Class Struggle Education Workers and CUNY Internationalist Clubs came out to opening night of Tony Kushner's new play, May 5. After Board of Trustees had denied him an honorary degree, Kusher (left) was heartened by outpouring of support from CUNY faculty and students. (Photo: Steven Thrasher/Village Voice)

McCarthyite witch hunting in academia was spotlighted this month when the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) overturned a faculty recommendation to award an honorary degree to renowned playwright Tony Kushner. The motive for this unprecedented action by the CUNY Board was Kushner’s defense of the Palestinian people oppressed by Zionist Israel. The faculty at John Jay College had voted to recommend the degree to Kushner, a Pulitzer Prize winner of left-leaning views most famous for his play Angels in America. Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who has made a name for himself as a bush league Joe McCarthy, attacked Kushner as anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. Using quotes gleaned from the rabidly anti-communist and pro-Israel site Front Page, he demanded the degree be denied. The Board of Trustees, called to order by this ultra-Zionist attack dog, dutifully complied and turned down the nomination. Then all hell broke loose.

This was the second time in the space of a few months that blacklisting by officials of the City University of New York caused an uproar. In January, the CUNY tops got egg on their faces when Brooklyn College adjunct Kristofer Petersen-Overton had his appointment canceled by the college president, again over his defense of Palestinians, due to pressure from State Assemblyman Dov Hikind (a co-founder of the Zionist terrorist Jewish Defense League) and the self-same trustee Wiesenfeld. A campaign of protest and exposure forced B.C. to backtrack and rehire Petersen-Overton (see “CUNY Adjuncts ‘Won’t Take No for an Answer’,” Revolution No. 8, April 2010). Now Wiesenfeld was back on the attack, and in a paroxysm of Zionist zealotry smeared Kushner as a “self-hating Jewish anti-Semite” and extremist because of his (relatively mild) criticisms of Israel. Wiesenfeld also accused Palestinians of “worship[ping] death for their children” and called them “not human” (New York Times, May 5).

Back in 2007, Wiesenfeld was a driving force behind the firing of Arab American educator Debbie Almontaser, who had been appointed principal of a new Khalil Gibran International Academy, the first Arabic dual-language school in the U.S. The New York Post mounted a vicious campaign against her, Department of Education chief Joel Klein duly fired her and United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten joined in the bashing. Responding to a rabbi who supported Almontaser at a rally, Wiesenfeld told him to “get yourself a suicide bomb and go blow yourself up.” While Wiesenfeld is a real piece of work, and many at CUNY are calling for his resignation, it is the Board of Trustees itself that is the real culprit and should be abolished. (See “”Look Who’s Trusteeing at CUNY,” Revolution No. 5, September 2008.)

When the Board of Trustees snapped to attention and followed Wiesenfeld’s lead, faculty and students at CUNY reacted with indignation. A letter of protest was issued by a long list of distinguished professors; a special Facebook page was established as a clearing-house of protest statements, and the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), denounced the Board’s move and called for Wiesenfeld’s resignation.

Protest outside emergency meeting of CUNY Board of Trustees executive committee, May 8, which due to outpouring of protest reversed the denial of honorary degree to Tony Kushner. While many called for resignation of trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, CSEW and Internationalist Clubs called for abolishing the BoT altogether. (Internationalist photo)

Shortly after the CUNY trustees shamefully nixed his honorary degree, on May 5 Kushner’s new play, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, opened at New York’s Public Theater. A number of CUNY faculty and students, supporters of the CUNY Internationalist Clubs and Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), came out to defend him against the witch hunters, rushing over from a protest against budget cuts called by the PSC. Dozens of theater-goers and passersby enthusiastically greeted the comrades, and Kushner himself came out to greet them, saying he was “incredibly touched” by their support. In a story on this impromptu solidarity protest, the Village Voice (May 5) quoted CSEW activist Sándor John saying that the proposed degree was to recognize Kushner as “a great playwright and an important contributor to the cultural life of the city and of the world” and noting that Wiesenfeld has “a history of attacking academic freedom, and a history of attacking any views which are at all critical of Israel's policies.” The trustees, he said, had made “a scandalous intrusion on the rights of the faculty, the rights of the students, and an attack on academic freedom and artistic freedom.”

