In 1940, a Brooklyn woman named Jean Kay filed a suit with the State Supreme Court against the her city’s Board of Higher Education claiming that the renowned mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was morally unfit to teach at the City College of New York, where he had been offered a professorship. Kay, supported by a host of others in the public scrum, including Bishop William Manning of the Episcopal Church, argued that Russell, who advocated sex before marriage and other heretical lifestyle choices, posed a threat to the virtue of her daughter — even though the impressionable youth was not actually a student at the college. A judge ruled in Kay’s favor. Russell, who was not allowed to speak in his own defense, was denied his appointment at the college, which was, and is, part of the publicly financed City University of New York system. Today, the now-notorious incident is chronicled in an exhibition on City College’s Web site, called “The Struggle for Free Speech at CCNY, 1931-1942,” as is a recounting of the subsequent firings, spurred by the McCarthy era Rapp-Coudert Committee, of faculty members accused of being Communist Party members.

Though the issues and stakes have changed, CUNY now finds itself at the center of another free speech controversy, which has erupted, 71 years and some months after Kay filed her complaint —  as Patrick Healy of The Times, among others, reported on Wednesday:

In a rare move, the trustees of the City University of New York have voted to shelve an honorary degree that one of its campuses, John Jay College, planned to award to Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “Angels in America.” The vote on Monday evening came after a CUNY trustee said that Mr. Kushner had disparaged the State of Israel in past comments, a characterization that the writer attacked on Wednesday.

Amid calls from CUNY faculty and staff members for the board to reverse its decision, Mr. Kushner said in an interview that he believed the trustees had slandered him and owed him an apology. Even if the board was to reconsider and approve the degree, Mr. Kushner said, he would not accept it. …

[O]ne of the 12 trustees present, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, objected to John Jay College’s submission of Mr. Kushner for an honorary degree. Mr. Wiesenfeld described viewpoints and comments, which he ascribed to Mr. Kushner, that he had found on the Web site of Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist and critic of Israel.

Mr. Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime aide to former Gov. George E. Pataki and former Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, said that Mr. Kushner had tied the founding of Israel to a policy of ethnic cleansing, criticized the Israel Defense Forces and supported a boycott of Israel.

You can imagine what happened next. Or maybe not. Because the level of outrage, on both sides of the issue, escalated with a speed and intensity remarkable even for a fight over Israel. Commentary from pundits flowed, of course, but so did a war of words from the players themselves, so let us begin there:

Kushner himself responded in a letter to the CUNY board, in which he fought back against Wiesenfeld’s branding of him as “extreme” and “anti-Semitic” as a “grotesque caricature of my political beliefs regarding the state of Israel, concocted out of three carefully cropped, contextless quotes taken from interviews I’ve given, the mention of my name on the blog of someone with whom I have no connection whatsoever, and the fact that I serve on the advisory board of a political organization with which Mr. Weisenfeld strongly disagrees.” (The full opening sentence runs 87 words: dramatic license, I guess.) Kushner goes on:

My questions and reservations regarding the founding of the state of Israel are connected to my conviction, drawn from my reading of American history, that democratic government must be free of ethnic or religious affiliation, and that the solution to the problems of oppressed minorities are to be found in pluralist democracy. I am very proud of being Jewish, and discussing this issue publicly has been hard; but I believe in the absolute good of public debate, and I feel that silence on the part of Jews who have questions is injurious to the life of the Jewish people. My opinion about the wisdom of the creation of a Jewish state has never been expressed in any form without a strong statement of support for Israel’s right to exist, and my ardent wish that it continue to do so, something Mr Wiesenfeld conveniently left out of his remarks.

(The City Room blog has a transcript of Mr. Wiesenfeld’s statement at the meeting.)

