Trump, Antisemitism, Art: A Conversation with Tony Kushner

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL HOST: Next, Tony Kushner is one of America’s most celebrated theater and screenwriters, and a film that he co-wrote nearly 20 years ago is getting a second look amid this war, Steven Spielberg’s “Munich.” This is the story of an assassination of Israeli Olympic athletes at the 1972 Games by Palestinian terrorists. It’s also the story of Israel’s secret mission to hunt down and assassinate each of those assassins. In one scene, though, Israeli agent, Avner, is face to face with a group of Palestinians. This exchange with Ali and the topic of vengeance has been noted as strikingly relevant today. Here’s the clip.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You people have nothing to bargain with. You’ll never get the land back. You’ll all die old men in refugee camps waiting for  Palestine.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have a lot of children. They’ll have children. So, we can wait forever. And if we need to, we can make the whole planet unsafe for Jews.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You kill Jews and the world feels bad for them and thinks you are animals.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. But then the world will see how they’ve made us into animals. They’ll start to ask questions about the conditions in our cages.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

AMANPOUR: That was an 18-year-old script. Tony Kushner joins Walter Isaacson now to discuss the war, antisemitism, and the purpose of art, especially in this climate.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Tony Kushner, welcome to the show.

TONY KUSHNER, AWARD-WINNING PLAYWRIGHT AND SCREENWRITER: Thanks. It’s a pleasure to be here.

ISAACSON: It’s been three months since the Hamas terror attack on Israel. And I just read a piece in “The New York Times” by Lisa Schwarzbaum who said, the best way to process it is through the movie “Munich” that you wrote, co-wrote, and Spielberg directed. Tell me how you’re processing it and how that movie, “Munich” helps you process it.

KUSHNER: Oh, I’m not processing it very well. I mean, I think it’s a staggeringly upsetting and confusing time and a very, very frightening time. I, you know. I feel sort of crushed every day by horror at what’s happening in Gaza, at the circumstances that the Palestinian people in Gaza are living in. I’m very worried about Israel and what its actions in Gaza have done to its international reputation, to its historical reputation. I’m very worried about what’s happening in the United States. I’m a big supporter of Joe Biden, but I have to say I’m very disappointed so far in the administration’s response to the bombing of Gaza.

ISAACSON: Wait, wait. Why is that? Because they’ve not been harsh enough about the civilian casualties?

KUSHNER: Well, I mean, yes. You know, the president started out, you know, I think mistakenly embracing Netanyahu and sort of saying, we’re with you all the way, and then, you know, uttering these kinds of fairly tepid platitudes about, you know, let’s be careful about what we do next because, of course, everyone knew the minute we heard about the horrors of October 7th that the response was going to be horrendous and that Gaza was going to be bombed and that thousands of people were going to be killed. I didn’t imagine that it would rise to the level that it’s risen. It’s 22,000 people, according to the Hamas health authorities. And the president’s response has been, you know, to sort of dig in in a way that’s surprising to me. Because I think he’s a profoundly decent guy and I think he leads often with his heart and sometimes that leads him to do very brave things. And I feel that he should have been much firmer about stopping this. And so, some of the blood is on our hands at this point.

ISAACSON: Do you think that sometimes this criticism of Israel, people are saying it’s motivated partly by antisemitism, you’ve tried in letters you’ve written last November, I think, to separate antisemitism from being anti-Israel, but is this getting harder to do now?

KUSHNER: The weaponization of the charge of antisemitism which is by the right, which is not a new thing. But I think that, you know, there’s still absolutely no question support of the Palestinian people criticism of Israel is in no way antisemitic, it isn’t anti-Jewish, it isn’t even anti-Israel. I mean, you know, the Israeli press is full of — you know, Haaretz, I mean, they’re — you know, they’re, the Israelis are — the Israeli press is certainly full of self-criticism, and this is a time profound internal conflict in Israel. You know, it’s a — it’s not a country that operates with a single voice. And there’s a fiction that’s been created by the right in the United States that it does and therefore, everyone in the United States, especially all American Jews, have to speak with a single voice of absolute blind support for Israel and whatever it’s doing. And I think this is a danger for any country to not tolerate dissent. And so, it’s not any more difficult to say that students protesting and using the term Intifada are not anti-Semites. Intifada is not an antisemitic term. And the danger to Jews, and there’s always danger to Jews, we’re a very small minority and we have a very unique position of having been targeted throughout — you know, at least for the last 2,000 years and suffering terrible oppression and persecution. But our — the danger to us, I think, almost always comes from the right, not the left, and I see no danger to Jews in people arguing that the Palestinian people need to be treated, you know, in accordance with international standards of decency and according to their human rights. And I think it’s a great danger to Jews for Jews to not speak out in support of the Palestinians because it — you know, I don’t think that being Jewish is a tribal identity. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe in tribalism. I think it’s always a mistake. And you know, Jewish ethnic, ethical teaching doesn’t draw the line at — between Jew and non-Jew.

