New York Times Chief Dance Critic Joins Jewish Boycott Antisemites Denouncing Israeli Performers

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The New York Times has found a new way to criticize Israel while building up the mostly Muslim communities that want nothing more than to see the Jewish state wiped from the face of the earth — use the film section to take antisemitic shots.

Times’ dance critic Alastair Macaulay did just that.

Alastair Macaulay

In his most recent review, he slammed the performance of Israel’s junior troupe, the Young Ensemble. And he did it in such a way as to make clear to readers that he regarded this group as a sort of example of Israel’s repression of “Palestinian” people.

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Here’s the story, from the Algemeiner:

Sometimes the clearest examples of the anti-Israel tilt of The New York Times comes not in the news columns but in the arts section.

The latest example is a review by the chief Times dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, of a performance in New York. The review begins:

Human rights protesters were demonstrating outside the Joyce Theater on Tuesday night. The company appearing was from Israel — Batsheva’s junior troupe, the Young Ensemble. The topics of protest were Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people and Batsheva’s role, as an Israeli cultural ambassador, as a front for that repression.

The Times somehow accepts the idea that these were “human rights protesters” rather than “anti-Israel protesters.” It takes at face value the claim that “[t]he topics of protest were Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people and Batsheva’s role, as an Israeli cultural ambassador, as a front for that repression,” rather than attributing the claims to the protesters.

An alternative approach might have been something more like, “The protesters claimed to be protesting what they said was Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people, but Israel’s defenders say the protesters actually oppose Israel’s mere existence, and are protesting the dancers simply because many of the dancers were born in Israel.” The Times doesn’t report how many protesters there were — which it usually does in these situations (The Jerusalem Post numbered them at 50). And it doesn’t explain why the protest deserved mention in the first paragraph of the review rather than being ignored or tucked away at the end.

A letter from the protest organizers suggests indeed that it is Israel’s very existence and founding that is their core grievance:

Israel was established 70 years ago through the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from their homes and villages — a catastrophe, or Nakba, for Palestinians. The expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians was a deliberate and systematic act planned by Zionist leaders and carried out by pre-state Zionist militias, and later the Israeli army. Israel has since denied Palestinian refugees their right of return to their homes and villages, as mandated by international law. Celebration of 70 years of dispossession of the Palestinian people should not be supported by the Joyce Theater.

The problem with the Times review, though, spills over from the treatment of the protesters into the treatment of the dancers and their performance. The Times critic writes:

The climate onstage, however, is never one of freedom. There’s always a sense that Big Brother is watching. The company performs Gaga, a movement style developed by Mr. Naharin to heighten sensation and imagination and to go beyond familiar limits. But even when the 16 dancers are at their wildest, they look driven rather than driving.

Near the end, all the dancers do unison movement routines that evoke various folk forms of the Near East: here a slow turning step with one arm raised, suggesting the movement of dervishes; there a two-step number with arms outstretched, reminiscent of the dabke, an Arab folk dance. Yet the look is always one that deprives them of freedom rather than liberating them. Even when earlier on three or more subgroups are doing entirely different, often intense things, the mood is controlled, involuntary, dragooned.

To me, they look like citizens of a totalitarian state. …It leaves me cold and annoyed.

The “totalitarian state” referred to here doesn’t seem to me to be Arab, Turkish or Persian but rather, at least as I interpret the review, Israel itself. The review headline is “With Batsheva, Politics Inside and Outside the Joyce Theater.” And, one might add, politics also in the Times review.

And if the dance performance left Macaulay “cold and annoyed” — well, that’s a fine description, too, of how his review left me.

The same Times arts section carries an enthusiastic article (“This Tevye Kvetches In Yiddish”) about a performance in Yiddish of the play “Fiddler on the Roof.” As if the nice coverage of the Yiddish performance is supposed to make the Times attack on the Israeli dancers somehow more palatable. On the contrary, it’s emblematic of how the Times likes its Jews. Nostalgia-drenched representatives of now-vanished worlds are acceptable in retrospect — or at least preferable, from the Times point of view, to living, breathing, dancing modern Israelis.

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762x51FMJ
762x51FMJ
5 years ago

“All the news thats Fit to print”,
Is news fit to wrap a fish.

Mahou Shoujo
Mahou Shoujo
5 years ago

Another example of someone who can’t do, so they criticize, going to great lengths to draw irrelevancies to their grunts and utterances, indicateing an agenda rather than observation.

Suresh
Suresh
5 years ago

while Hungary keeps jihadis out and deports Left/liberal pro-jihadi Loons http://bit.ly/2gh6A72

Europe/USA denies christians/non-muslims entry and welcomes their murderers.

Es werde Licht
Es werde Licht
5 years ago

I didn´t see this dance performance so I dont know was it good or not.
But I hope that this new spirit ( worldwide ) moves on and the lefties will be destroyed.
And I give a dam* sh*t on Palastinians. This war is not about land, the Musels will proof that Islam is stronger then the GOD from the bible.

tatka150
tatka150
5 years ago
Reply to  Es werde Licht

Exactly. Israel has almost no land. It’s a narrow strip. Muzrats have a hell of the land and don’t know what to do with it. They just want to wipe Israel from the map. Israel is too good for these thugs. They need to evict them all for all their crimes against the state of Israel and the blood of their innocent victims. Stand with Israel!

