Censoring Israeli and Palestinian Art: Chicago's Spertus Museum Controversy

On May 2, 2008, Chicago’s Spertus Museum, one of the city’s most important Jewish institutions, opened an exhibit called “Imaginary Coordinates.” It featured the work of eight Palestinian and Israeli women, well known in Israel and around the world for their work challenging predictable notions of space, geography, boundaries and what may be summed up as the rights to sorrow—who may feel sorrowful for whom and why.

The exhibit aimed to use its own collection of maps along with the artists’ works to question the notion of boundaries. Had the maps involved virtually any place in the world other than Israel/Palestine, the exhibit would have likely gone unnoticed much beyond Chicago. But it didn’t. It focused on one of the most embattled regions in the world.

Art critics and visitors to the museum were impressed. Some of the museum’s powerful backers were not. They included Chicago’s Jewish federation, which contributes $700,000 a year, or 10% percent, of the Spertus’ operating budget, and whose membership contributed generously to Spertus’ new, $55 million home. “Aspects of it were clearly anti-Israel,” Steven Nasatir, president of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Greater Chicago, told the Chicago Tribune.”

An Exhibit Censored

Within days of the exhibit’s opening, it closed, ostensibly to rearrange some of the art work to protect it from harsh light. That was the reason given to the public. In reality, the museum board of directors was battling pressures to shut the exhibit outright. The exhibit reopened during the third week of May with what the board thought would be an acceptable compromise with the exhibit’s opponents: patrons would be accompanied by docents to ensure that the artists’ work was put in context. It was somewhat like the Kremlin sticking official escorts on journalists working in Moscow during the cold war, to ensure that the reporting followed the official line’s proper context.

And it didn’t work. “Imaginary Coordinates” abruptly closed on June 20, three months before the intended closing date. It wasn’t censorship, the museum insisted. “Spertus is not interested in going around and hurting people’s feelings,” Marc Wilcow, a trustee of the Spertus, said. But as Lynn Pollack of Chicago’s Jewish Voice for Peace organization told the Tribune, “These were mainstream artists who are able to display in their own country” (or, at least, their own Territories). “Why can’t this art be seen by American Jews? It’s really a shame.”

Not just American Jews, but any of the millions of Chicagoans and visitors to the Windy City.

Read the full account of the controversy...