Wiesenfeld, who is an active supporter of Israel, is perhaps not a stranger to controversy on this issue. Nor is he much for verbal niceties. In an op-ed response at the site of the Jewish Yiddish-English newspaper Algemeiner, he holds his ground, then takes some more:

If [Kushner’s] libelous statements against Israel were made by anyone outside the Jewish community, that person would be correctly labeled an anti-Semite. When you hold the State of Israel — a nation in a struggle for its survival from the beginning, a target for the misogynist, racist, anti-western, dictatorial regimes which surround it — to a standard you would hold no other nation under normal circumstances, let alone under such exigencies — and when you spew libel against our sole regional democratic ally for “crimes” concocted by delegitimizers, you are an anti-Semite.

I would no differently oppose a racist for an honorary degree who personifies himself by calumny against a people. If Mr. Kushner were a CUNY student degree candidate,  or even more extremely, if he were David Duke or Lynne Stewart or Sonny Carson or any other detestable individual, no trustee or administrator would have the right to deny him or her a degree if requisite requirements were fulfilled.

To the contrary, an honorary degree is wholly within the absolute discretion of the board to grant.

Whoa. But Mr. Wiesenfeld, little known to the general public a week ago, seems to be having a Trump-like response to the limelight. He continued to heat the rhetoric, as revealed in a column by The Times’s Jim Dwyer:

I tried to ask a question about the damage done by a short, one-sided discussion of vigorously debated aspects of Middle East politics, like the survival of Israel and the rights of the Palestinians, and which side was more callous toward human life, and who was most protective of it.

But Mr. Wiesenfeld interrupted and said the question was offensive because “the comparison sets up a moral equivalence.”

Equivalence between what and what? “Between the Palestinians and Israelis,” he said. “People who worship death for their children are not human.”

Did he mean the Palestinians were not human? “They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history,” he said.

But is there no reason to hear from Tony Kushner, or have a more thorough airing of his views? “Tell you what,” Mr. Wiesenfeld said. “Your question tells me — and I am saying this not to insult you — tells me that you don’t know” what you are talking about.

Oh, yes he did.

Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic was one of many who thought the whole thing could have been handled a bit more politely, no? He writes:

If Wiesenfeld had said, “I have proof that Tony Kushner has spoken out in favor of Hamas and the al-Aksa Martyrs’ Brigade, two organizations that have both developed a very unusual and repulsive culture of death, which has allowed them to use Palestinian suicide bombers, often very young Palestinian suicide bombers, to murder Israeli children; therefore, I don’t believe Tony Kushner is deserving of this honor,” well, that would have been one thing. But he didn’t say that. He broad-stroked the Palestinians — some of whom I know, and some of whom, from what I have observed, love their children — in the manner many Palestinians, particularly those in the Hamas camp, broad-stroke Jews.

This has not, so far, been a helpful episode.

Well, really, what’s the big deal? With the body of the world’s most wanted man now decomposing at sea, revolutions on distant shores and other important events unfolding, the slight to Kushner is just the sort of thing that only the fancy-pants, East Coast, liberal-media-fed cultural elite could get worked up about. So thinks Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin (who subtly reveals in this post that he is not a really big fan of The New York Times):

A New York arts world that considers a hard-core leftist theatrical polemicist like Tony Kushner to be “compassionate” and fair-minded must find it hard to accept the fact that there are people in the world who deem his anti-Zionism so hard to stomach they refuse to remain silent when asked to honor him. The belief that Kushner is a “writer of rare intellectual scope” with an “extraordinary, active empathy that pervades every one of his plays” is clearly the dominant viewpoint among the city’s chattering classes, and it is hardly surprising that dissenters like Wiesenfeld will be treated harshly as a consequence. The drumbeat of incitement against Wiesenfeld, in which Kushner is falsely portrayed as a victim, will accelerate in the days to come. By the time this nonsense is played out, Kushner may be in line for a Nobel Peace Prize.

That is the way the cultural elites play hardball. Wiesenfeld must understand that he will not be forgiven for his act of lese majeste against a leading cultural liberal. But in standing up against a man whose opposition to Israel has always brought him honor rather than the shame it deserved, Wiesenfeld has restored a little bit of balance to New York’s cockeyed world of high culture.

