New Jersey Jewish News
Editorial

Stage fright

Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief

New York’s theater community is embroiled in a controversy over the on-again, off-again staging of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a British play about the 23-year-old American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003. Corrie was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement, a group of pro-Palestinian “idealists” whose ideals include a refusal to condemn the terrorism that might lead Israelis to act in their own self-defense.

Critics of the play say it too refuses to acknowledge this reality, and their protests apparently became loud enough that its performance at the New York Theater Workshop is being “delayed.” Theater hounds are baying, and actress Vanessa Redgrave surprised no one by calling the workshop’s decision “censorship of the worst kind” and the “blacklisting of a dead girl and her diaries.”

Producers of the New York performance say that postponement is not the same thing as censorship, and they will use the time to discuss how to “contextualize” the production. Here’s an idea: Ten years ago, on Feb. 26, American rabbinical student Matthew Eisenfeld and his fiancee, Sara Duker, were killed in a terrorist bus bombing in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of 26 people. Their parents, Vicki and Leonard Eisenfeld of West Hartford, Conn., and Arline Duker of Teaneck, are seeking legislation that would pressure Iran to stop financing terrorism.

How’s that for drama? Let theatergoers hear about Rachel Corrie — but also tell the stories of the other young Americans who paid a price for her colleagues’ “idealism.”

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