The Statue of Liberty against the New York City skyline, one of the entertainment capitals of America. Gordon Donovan via Reuters Connect.

Six months after October 7th, 2023, I sat with an acclaimed Israeli author in Tel Aviv. Her books had been translated into English and sold in bookstores across the United States for years, including her latest.

In spite of this success, she shared that her publisher told her there wasn’t a single bookstore in New York City willing to host her for a reading.

New York, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world.

I wish her experience were rare, but it isn’t. Jewish and Israeli comedians and performers are losing shows over vague “security concerns,” filmmakers are being pulled from festival lineups, and successful authors are learning their publishers have suddenly lost interest in whatever they write next.

Some institutions will say they’re simply managing risk. But when the same ‘risk’ only ever applies to Jewish and Israeli artists, it isn’t caution. It’s exclusion.

One dot on a page, on its own, means nothing. Plot enough of them, and a trendline emerges that can’t be waved away as coincidence.

We set out to document these trends, with a new initiative assessing 40 of some of the country’s most well-known art museums and examining antisemitism within the literary and entertainment worlds. Our findings should trouble anyone who cares about American arts and culture, not just the Jewish community.

Ask any novelist or comedian who has ever softened a line out of fear, and they will recognize exactly what’s at stake. A culture willing to quietly edit out one group over its identity will eventually find reason to edit out another.

Of the 40 museums we evaluated, only one earned the highest rating possible in our assessment. Twelve — such as the Walker Art Center, the Broad, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art — landed in the lowest category. Only six of all 40 museums recognized Jewish American Heritage Month before October 7th, and five of those have since stopped. Not a single museum names Jewish identity in its diversity and inclusion policies.

In publishing, we identified seven distinct anti-Jewish trends, from suppressing Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist themes to coordinating review bombing campaigns. In the performing arts, we documented dozens of cases across 41 U.S. cities where Jewish, Israeli, or openly Zionist performers were harassed, disrupted, or canceled.

None of this reflects what the American public wants. We found that 88 percent of survey respondents would visit an art gallery exhibiting work by Jewish artists, 87 percent would attend a performance featuring Jewish performers, and 84 percent would still buy a book that interested them even if they knew it included Jewish topics or characters.

The audience isn’t the problem. Institutions are “playing it safe” at the expense of the audiences they depend on — and at the expense of the artists.

Jewish artists aren’t new to American culture. They helped build it. Take away Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand, and American music sounds different. Pull Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, and Judy Blume off the shelf, and American fiction reads differently too. Lillian Hellman and Neil Simon shaped what happens on the American stage, while Rothko, Lichtenstein, Judy Chicago, and Helen Frankenthaler shaped what hangs on the walls of our best museums. Without these artists, American culture would be unrecognizable.

To preserve that legacy, we’re pushing forward on three fronts. First, we’re documenting trends, so quiet exclusion can’t hide behind vague explanations.

Second, we’re educating the industry, because the assumption driving many of these decisions – that audiences don’t want Jewish or Israeli artists – is one the data flatly contradicts.

Finally, we’re directly advocating with museums, publishers, and cultural institutions. We must press them to explicitly prohibit antisemitism through their own policies, resist pressure campaigns aimed at silencing one group, and trust the audiences who have already told us what they want.

That Israeli author I sat with over two years ago deserved a bookstore willing to host her in New York, and so does the next artist facing the same scenario. Getting that right is a test of whether American culture still has room for everyone, regardless of their identity. We intend to make sure it does.

Jonathan A. Greenblatt is CEO and National Director of ADL (the Anti-Defamation League).