Liberating Theater J from diva Ari Roth

Before the campaign to portray Ari Roth as a martyr to freedom of artistic expression gains traction, let’s review:

Roth was recently fired as artistic director of the District of Columbia Jewish Community Center’s Theater J. His dismissal came not, as playwright Tony Kushner would have it, “because he refused to surrender to censorship.” It did not happen because Roth believes, in Kushner’s telling, in freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Ari Roth had to go because anti-Israel exhibitions had become his theatrical pornography.

In 2009, Roth’s Theatre J gave a series of staged readings to British anti-Zionist Caryl Churchill’s “Seven Jewish Children.”

James Kirchick, then at The New Republic, said the 10-minute rant “draws a straight line from Nazi Germany’s mass murder of European Jewry to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, an old trope in the quiver of rabid Israel haters.”

Roth tried to camouflage “Seven Jewish Children’s” anti-Semitism in deconstructionist jargon. Calling Churchill a great writer to whom Jews should not turn a deaf ear, he termed “Children” an “elusive, evocative, wispy play that has mysteries in, and we are trying to decode them in a public discussion.”

The late Herman Taube, Holocaust survivor, poet and novelist responded, “We have some Jews who, you spit in their face, and they say it’s raining.”

In 2011, Roth’s compulsion to “decode in public discussion” — translation: provide a Jewish-funded forum for pro-Palestinian propaganda — led him to stage “Return to Haifa,” based on a novella by Ghassan Kanafani. Kanafani was a senior aide to George Habash, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

The PFLP pioneered anti-Israel terrorism including airliner hijackings. It’s still a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, more recently involved in suicide bombings.

Kanafani died in a car bombing not long after he was photographed working with members of the Japanese Red Army, whose 1972 attack on Ben Gurion International Airport murdered 26 and wounded 80.