Rachel Corrie, a young American peace activist, died three years ago beneath an Israeli bulldozer in front of a Palestinian pharmacist’s house in Gaza. She was 23 years old, and she left some words behind. Her words don’t clarify the murky circumstances surrounding her death, but they paint a moving picture of her life and her beliefs, according to those who have seen My Name is Rachel Corrie in London.

The Nation has attempted to answer the question posed above, in an editorial (“An American Inquisition?”) and an article by Philip Weiss (“Too Hot for New York”). Weiss’s article shows many people dancing around the elephant in the room, everyone reluctant to pinpoint the cause. And, truly, it seems the cause is too diffuse to capture in a word or phrase. But the general outlines emerge, and Weiss produces them at the article’s end, after quoting theater blogger George Hunka’s description of the controversy as “an extraordinarily rare picture of the ways that New York cultural institutions make their decisions about what to produce.”

Hunka doesn’t use the J-word. Jen Marlowe does. A Jewish activist with Rachelswords.org (which is staging a reading of Corrie’s words on March 22 with the Corrie parents present), she says, “I don’t want to say the Jewish community is monolithic. It isn’t. But among many American Jews who are very progressive and fight deeply for many social justice issues, there’s a knee-jerk reflexive reaction that happens around issues related to Israel.”

Questions about pressure from Jewish leaders morph quickly into questions about funding. Ellen Stewart, the legendary director of the theatrical group La MaMa E.T.C., which is across East 4th Street from the [New York Theatre] Workshop, speculates that the trouble began with its “very affluent” board. Rachel’s father, Craig Corrie, echoes her. “Do an investigation, follow the money.” I called six board members and got no response. (About a third appear to be Jewish, as am I.) This is of course a charged issue. The writer Alisa Solomon, who was appalled by the postponement, nonetheless warns, “There’s something a little too familiar about the image of Jews pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes.”

Perhaps. But [NYTW artistic director James] Nicola’s statement about a back channel to Jewish leaders suggests the presence of a cultural lobby that parallels the vaunted pro-Israel lobby in think tanks and Congress. I doubt we will find out whether the Workshop’s decision was “internally generated,” as [Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony] Kushner contends, or more orchestrated, as I suspect. What the episode has demonstrated is a climate of fear. Not of physical harm, but of loss of opportunities. “The silence results from fear and intimidation,” says Cindy Corrie [Rachel Corrie's mother]. “I don’t see what else. And it harms not only Palestinians. I believe, from the bottom of my heart, it harms Israelis and it harms us.”

Kushner agrees. Having spent five months defending Munich, he says the fear has two sources: “There is a very, very highly organized attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel’s policies, and it’s a very unpleasant experience to be in the cross hairs. These aren’t hayseeds from Kansas screaming about gays burning in hell; they’re newspaper columnists who are taken seriously.” These attackers impose a kind of literacy test: Before you can cast a moral vote on Palestinian rights, you must be able to recite a million wonky facts, such as what percentage of the territories were outside the Green Line in 1949. Then there is the self-generated fear of lending support to anti-Semites or those who would destroy Israel. All in all, says Kushner, it can leave someone “overwhelmed and in despair—you feel like you should just say nothing.”

Who will tell Americans the Middle East story? For generations that story has been one of Israelis as victims, and it has been crucial to Israeli policy inasmuch as Israel has been able to defy its neighbors’ opinions by relying on a highly sympathetic superpower. Israel’s supporters have always feared that if Americans started to conduct the same frank discussion of issues that takes place in Tel Aviv, we might become more evenhanded in our approach to the Middle East. That pressure is what has stifled a play that portrays the Palestinians as victims (and thrown a blanket over a movie, Munich, that portrays both sides as victims). I’ve never written this sort of thing before. How moving that we have been granted that freedom by a 23-year-old woman with literary gifts who was not given time to unpack them.

I’ve noted many times that one is more likely to find an open, multisided discussion of the Palestinian issue in the Israeli press than in the American media. Kudos to The Nation.

On the broader issue of the power and influence of the “Israel lobby,” see this recent article by two American scholars—in the London Review of Books.

Olbrichsky asked Andrey Konchalovsky to direct, and together they chose King Lear.

What follows is a translation of an interview with Konchalovsky that appeared in Московские новости on 2 February 2006.

The Moscow News correspondent [Valery Masterov] asked how long Konchalovsky mulled over the offer from Olbrichsky.

—I agreed immediately. First of all, Daniel is a huge actor on stage and screen. I hadn’t had a chance to work with him, and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. Second, right now I’m drawn more to theater, especially the classics.

—So you took the commission without any doubts?

—There were some doubts about which play to choose. We thought about Chekhov, Strindberg, Ibsen. But we preferred Shakespeare, who was the first I’d ever directed. King Lear is a very difficult piece, and I thought: If not now, when?

—You’ve said many times that traditional culture is dying and that, in this context, the classics look absurd. And yet you chose a classic.

—When I speak of the assault of postmodernism, it’s Europe I primarily have in mind.

Nowadays they present the classics in abundance, but transfer the action to different places and times. Fashionable directors want to attract attention to themselves — the author of the play is, for them, a pretext for self-expression.

—In the Polish press they wrote that the leitmotif of this Shakespeare play—the rejection of absolute power and the collapse of the monarchy—can be seen as the disintegration of the Soviet empire.

—People can write whatever they like. You want hints? Look for them. It’s people living under totalitarian regimes who go to the theater to find hidden political references.

What my Lear is about I’ll venture to say after the tenth performance, at the earliest. I tried to understand what the author was trying to say. Shakespeare wasn’t answering questions, he was asking them. And so the viewers will ask themselves questions, which, after a good performance, basically reduce to a question about life: What does it all mean?

—How much time did you spend preparing for this production?

—I started preparing for it forty-five years ago. Work on any production consists of everything you’ve done previously. And the experience of King Lear will undoubtedly enter into preparation for the next production.

—What was your working relationship with the Polish actors? You’ve said there’s a curtain between Russia and Poland, dividing our culture, mentality, religion …

—And the curtain will always be there. Just as between, say, Russian and Estonia. In Moscow there are loads of theaters, one and the same culture, but the rancor is indescribable.

It’s possible for people to belong to the same culture and detest one another, but it’s possible to present different cultures and love one another if you work together on the same task.

—You weren’t bothered by the fact that the actors were taken from popular Polish television series?

—Daniel handled the casting. The actor must be good, first and foremost. And good actors earn money, unfortunately, in various ways. You can’t make a living in the theater, even playing Shakespeare.

—But people who are used to TV shows will come to see familiar actors, not Shakespeare.

—The main thing is that they come and that they think.