Alex
Alex
5 years ago
Reply to  tatka150

America is fast being conquered by Islamo-Nazi ideology through its elite, whether its Democrats or Republican. The mass media gives tremendous possibilities for this conquest. In Germany the Nazi conquest went via masses of frustrated and angry Germans outraged by Western powers victors doing all possible to destroy German nation, physically and mentally.
The mass media allows conquest through incessant pseudo-left propaganda without parades and clownish speeches of Hitler and his lieutenants by mass brainwashing based on imagined, rather than real grievances of imagined peoples having nothing to do with real peoples and having nothing to do with USA and American people. It is brainwashing by a mass psycho hysteria and brain control by projecting virtual reality that in human brains exposed to this imagined reality lose control of actual reality. This neo-Nazi methods of brain control through virtual reality images had been forewarned by science fiction writers like Bradbury in his 451 Fahrenheit and others but no one has imagined that these amazing methods of brain control will be mastered and employed for world conquest by backward medieval ideology of Islam and nations who contributed nothing at all to the modern technologies in general and virtual reality technologies in particular. They just use what the conquered nations created and this is the amazing advantage of Islam and coherent Islamic nations through the history. They are adroit users of creations of peoples whom they are conquering. Its a difficult concept to swallow by the creators of Frankenstein that they submit to their invented monsters but this is what is happening. Nations after nations submit to backward, medieval Islamists who do not have any real tangible power except using advanced virtual media technology creating images of their invincibility and inevitability. Future historians, if such will exist in the grim future we are facing will study this phenomenon as one of the miracles of human, or subhuman inventiveness to turn the achievements of advanced civilizations into the tools of conquering and destroying these civilizations. I emphasize, not weapons but tools of mind control.

tatka150
tatka150
5 years ago
Reply to  Alex

Alex, thank you for your great detailed post. I can sign under each line. I think a major problem of Western liberal civilization is that the most of the population have no clue about the history, especially the history of the spreading of Issslam and it’s bloody “victories”. Knowledge is a force. In order to open their eyes these facts must be heard. Since not too many people read in our times. Kudos to the great Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, Breitbart and a few other who are trying to open the eyes and ears with the valuable information. But it’s definitely is not enough for the millions people who have no clue what is going on around them.

R. Arandas
R. Arandas
5 years ago

I can’t believe the American Jews are staying silent and mum about this movement, do they have no sense of pride left?

tatka150
tatka150
5 years ago
Reply to  R. Arandas

American Jews are not staying silent. Most of them are leftist libertads and they vote for the anitsemites-DamonCraps. And contribute for their campaigns. This is a special phenomenon. Jews were always oppressed, especially in Europe. So when they finally found the freedom in US, they become Democrats. I am a former European Jew and went through the Socialist’s hell. I know the price of it.

R. Arandas
R. Arandas
5 years ago
Reply to  tatka150

Are most European Jews leftist as well?

Ziggy46
Ziggy46
5 years ago

Well, it affirms that which is already known, the NY Times is nothing more than a Goebbels’-like propaganda rag. Welcome to the 21st Century, the continuation and acceleration of anti-Semitism/Israel vitriolic journalism. The mythological spin of the Palestinians is enabled by such media sloths whose ignorance and prejudicial agenda is daunting and woeful. The demonizing of Israel is a Progressivist/Fascist malignancy perpetrated by the MSM and the Leftist scourge. In the near future, those advocating Palestinian Rights, overlooking its depravity, murdering of Jews/Israelis in the name of Islam will come back to haunt them. The Leftists of the alleged journalism profession are no more than hate-mongers; no different than Goebbels and others awash in evil and hatred for Jews.

Achmed Mohandjob
Achmed Mohandjob
5 years ago
Reply to  Ziggy46

Ten large a month wouldn’t pay my bar tabs, much less my charges at the club. What a peasant.

poetcomic1
poetcomic1
5 years ago

Please, check-out the stirring story of this WORLD FAMOUS and earth-shaking little dance troupe on a Netflix documentary called Mr. Gaga (no connection with Lady…). The brilliant founder created a joy of movement for EVERYBODY, children, non-dancers, the disabled, the wheel chair bound etc. Unbelievable gift of movement and joy rather unlike those who can only turn children’s kites into blazing destruction

Mickey Oberman
Mickey Oberman
5 years ago

Who pays his salary?
Who will pay his retirement fund – as long as he toes the line?

In other words who is the source????, which question must be applied to all NYT and all MSM words.

freepetta
freepetta
5 years ago

If I ever did read The NY Times I’d use it as cat litter.l. Despicable POS!

John Michael Steele
John Michael Steele
5 years ago

Pitiful and disgraceful.

VTS
VTS
5 years ago

Well. There is no ballet in Phuckistine.

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