Tom Kasten wrote that the institution maintained its stance that “to call for the swift return of all Israeli hostages and an end to the ongoing violence against Palestinian civilians is not a political stance but an essential moral position.”
“As an institution, we have before, and will continue to present works that may be critical of Israel and show support for Palestinians,” King had previously told two artists in an email. “However, what we cannot do is question the right of Israel to exist at all, implicitly or explicitly.”
A spokesperson for the Contemporary Jewish Museum told Hyperallergic that they supported the protest outside and would not move to end it if it remained peaceful, which it did.
By 6pm, the space was filled with tables offering printmaking, chalk drawing, live painting, and a brass band; speakers in the plaza took turns at a microphone, some with traditional Jewish chanting and singing. As dusk fell, museum-goers joined a line of over 80 people trickling inside. Metal detectors and security personnel scanned each person.
A visitor named Scott Berman stood watching the demonstration before joining his wife in line. He was impressed by what he saw as the coexistence of the art inside the museum and the protest outside.
“I think this is a good model,” Berman told Hyperallergic. “No one’s hating each other. I am Jewish; I have a strong connection to Israel. But there’s plenty of room to condemn what [Prime Minister] Netanyahu has done.”
CJAFP organizer and Jewish artist Kate Laster was unfazed. “We owe Gaza our endurance,” she told Hyperallergic. “This is urgent. There is a genocide happening in Palestine, and we need to normalize how we talk about these things.”
Open call artist Vanessa Thill emphasized that the group was there to protest the institution, not the show’s participants. Artists were asked to submit to the open call around the theme of “connection,” and at first, Thill had felt encouraged by curator Heidi Rabin’s assurances that pro-Palestine views would be accepted.
But as the opening neared, Thill felt less and less supported in her anti-Zionist views. There was little dialogue among artists even after she reached out to the group to discuss Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza — and that dialogue didn’t seem to be encouraged.
Upstairs, around 7pm, as hundreds of attendees passed through, Thill stood next to her sculpture “Cleave-To (His Cheeks Were Beds of Spices)” (2023), consisting of two large crescent shapes cast in various spices, graphite, and fake blood. Thill read the traditional Kaddish prayer followed by the names of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. She then read the names of Israeli hostages who were recently confirmed dead. And in a final act violating her museum’s artist contract, Thill broke off a piece of her sculpture and held the fragment to the crowd.
“The theme of the show is connection,” she said. “I felt we had to actually go outside [the museum] to do that.”
