The Brooklyn Museum Is Progressive. Why Is the Left Attacking It?

One of the city’s most consistently progressive institutions — which had long enraged conservatives — has become the object of scorn by pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

On Wednesday morning, Anne Pasternak, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, awoke to find that the front of her co-op building had been defaced with red paint and accusations — attacks inscribed on a large banner — calling her “a white supremacist Zionist.” Trustees and the museum’s president also found their morning colored by similar angry disparagements in front of their own apartments. These apparently coordinated attacks came nearly two weeks after 34 people were arrested at a pro-Palestine rally in front of the museum. Protesters, who assaulted security staff and damaged artwork displayed in the plaza outside, were calling for Israeli divestment from a museum facing budget cuts and lumbering along with an endowment smaller than, say, Harvard’s by a factor of 407.

Outraged over the latest bout of vandalism, Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, stood on the Senate floor on Wednesday, slamming the “invasive attacks’’ as dehumanizing, “loaded with the threat of looming violence,” “vile,” “nasty,” “un-American.”

To those who were targeted it must have also seemed profoundly confusing. Seven months ago, the museum was criticized not for a sympathetic view toward Israel but instead for antisemitic leanings. The turmoil in which so many universities and cultural institutions were now engulfed was playing out at the museum as whiplash.

At a fair held in conjunction with the opening of an exhibit called “Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines,” printed materials had been sold bearing the controversial slogan “River to the sea, Palestine will be free.” The museum apologized, issuing a statement that said it was “giving care to reviewing our policies while remaining committed to freedom of artistic expression and striving to create spaces for all to see themselves and others with dignity.”

These have become increasingly ambitious if not altogether unachievable goals for those in the business of upholding the country’s liberal humanist traditions. From this vantage, it is all too easy to imagine a crisis of talent supply in the coming years, if not tomorrow — a pool diminishing to nonexistence of those inspired to govern academic and cultural outlets amid the seemingly irreconcilable conflict and chaos that each new week seems to bring. Just a few days ago, Collegiate, the 396-year-old Upper West Side school, announced the departure of its head, David Lourie, after only four years, following an internal report that found “disquieting problems of religious and cultural bias.”

The average tenure for a private school head declined from 10 years in 2012 to seven in 2020. The National Association of Independent Schools predicted that one in five heads who started during the 2021-22 academic year would be gone in three years. For any nonprofit institution, that kind of instability comes with problems around staff retention, enrollment, subscriptions, fund-raising. And this is unfolding against ever rising anti-intellectualism and a financial free fall that has caused at least 16 four-year colleges to close since the beginning of last year, the most recent of them Wells, in Aurora, N.Y., which cited as one of the many insurmountable challenges it faced after 156 years “an overall negative sentiment towards higher education.”