The affair grabbed national headlines, as Kushner is one of the foremost playwrights in the U.S. and internationally, who had already accumulated 15 honorary degrees in recognition of his work. Kushner ably defended himself with a hard-hitting letter to the trustees setting the record straight. In a panicky attempt at damage control, the Board of Trustees executive committee held a special, one-point meeting on May 9 which hurriedly voted to grant the honorary degree after all. Outside, several faculty, students and others held signs, including “’45 Alumna Outraged by CUNY BoT.” CUNY Internationalist and CSEW signs highlighted the need to abolish this den of witch hunters, union-busters, real-estate speculators and all-round nincompoops, a point also made in our short flier that read: “Enough is enough. Give the Board of Trustees a dishonorable degree ... and a dishonorable discharge. Not just Wiesenfeld but the whole Board of Trustees must go. Who elected them, anyway? Abolish the Board of Trustees. CUNY should be run by elected representatives of faculty, students and workers.”

In addition to the scandal and outcry, Kushner’s new play is richly rewarding. We print below a review by a comrade who has contributed previously to The Internationalist.

Review: 

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, a play by Tony Kushner

By R. Titta

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, by Tony
Kushner, with, from left: Michael Cristofer, K. Todd Freeman, Linda Emond, Stephen Spinella and
Steven Pasquale, at the Public Theater. (Photo: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

Tony Kushner is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America, an epic drama on the experience of AIDS in the United States during the reactionary Reagan era. His latest work, with the intentionally funny title, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, is now being performed at the Public Theater in Greenwich Village. Some supporters of The Internationalist were involved in organizing the successful protest against the CUNY Board of Trustees for attempting to deny Kushner an honorary degree bestowed on him by John Jay College. The motives of the CUNY Board were blatantly political, aimed at Kushner’s leftist views, specifically his opposition to policies of the government of Israel. The same night that his play opened, some of the pro-Kushner protestors stood before the theater in solidarity with Kushner, who came out and greeted them in a scene captured in the Village Voice.

Kushner’s new work is a compelling human drama that is also deeply political, telling the story of one Italian-American family from Brooklyn with a long history of anarchist and communist activity. For this, Kushner must be heartily commended, since it is rare in the United States to find a successful artist so thoroughly engaged in real social questions and aiming a critique at the very heart of American capitalism. In postwar McCarthyite North America, a reactionary wave of criticism condemned literary and artistic creations that had socialist content, while sentiments such as “art for art’s sake” and movements such as “abstract expressionism” were officially promoted (including by the CIA).

Particularly in the 1950s a critical premium was put on personal psychology as a hallmark of true art. Representational depictions of poor people in struggle and discussions of socialist or Marxist ideas (except to despise them) were attacked by bourgeois critics, to the extent that it was dangerous for the artist even to address such topics. While the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements served to weaken the oppressive strictures American bourgeois society imposed on art, they have not been eradicated. A playwright, author, painter or musician who takes up the cause of the working class and the oppressed, or seeks to address communist ideas or the history of the class struggle in America, still risks being pilloried by bourgeois critics for making “propaganda not art.”

Tony Kushner has not escaped such criticism, but he remains refreshingly defiant of the stereotype of the narcissistic artist, concerned about only “personal” things and avoiding larger social questions. The title of his play contains references both to the work of George Bernard Shaw (author of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism), a playwright Kushner obviously admires, and to Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, whose Key to the Scriptures is the main text of the Christian Science denomination. From these references one might not be prepared for the intensity of discussion that takes place in the play of Marxist ideas, especially dialectics and the alienation of labor, nor for the historical background of the Marcantonio family.

