This quote from the end of a WaPo article about the donor pressure (nonprofit cultural BDS) campaign of COPMA (Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art) left out an important fact.
“If you can be terrorized by e-mail, that’s what COPMA has done,” Roth says. He has met with COPMA activists and recognizes them as being like people he knew growing up, people driven by a love of Israel and a fear that a hostile world could turn against Jews at any time.
“I think,” Roth says with sudden enthusiasm, “we should write a play about them.”
In 2007 Ari Roth produced a play, in cooperation with the Capital Fringe Festival that used the Theater J performance space at the DCJCC, called "Pangs of the Messiah." Images below are photos of the printed 2007 brochure DCJCC printed to promote "Pangs of the Messiah" and 7 other plays that were produced in Theater J performance space at the DCJCC on 16th street, NW as part of the 2007 Capital Fringe Festival.
To repeat, "Pangs of the Messiah" was written by the same playwright, Motti Lerner, who later wrote "The Admission" that became the object of COPMA's nonprofit donor pressure (cultural BDS campaign) to deny Greater Washington Jewish Federation funding to support. COPMA was using BDS tactics against one target, the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, to stop what COPMA perceived as advocacy for the use of BDS tactics against another target the GOI (Government of Israel) to change their peace and security policies to provide for civil legal equality, including freedom of movement of people and goods, for all citizens currently subject to Israel's control by both civil and military power. The blog post from 2007
And who is losing? Philip Weiss, who went and discovered a largely older and in many ways sympathetic crowd of familiar Jews who still saw the world was against them, wrote:
compassionately and sympathetically expressed the same feeling Ari Roth expressed about COPMA members in his quote in the 2014 article.
This article
shows that COPMA in Washington D.C. was not alone in their use of nonprofit donor pressure (cultural BDS tactics) on Jewish Federations to suppress plays that encouraged audiences to rethink what they thought they knew as a basis for their views on resolving the Israel-Palestine and regional Israel-Arab conflicts to sustainably pacify the Middle East/Levant region.
The film "Between Two Worlds" shows the same generational conflict about the range of views on Israel-Palestine and regional Israel and Arab state conflict resolution that the San Francisco-Oakland (Bay Area) Jewish federation(s) should support by funding live theater productions.
The fact should be noted that Robert Samet of COPMA had also been previously identified as a CAMERA member
February 3, 2004
by Eric Rozenman
WASHINGTON POST-WATCH: Post's Selective Cuts
CAMERA member and co-chair of the Washington, D.C.-based EyeOnThePost, Inc., Robert Samet, first caught the differences between the full Reuters report and the Post brief. In a letter to Post Chairman Donald Graham, Mr. Samet pointed out that the paper “was virtually alone among media outlets in dropping these important qualifying statements.” The cuts, Samet observed, slant the news “to make Hamas appear to be more moderate than it is. When you then follow it up in the same article by reporting that Israel ‘dismissed any talk of Hamas moderation as a smoke screen,’ your readers are misled into believing Israel is being obstinate.”
Carol Greenwald, the treasurer for COPMA, has also been on the CAMERA board and been CAMERA's treasurer since 1994.
As the variety of news sources that people read has expanded beyond print newspapers and broadcast (redistributed by cable companies) tv and radio to online-only news sources CAMERA members Robert Samet and Carol Greenwald, among others, shifted their mission from news monitoring to arts institution monitoring. The variety of plays produced at Theater J since Ari Roth's firing in Dec 2014 show the long-term rightward drift of a 'political center' in the Greater Washington Jewish Federation and the DCJCC after COPMA's extremist advocacy.
The Fringe Festival continues in other venues and Ari Roth has been able to start another theater company, Mosaic Theater, rather than being silenced completely.