ISAACSON: You talk about calls for intifada, and you’re saying that’s not really an attack on Jews, but do you think it’s now, especially on college campuses, those chants, become an attack on Jews, antisemitic?

KUSHNER: Well, look, I’m — I’ve gone to teach on a college campus. I have not — I’ve been very busy in the last few weeks. I have not gone to college campuses to — I have seen no evidence that there’s a huge increase of attacks on Jewish students. I think there have been some reports of altercations between Jewish students and other people, but I don’t see a great danger. It doesn’t strike me.

ISAACSON: So, you’re not worried about the rise of antisemitism in the next three months?

KUSHNER: I’m very worried about the rise of antisemitism. I’m worried about the rise of antisemitism with people like Trump sitting down and having dinner with Kanye West and that creature, whatever his name was.

ISAACSON: But you’re not worried about antisemitism on the left?

KUSHNER: Anywhere that antisemitism appears is a concern for me. If I see evidence of antisemitism, I have — almost all of my friends are on the left, I have a number of Palestinian friends, none of them are anti- Semites. If they were anti-Semites, I wouldn’t be friends with them, and I would imagine they wouldn’t want to be friends with me. There’s a great deal of anger against Israel. There’s a great deal of anger against the Jewish American community. It is — I mean, I’m not minimizing the sort of scariness of anger directed at Jews anywhere at any time can feel like it will boil over very easily into antisemitism, because antisemitism is such a pervasive theme in western consciousness. But I think with — you know, with goodwill and discernment and using your faculties of reason rather than emotion, it’s easy to understand where the anger comes from, and easy to also see where our real enemies are. I mean, the spectacle of Elise Stefanik, who supports Donald Trump wholeheartedly, which means that she supports the replacement theory, which is just fundamentally an antisemitic theory, getting up and yelling at the presidents of these three schools about their weakness on antisemitism is ridiculous.

ISAACSON: Over the years you’ve worked with Steven Spielberg, working through a lot of these issues, especially Jewish identity, I think, from “Munich” to “The Fablemans.” Tell me what it was like working with him and what were the themes that you all were trying to develop?

KUSHNER: Well, we never sat out and talked about themes. We just sort of liked each other from the first time we started talking, which was about I had published with Elisa Solomon an anthology called “Wrestling with Zion,” 58 Jewish — progressive Jewish Americans talking about the Middle East conflict, about the Palestinian Israeli conflict. And Steven read the anthology and called me and said, I have this movie that I’m working on, would you like to try and write the script? I thought that Lisa Schwarzbaum’s essay about it, by the way, was magnificent. The one thing I would add to what Lisa said, because Steven and I decided to watch “Munich.” neither of us had watched it since it first came out 20 years ago. When we were making “The Fablemans,” we decided that we would go to his house and watch it. And I was stunned by something that — this is why I love working with him. There isn’t — it’s a very bloody movie and a lot of people die in it. There isn’t a single death in the entire film, even in a scene in Beirut where there’s just dozens of people being shot and killed, Steven never shows you a single death as a kind of entertainment. He introduces — and I don’t know that he did this consciously, we didn’t talk about it, but every single person who dies has — there’s a moment right before they die that forces you to recognize that person’s humanity, which is why the movie is so upsetting. And it’s really unique in that way, and I think it’s a great response to unfortunate tendency in Hollywood to use human destruction, the destruction of human lives as a kind of, you know, like, way of amping up the stakes and getting people’s heartbeats faster. There’s a profound grief in the film. That’s why I think Steven is a great artist. I mean, you see it in all of his movies, it’s in “Jaws.” When the shark blows up at the end, there’s this stunning moment where you see the fin underwater spinning through this cloud of blood, and it’s a moment of grief for this magnificent creature has been destroyed, and it undercuts the triumphalism of the end quite a bit. You know, it’s — I love working with him. I consider it a great honor and one of the great blessings in my life that we’ve developed this working relationship.