The family is depicted as relations of Vito Marcantonio, the CP-sympathizing congressman from East Harlem of the 1930s and 1940s, whose portrait hangs on the wall of the family living room. The father, Agosto Marcantonio, is revealed to have been the grandson of one of the Paterson, New Jersey, anarchist workers who helped a weaver named Gaetano Bresci return to Italy and kill King Umberto I in 1898. Agosto, called “Gus,” himself is a retired longshoreman, and he and his late wife were longtime members of the Communist Party. Gus is revealed to have recently attempted suicide, and he calls his family together to discuss his intention to try again. His proclaimed reason is that he has manifested early signs of Alzheimer’s, but in the course of the discussion the true reason emerges as political despair.

In Gus’s view, he has spent his life, in the union and in the Communist Party, seeking the overthrow of the capitalist system in America. This may seem improbable given the long commitment of the Stalinized CP to pro-Democratic Party reformism, but Gus like many CP militants did not join the Communist Party to be a reformist. He may have done mental backflips over the years to find justifications for the CP’s reformist (and sometimes outright reactionary) policies, but he is portrayed by Kushner as a Marxist in his heart of hearts.

Gus feels that now (during the George Bush II era), the prospects of overthrowing the capitalist system are bleaker than ever. The longshore union was greatly weakened by containerization – to Gus’s regret, he was involved in negotiating one of the “guaranteed annual income” contracts that ultimately brought two-tier pay status to the longshore workers. This betrayal is underscored by a poster on the living room wall, “An Injury to One Is an Injury to All,” the old Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) slogan adopted by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. It is rather amazing these days to see an author dealing with such things as the onslaught against industrial labor, to even mention a word like “containerization,” and to know something about it. And it sure beats the anti-labor vituperation of anti-communist finks Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront.

Gus is also despairing from the collapse of the USSR and the ensuing bitter splits that have much reduced the Communist Party, which Gus feels will soon disappear altogether. (In fact, the CPUSA leadership is proposing to rename the party in order to ditch the dreaded “C word.”) Yet the old man retains a lot of revolutionary energy, and here and there he lashes out at the capitalist system with the ardor of his youth.

Gus’s family is populated by characters nearly as fascinating as he is. His sister is named Clio, for the Greek goddess or muse of history. Clio has an unstable past of alternately living in a convent and joining the Tupac Amaru movement and even, briefly, Sendero Luminoso in Peru. She has returned to Paterson, the place from which her anarchist grandfather had to flee. She is living in subsidized housing, where she uses her education to help the people living there, all poor and black, cope with official white society. She is a calming and even wise presence, with an extremely dry sense of humor.

Gus’s children have all dealt with the politics of their parents in their own way. A lesbian daughter, “M.T.” or “Empty” (for Maria Teresa), is a committed Democratic Party supporter and she has many arguments with her father, who as we have seen, is cast in a revolutionary light despite his allegiance to the reformist CP. In an angry moment Gus tells M.T., “what you call progress I call the prison rebuilding itself!” (This has the sound of a cri de coeur from the playwright himself.) Another son, much younger, is depicted as having missed out on most of the radicalism of his family. He is ironically called Vito, after his famous great-uncle, but is a reactionary, anti-union small businessman superexploiting Latino workers at minimum wage.

The middle child, Pil (for Pier Luigi), is in some ways an obviously autobiographical creation of Kushner’s. He is a gay high school teacher in Minneapolis, in his 50s, and conflicted about whether to pursue a passionate affair with Eli, a younger hustler he’s fallen in love with, or renew a commitment to his husband Paul, a black atheist theology professor, who has lately been reduced to adjunct status.

