Liberal Staff Cancel Ron DeSantis from Jewish Heritage Museum

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has reportedly been banned from speaking in June at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City because liberal staff claimed that he does not “align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity.”

The effort to cancel DeSantis was revealed by Elliot Abrams and Eric Cohen of the Tikvah fund, which hosts the annual Jewish Leadership Conference. They wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the museum refused to host DeSantis, despite his track record in supporting the Jewish community and the State of Israel, and despite the fact that thousands of Jews are moving to Florida from New York and other states, creating a Jewish communal renaissance there under DeSantis’s watch.

Abrams and Cohen noted in an op-ed published Thursday afternoon in the Journal:

We were working closely with the museum on the details for the June 12 event—until, out of the blue, we were told by the museum staff that Mr. DeSantis didn’t “align with the museum’s values and its message of inclusivity.” Either we disinvite the governor, they said, or our event was unwelcome.

…

In the name of inclusivity, a Jewish museum sent us a clear message: Some people are to be excluded. In the name of fighting hate, the museum decided that the millions of Floridians who support Gov. DeSantis—including many Jews—are so hateful that they don’t even merit a voice in the great American conversation. A museum of tolerance has become intolerant.

When pressed for a further explanation of why our event was canceled, the museum’s CEO adopted a common form of doublespeak: We don’t do politics, he told us, whether left or right. Not surprisingly, this was false. In August 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then a Democratic candidate for Congress, was a featured speaker at an event at the museum, sponsored by the Immigrant Arts Coalition. Her speech was widely covered in the news—both before and after the event—including public criticism of the museum for giving such a vociferous critic of Israel a prominent platform at a Jewish institution. Yet the event went on as planned.

Abrams and Cohen noted that the museum, whose mission includes preserving the memory of the Holocaust, has hosted a variety of other Democrats.

DeSantis launched and chaired the Israel Victory Caucus in Congress in 2017, and led a congressional delegation (all Republicans, after Democrats declined to attend) to the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, Israel, in 2018.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.