Here’s the background on this one: last week, news broke that an event featuring Jewish author Joshua Leifer was cancelled at Powerhouse Arena, a Brooklyn bookstore, because the moderator scheduled to attend the event, Rabbi Andy Bachman, was a “Zionist.”
Turns out, the decision to cancel the book launch was not made by the store’s owner, Daniel Power, but by an employee that has since been fired.
The event, a showcase of Leifer’s new book about American Jewish life called Tablets Shattered, will now instead take place on Monday, August 26, at the Center for New Jewish Culture at 274 Garfield Place in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, at 7pm.
“Less than an hour before the launch event for my book Tablets Shattered, a conversation with Rabbi Andy Bachman, Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn told me they were unwilling to host the conversation with Andy because they would not permit a Zionist on the premises,” Leifer wrote on X last week.
A few days later, the bookstore released a public statement explaining the situation, acknowledging the fact that the employee’s actions were uncalled for, unapproved and clearly anti-Semitic in nature.
“The gross irony of this situation, with one disgruntled employee allowing her biases to run roughshod over Powerhouse’s clear enthusiasm to host these speakers and provide them with a public forum, is surmounted only by the dark specter of antisemitic bigotry that her words conjured,” reads the statement. “She forced [the event] […] to instead become a case study in the shocking re-emergence of anti-Semitic hostility that continues to rear its head in spaces and communities where all of us would least expect it to. this exclusionary language would have stung no matter where it was uttered, but bookstore especially cannot fulfill their basic raison d’être without an unflinching commitment to the free and open exchange of ideas.”
The cancellation lead to a lot of backlash from both average New Yorkers and public officials, most of them citing a rise in antisemitic language and actions across New York since October 7.
Although the newly scheduled event is free to attend, we suggest you reserve a seat for it right here.