Pil also holds strong Marxist views. He is still working on his Ph.D. thesis, the subject of which is the CP-led San Francisco general strike of 1934. He has discovered that Harry Hay, one of the founders in 1950 of the Mattachine Society – the first gay rights group in the U.S., constituted mainly at first of ex-CP members – was an active participant in the 1934 strike. In a passionate argument with his father, Pil denounces the Stalinists’ revolting and reactionary line against homosexuality. In the same argument, Pil lauds the role of the Trotskyists in organizing the Minneapolis general strike the same year, which Gus considers a victory for the working class.

But then in admiring the Trotskyists (called “Trotskyites” in realistic Stalinist fashion), Pil blurs the distinction between the followers of Trotsky and the followers of the anti-Trotskyist renegade Max Shachtman, who eventually joined Norman Thomas’s CIA-infested Socialist Party. So in Pil’s somewhat confused argument, the “Trotskyites” merge with the “Socialists,” who are held up as being much more progressive on the question of homosexuality. Proof is adduced with reference to “The Homosexual in Society,” an early gay rights essay written by Robert Duncan, which first appeared in 1944 in Politics, a magazine edited by Shachtmanite Dwight Macdonald. In Duncan’s essay anti-homosexual prejudice is revealed in all its brutality as akin to anti-black racism, with the difference that many influential homosexuals disguised their identities and refuse to struggle.

Despite its provenance, the essay is indeed a landmark in the struggle against the oppression of homosexuals. The opening words of Duncan’s essay give an idea of its importance: “I propose to discuss a group whose only salvation is in the struggle of all humanity for freedom and individual integrity; who have suffered in modern society persecution; excommunication; and whose intellectuals, whose most articulate members, have been willing to desert that primary struggle . . .”. On the other hand, Kushner’s regard for Dwight Macdonald as a Trotskyist is entirely mistaken, and has likely been picked up from the unending Stalinist campaigns to associate Trotsky with his anti-communist political enemies. Macdonald’s brief flirtation with Trotsky and Trotskyism was followed by many years as a leading and virulent Cold Warrior, associated with the CIA-funded Committee on Cultural Freedom.

The discussion between Gus and Pil on homosexuality is nevertheless one of the most charged and exciting in the play. Pil at one point recalls for Gus that the Stalinists once outrageously held that homosexuality leads to fascism. (Homosexuals were routinely expelled from the party.) But Gus does refer to the fact that the Bolsheviks abolished all laws against homosexuality immediately upon coming to power. At the end of the play there is a quiet scene, moving and satisfying, between Gus and Eli, the young “hustler,” that seems to unlock Gus’s despair. Kushner here reveals his own ability to recognize and criticize the reactionary policies of the Stalinized CP while also honoring the revolutionary commitment of many militants like Gus.

There is much to tell about this play, including its view on the question of suicide, the discovery toward the end of the play of a satchel with surprising documents buried in a wall and more, but I will stop here. I think Tony Kushner has created an excellent work of art, depicting a human drama somewhat in the vein of Arthur Miller’s plays (especially The Crucible and A View from the Bridge) but without the surreptitious McCarthy-era Aesopian language used by Miller to disguise his subjects from bourgeois censorship. Kushner shows himself to be a highly engaged leftist intellectual. Questions of sexuality and the family are clearly bound up for him with the question of reform vs. revolution. He is especially grappling with the negative aftermath of the counterrevolution in the USSR. The play indicates that in his most honest moments Tony Kushner is an artist for whom the flame of revolution has not gone out. ■

