A wild story out of Berlin perfectly encapsulates the anti-Zionist obsessions of the world of arts and culture, as well as the way pro-Palestinian movements degrade and destroy their own coalitions.
If this story were fiction, it would be dismissed as too on-the-nose.
Appropriately, this is about performance art. Over the weekend, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera performed her piece Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions, which is a round-the-clock, 100-hour live reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Unfortunately, at the 88-minute mark it was shut down by pro-Palestinian activists. (It is purely coincidental, though no less amusing for it, that 88 is neo-Nazi code for “heil Hitler,” or HH.)
The protesters had interrupted the performance earlier Saturday as Bruguera was reading from the book, but they left and came back 88 minutes in to shut it down during one of the stretches when it was being read by a guest reader. That guest reader was Mirjam Wenzel, director of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.
The exchanges between the artist and the protesters during these two interruptions are worth highlighting for what they tell us about everyone involved.
Bruguera is—quite famously, though her name is a hint—a Cuban dissident. The Palestinian protesters got in…
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