A comprehensive body of research released by the Anti-Defamation League on Thursday documents the systemic exclusion and marginalization of Jewish and Israeli artists across American cultural life.
The initiative, titled “State of the Arts: Advancing Jewish Inclusion in Arts, Entertainment and Culture,” examines institutional practices across art museums, the publishing sector, and live performance venues alongside a companion investigation into activist networks.
"Jewish artists are being canceled, blacklisted, and pushed out of American cultural life. We knew the situation was bad; we just didn't know how bad, and no one had documented it this way before," ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.
"Forty leading museums, not one includes Jewish identity in its DEI commitments. Authors are being told to strip Hebrew words and change Jewish character names just to get published. Jewish and Israeli performers are being harassed off stages and dropped from lineups. This is antisemitism and anti-Israeli discrimination, plain and simple, and the arts and culture sector needs to wake up before Jewish voices are silenced entirely."
The museum sector report, titled “Behind the Frame: A Quiet, Systemic Erasure in America's Museums", evaluated antisemitism and Jewish representation across 40 leading US art museums, grading institutions on policies, artist representation, and programming.
Of the 40 museums invited to review their assessments, 20 participated. The findings showed that only one museum, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, achieved the gold standard, while 12 museums received the lowest rating of "critically deficient," including the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Broad.
Additionally, only one of the 40 museums recognized Jewish American Heritage Month in May 2026, even though 60% continued recognizing other heritage months during the same period.
Jewish, Israeli cultural motifs discouraged in publishing
The publishing sector report, titled “Missing Chapter: Suppression of Jewish Voices in Publishing", identifies seven anti-Jewish trends reshaping the industry since October 7, 2023, based on secondary research and more than 30 interviews with authors and publishing professionals.
These trends include the suppression of books with Jewish, Israeli, or Zionist characters at the acquisition stage, where manuscripts dealing with Jewish identity or contemporary Israel are increasingly treated as commercially risky. Authors face editorial pressure to remove Hebrew words, Israeli settings, and Jewish-sounding character names before their works can be considered for publication.
Blacklistings and boycotts of authors have also proliferated across online reader communities and social media platforms like BookTok, Bookstagram, and X. This is highlighted by a viral May 2024 Google spreadsheet titled "Is your fav author a Zionist?" that sorted writers by political affiliation and urged readers not to buy, review, or promote their work.
Additionally, transnational boycotts have targeted Israeli publishing institutions and translation rights. This includes a 2024 PalFest letter signed by more than 1,000 writers urging a total boycott of Israeli publishers, literary agencies, and festivals.
Other documented trends include author-level exclusion from literary festivals and events, as well as struggles to secure and keep literary agents who view Jewish or Zionist identity as too risky for the market. The report also highlights an institutional failure by major literary bodies to name antisemitism directly rather than grouping it under generalized anti-bigotry.
The report documents cases of review-bombing, coordinated waves of negative ratings and reviews on public book platforms such as Goodreads, which function as critical marketing and discovery tools within the publishing industry. These malicious campaigns often occur months before a book is published and before reviewers could plausibly have read the work, damaging an author's commercial viability, retail visibility, and professional standing based on identity or perceived politics rather than the book's content.
ADL: US cultural institutions failing Jewish, Israeli artists
The entertainment sector report, titled “Dark Stage: Jewish and Israeli Performers Are Being Canceled, Harassed and Silenced", alongside its accompanying case archive, catalogs 65 incidents across 41 US locations detailing the rising hurdles faced by Jewish, Israeli, and openly Zionist artists in live music, comedy, theater, dance, film, and campus events.
The findings highlight how political demonstrations have increasingly shifted away from standard advocacy and toward targeted campaigns aimed at excluding Jewish and Israeli performers from the stage entirely, utilizing petitions, boycotts, and organized protests to block appearances.
Venues frequently lean on safety rationales to enact a security veto, where the mere prospect of public outcry or disruption, rather than any confirmed danger, is enough to scrap a show. This environment also fosters informal cultural boycotts and quiet professional distancing, where bookings silently vanish.
Furthermore, artists encounter frequent mid-performance harassment and audience heckling, exemplified by comedian Judy Gold facing hostile remarks during two separate shows in April 2026, including an audience member shouting "You're a Jew," and singer-songwriter Regina Spektor being interrupted by a protestor during a concert in Portland.
Compounding these pressures is widespread institutional inconsistency, where venues and cultural organizations respond unpredictably to controversies without clear standards, leaving performers unable to anticipate how their events will be handled and forcing administrators into reactive decision-making that frequently leaves Jewish and Israeli artists to absorb the professional and reputational fallout alone.
To accompany these sector analyses, the ADL Center on Extremism released an investigation into how external activist organizations target cultural spaces, detailing how groups work to pressure venues and museums to isolate Jewish and Zionist creators through coordinated demonstrations, blacklists, and confrontational tactics.
To examine public attitudes toward these dynamics, the ADL Ratings and Assessments Institute fielded an online survey through Prolific in July 2026 with an analytical sample of 951 US adults.
The survey found that 88% of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed they would visit an art gallery exhibiting work by Jewish artists, 87% would attend a performance featuring Jewish performers, and 84% would buy an interesting book even if it included Jewish topics or characters.
Support remained robust for Israeli-identified work, with 77% saying they would visit a gallery exhibiting Israeli artists, 75% attending a performance featuring Israeli performers, and 73% buying a book with Israeli topics or characters.
Furthermore, 85% of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed that excluding Jews or their work from cultural spaces contributes to anti-Jewish hate, while 72% said the same about excluding Israelis.
Despite this widespread recognition of harm, 32% somewhat or strongly agreed it was understandable for people to avoid art galleries showing work by Jewish artists, and 46% said the same regarding Israeli artists.
"This research shows a clear and consistent gap between perceived market risk, what Jewish and Israeli authors are being told, and actual audience demand," said ADL Vice President of Public Affairs and Special Initiatives Shira Goodman.
“The interview ADL carried out with literary professionals for this research surfaced a recurring pattern of authors being told by agents and publishers to strip Jewish and/or Israeli themes and characters from their work over fears it won’t sell or is too much of a risk," she added. "The survey findings suggest this risk aversion is a misperception, not a market reality, and something that urgently needs to be addressed by the industry.”
The ADL is calling on cultural institutions, museums, publishers, literary agents, and venue operators to close these gaps by naming antisemitism explicitly in policies and DEI commitments, recognizing Jewish American Heritage Month alongside other heritage observances, resisting pressure campaigns rooted in identity-based exclusion, and trusting data that shows American audiences want and will support Jewish and Israeli inclusion in the arts.