ISAACSON: You know, a lot of great artists in history, you know, Leonardo da Vinci comes to mind, sort of grew up as outsiders. He grows up in a small village, gay, left-handed, born out of wedlock. You grew up down here in Louisiana, Lake Charles, not too far from here, gay and Jewish. And how did that shaping of being an outsider affect your art?

KUSHNER: You know, there was a very proud, very small Jew while you’re from Louisiana, also. So, you know, I mean — we, the Jewish community in Lake Charles, Louisiana was large enough to have a temple and services and an identity and it was a very proud identity and no one apologized for being Jewish. I have said many, many times that when I came out of the closet as a gay man, the model that I used for claiming this identity that had been — that was being sort of, you know, disparaged and rejected and despised by the majority was the model that my parents had given me as a Jew, that, you know, if they don’t like you, it’s their problem, it’s not you, it’s them, you know, they need to change, you don’t need to change, you need to be who you are, and I think it was an important lesson to learn. I mean, I — you know, I also grew up during a time of busing and integration and what is now called social engineering that even Richard Nixon sort of went along with. And so, my high school was integrated and that taught me a lot about, when a society makes a decision to really go after a great social evil like racism in the Deep South, astonishing change can happen. And I watched it happen in my high school and it — you know, that changed my life. I mean, I saw my cousins in New York all went to segregated high schools. I went to a high school that was 50 percent black and 50 percent white. So, I grew up believing profoundly, and I still believe in it, that, again, when we apply ourselves, we can take situations that seem absolutely irresolvable and impossible to fix, and we can fix them, we can make things better, but we have to go at it with a will.

ISAACSON: One of the great milestones in terms of gay, lesbian rights was Angels in America. I think, what, 30 years ago or so?

KUSHNER: Yes.

ISAACSON: And now, do you think there’s been a backlash against those rights?

KUSHNER: I think that, you know, like all rights that have been granted, including, you know, the right to an abortion, the right now to health care it’s — we’re learning, and I think it’s a — it’s, for me, a very moving lesson that once people have been given a right, they won’t let go of it easily. I think that that’s certainly true of same sex marriage and of the acceptance of gay people in American society. The Republicans have tried to figure out a new way to, you know, bout (ph) with these really repulsive accusations of child molestation and grooming and all of this stuff. It’s coded language. We haven’t gone all the way back to Pat Buchanan getting up in 1992 and making homophobic jokes at the Republican National Convention. We may get that next time. I don’t know. But I think there’s pushback, but everything that I read indicates that — you know, I mean, obviously we know now after the, after Dobbs and the overturn of Roe, that no rights are secure. I mean, to go back to, you know, a Jewish theme, what we learn every year at Seder is that in every generation, a new pharaoh arises seeking to destroy us. And the fight for justice and liberation and the end of oppression is constant and has to be constantly renewed. You can never say, OK, we won. Now, we can be secure.

ISAACSON: When you were young and you thought about becoming a playwright, I read that you were a little worried. You thought it might be a bit trivial that art wasn’t serious enough. After all these years, do you think art, and especially being a playwright, is serious enough and can actually help change the world?

KUSHNER: I don’t believe that artists should believe that art can change the world. I don’t believe you should art thinking you’re going to change the world, because I think that art has tremendous power, but mostly I think its power is not in the way that it leads directly to action. I think it’s an indirect power. Politics is the necessary evil of political action is pushing aside all of the contradictions and complexities of life and saying. here is the best, here’s our best guess at where to move, how to act. Art in a certain sense doesn’t do that. It says, let’s look at all of the complexities and all of the contradictions. It doesn’t silence any voice. It says, let’s bring in the whole sort of plethora of perspectives and spend time thinking about how overwhelming human experience is, how overwhelming life is. I think most human beings find art somewhere and engage with it. And I think it fills your capacity and strengthens your capacity to be human and to — and then, you wake up out of the dream and you go forth into the world, I think, more capable of figuring out the right way to move because you’ve learned not to filter out too much of the confusion and contradiction before you make the decision. So, you — that’s where wisdom comes from, I think art can produce. Wisdom is the short answer to your question.

ISAACSON: Tony Kushner, thank you so much for joining us.

KUSHNER: Thank you, Walter. It’s a real pleasure.