Neo-McCarthyites Target Campus Leftists Inquisitors Still Going After the Rosenbergs Some have questioned what the furor over CUNY’s denial of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner has to do with academic freedom (see Stanley Fish’s May 8 blog posting “The Kushner Flap: Much Ado About Nothing” on the New York Times website). The answer is: plenty. In Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s drama of AIDS in the reactionary Reagan era, the figure of Ethel Rosenberg appears to haunt the dying witch-hunter Roy Cohn, Senator Joe  McCarthy’s right-hand man, who even on his deathbed symbolizes the cruelty and hypocrisy of official American society. Today’s McCarthy clones are still haunted by the spectre of the Rosenbergs. On the NewsRealBlog (10 May), one Phyllis Chesler wrote breathlessly, “Just Who Nominated Tony Kushner WON’T Surprise You.” This retired CUNY professor declared: “When I first described the City University of New York as the Communist University of New York, I had no idea how right I was. It seems that Dr. Michael Meeropol, the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, is one of two professors at John Jay College who nominated Tony Kushner for this honorary degree.” Right-wingers hailed Chesler for uncovering a nefarious plot by the son of “Communist spies.” While the attack on Tony Kushner was spearheaded by one unhinged CUNY trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, it was the product of a whole apparatus of professional witch hunters. Wiesenfeld says he went to the website of Norman Finkelstein, whom he describes as “another discredited individual, that mercifully we rid ourselves of at this university,”[1] where he found quotes from Kushner. Actually, Wiesenfeld left out a step: the quotes he cited are all to be found on David Horowitz’s Internet site Frontpagemag.com, which has been going after Kushner and Finkelstein for years. Chesler, too, works closely with Horowitz, the megalomaniacal red-hunter whose on-line outlets include the “David Horowitz Freedom Center.” His self-appointed mission (for which he receives big bucks from nefarious sources) is “the defense of free societies … under attack by leftist and Islamist enemies at home and abroad.” During the anti-Communist witch hunts at the onset of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, American universities were systematically purged of “reds.” Senator Joe McCarthy’s bloodhounds roamed the land (as former New York Times reporter Selwyn Raab put it), looking for “subversive” faculty members to be pilloried. More than a dozen professors at City College of New York and Brooklyn College were fired after hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. These days, witch-hunting, like prisons and police, has been heavily privatized, outsourced to the likes of Fox News, the New York Post and professional inquisitors like Horowitz. Enlisting student snitches as junior G-men to turn in their professors, in addition to his web sites this modern-day Torquemada published a hit list, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006) Horowitz is an extreme Zionist, as are Wiesenfeld and Chesler, of the sort that think Obama has “thrown Israel to the dogs.” They are closely tied to the Muslim bashers who tried to prevent the construction of an Islamic cultural center and mosque in Lower Manhattan last year (see “Mobilize Against Racist Attacks on Muslims and Immigrants,” The Internationalist No. 32, January-February 2011). One of the poisonous specialties of this crew is hounding people of Jewish ethnicity whom they regard as insufficiently pro-Israel and anti-Arab. They go after the “crypto-communist” Tony Kushner with the same fervor that Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and the witch hunters of their day (including many anti-communist liberals) orchestrated the legal lynching of the Rosenbergs, the firing of the “Hollywood Ten” and blacklisting of hundreds in the entertainment industry, and the hunt to ferret out “reds” supposedly hiding under the bushes on campus. Michael Meeropol is a visiting professor of economics and interdisciplinary studies at John Jay College. His younger brother Robert, who directs a foundation to aid youths and children of parents targeted by state repression, detailed in a posting titled “Communist Coup?” (Director’s Blog, Rosenberg Fund for Children website, May 19) how the witch-hunters conjured up their Rosenberg-Kushner amalgam. For our part, we salute the Meeropol brothers, who have stood tall through decades of smears and anti-communist campaigns, which even now are being conducted against them by the vilest bigots in America, nearly 60 years after the state murder of their heroic parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. [1] Finkelstein, whose parents were survivors of the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camps, taught for nine years at Hunter College before he was forced out by the campus administration following publication of his book The Holocaust Industry (2000), which exposes how Zionists exploit the Nazi genocide as an ideological weapon to silence criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Subsequently, after teaching for six years at DePauw University in Chicago, Finkelstein was denied tenure due to a campaign of vilification against him led by Alan Dershowitz.