One person was taken into police custody last night, November 12, at a protest outside the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) during the World Jewish Congress’s (WJC) 2024 Theodor Herzl Award Dinner taking place at the institution
Some 40 people gathered outside the museum’s 53rd Street entrance yesterday evening in response to a call shared by pro-Palestine advocacy groups, including Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) and Within Our Lifetime, to protest MoMA Honorary Board Chair Ronald Lauder. The billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder fortune is also the president of the WJC, a federation of Jewish communities and Israel advocates. Founded in 1936 to “support the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine,” among other aims, the organization regularly lobbies on behalf of Israel and has rejected reports presented to the United Nations alleging that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza constitute genocide.
Before the protest began at around 5:30pm, police had sectioned off the institution’s main entrance, where the group crowded around a sign that read “MoMA Trustees Fund Genocide Apartheid and Settler Colonialism.” Chanting “Free Palestine” and “No justice, no peace,” they called on MoMA to disaffiliate from “dirty money.”
A woman wearing an Israeli flag draped around her shoulders made her way into the group of protesters around 6:30pm and was escorted out of the crowd by police seconds later without the flag. Hyperallergic also witnessed an altercation between a suited man and a protester wearing a keffiyeh; the protester, who declined to provide his name, alleged that the man yanked the Palestinian headscarf off his neck. A police officer then ushered the suited man inside MoMA.
Writer Sarah Nicole Prickett, a WAWOG organizer, was stopped by two police officers as she was crossing the street between two groups of protesters on both sides of the barricaded entrance. She was charged with disorderly conduct, according to a summons note reviewed by Hyperallergic.
A New York Police Department spokesperson confirmed that one person was taken into custody and released with a summons to appear in criminal court next month.
In an interview with Hyperallergic, Prickett said, “The least we can do is disorder things.”
“We want these institutions to know that they can no longer silently, tacitly, and inconsequentially participate in the death-dealing activities of organizations like the World Jewish Congress,” she said.
MoMA has not replied to Hyperallergic’s request for comment.
The WJC’s Theodor Herzl Award, named after the man credited as the founder of Zionism, was given this year to United States Ambassador to China and Russia Jon M. Huntsman Jr. as a “devoted friend of Israel and the Jewish people.” Tal Huber, the Israeli graphic designer behind the red, black, and white “Kidnapped” posters wheat-pasted globally in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, was also honored at last night’s gala with an award for advancing Jewish culture.
Bobuq Sayed, a New York City-based writer from the Afghan diaspora who participated in the action, told Hyperallergic that they were protesting because “cultural institutions like the MoMA have a responsibility to cultural workers and not to billionaire benefactors.”
Graphic designer Liv Senghor also attended the protest as an organizer of the environmental action group Planet Over Profit.
“We thought it was important for us to show up as climate protesters to show solidarity and that we understand that all our struggles are connected,” Senghor said.
MoMA has been the target of several protest campaigns targeting trustees’ links to human rights violations, military violence, and environmental damage. In 2021, a 10-week action series known as Strike MoMA called on the museum to drop board members including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and financier Leon Black. In the wake of pressure over his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, including an open letter from artists published in Hyperallergic, Black stepped down from his role as board chairman but remains a museum trustee.
The World Jewish Congress has not yet responded to a request for comment.
