To the Editor:
As a member of Queer Hillel, one of the groups that organized gay Israeli musician Ivri Lider's visit to Brown, I was saddened to read Malcolm Shanks' '11.5 guest column ("Keep my liberation out of your occupation!" Nov. 8), in which he spins the event as a nefarious plot to "pinkwash" the campus and distract attention from controversial Israeli security decisions. Our actual motivations for organizing the event were decidedly less dramatic: We are a queer Jewish group, so we brought a queer Jewish performer to campus. This was not an event about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We offered an opportunity for queers and allies of all backgrounds to come together to listen to the music and the inspirational story of a successful queer Jewish artist who has benefited from the progressive rights and protections offered to him by his country. The feedback we received from the over 110 students and community members who actually attended the event was uniformly positive.
When American gay rights activists speak at Brown, do we demand that they espouse certain political views about, say, America's controversial war in Afghanistan? No, because we recognize that the issues are completely separate and deserve to be treated as such. Portraying Lider's efforts on behalf of the Israeli gay rights movement as anti-human rights propaganda is an unjustified insult, both to the artist and to the numerous accomplishments of the movement he represents.
I feel lucky to attend a university where my assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are constantly challenged by thoughtful and vigorous debate, but politicizing cultural events that bring communities together is divisive and unhelpful. Instead, I would encourage our campus to move beyond the polarizing rhetoric that takes two heterogeneous societies with millions of members — each with their own cultural, economic, spiritual and political struggles — and reduces them to unified blocks of terrorists, victims, colonizers and martyrs.
Gene Goldstein-Plesser '11
Executive Vice President, Brown-RISD Hillel
Nov. 10