(Who knew cultural elites could play hardball? Aren’t they too busy going to plays by “pampered scribblers”?)

Some commentators, including Goldberg, took the opportunity to consider Kushner’s views and work in shades of gray. Goldberg again:

This is just unconscionably stupid. … really, denying Tony Kushner an honorary degree because a former aide to George Pataki thinks he is anti-Israel? Kushner is critical of Israel, yes, and I don’t think he actually understands much about the Middle East, but I’m not sure this is the business of the City University of New York. In any case, Kushner is obsessed, in his own way, with the Jewish condition, and he views himself, I’m reasonably sure, as inhabiting the age-old role of the laceratingly self-critical Jewish dissident. He strikes me, from a distance, as one of those sons-of-the-people who wakes up worrying about the Jews, and goes to sleep worrying about the Jews. I think his discomfort with Jewish power is mainly misplaced, but turning him into a free-speech martyr? Is that what a handful of Jews want to do with their political power? In any case, if those Jews on the right are trying to marginalize his opinions, this is certainly not the way to do it.

Sarah Wildman at The Guardian posts a considered defense of Kushner and of the act of questioning, and sees the playwright himself as a work-in-progress:

Like many American Jews, Kushner is in the midst of a process, and is engaged in a thoughtful, nuanced, painful conversation with his colleagues, his family, his friends about the nature of democracy, the future of Zionism, and the context in which the state of Israel might finally make peace with the Palestinians. He is affiliated with a half dozen Jewish organisations in New York. He is on the advisory board of the Jewish Voices for Peace; but while some on the board have called for a boycott of Israel, he has not, and he does not believe in disinvestment.

And yet, the very fact that he has had to spell this out is a travesty. Is Jewish heritage and fealty to the Jewish state a monolith? Is there one means of living Jewishly in diaspora? One means of respecting the state of Israel? The idea that one’s relationship to Israel must be uniformly unquestioning is in and of itself the gravest of errors; it is one that will further marginalise and divide a community that is increasingly at war with itself.

But perhaps the biggest headaches now below to poor, poor Benno C. Schmidt, the chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees, and the unlucky recipient of many letters of protest, including an irate missive from the former New York mayor Ed Koch demanding Wiesenfeld’s ouster, untold complaints from faculty and this from Ellen Schrecker, a professor of history at Yeshiva University, who returned her honorary degree in protest:

When an academic institution lets extraneous political considerations override educational priorities, not only is it limiting its members’ free expression, but it is also undermining the quality of the education it offers. Censoring outside speakers, including honorary degree recipients, like refusing to hire instructors or firing them because of their reputed political views, tells students, faculty members, and the rest of the public that some ideas cannot be allowed on campus. Such constraints negate the sacred mission of higher education within a democratic society.

I received my honorary degree from CUNY because of my scholarship on the McCarthy period, when over one hundred professors (including at least fifteen from the New York City municipal colleges) lost their jobs for political reasons. I assume that no one within CUNY’s Board of Trustees or administration wants a repeat of those dark days. Certainly, the John Jay faculty and administration, whose judgment the CUNY Trustees overrode, realize the value of academic freedom today.

I urge you, therefore, to reconsider your decision with regard to Tony Kushner and to restore to this eminent, albeit controversial, American playwright the honorary degree that the faculty at John Jay has appropriately awarded him.

Well, guess what? The McCarthy era thus invoked, and not for the first time, the tide turned at last late Friday seemingly in favor of the Kushnerites, when Schmidt seemed to take Schrecker’s advice and called a meeting for Monday to reconsider the decision. Schmidt, City Room reported, “issued a statement on Friday afternoon saying that he believed that board members had ‘made a mistake of principle, and not merely of policy’ in failing to award the degree to Mr. Kushner earlier this week.”

As a look at the above-mentioned City College history site will show — and as The Guardian’s Ms. Wildman noted in her post — the college’s McCarthy-era dismissals were followed by formal apologies — 40 years after the fact.

It seems that the tides of history, or at least rage and dissent, flow faster these days.