ellauri108.html on line 291: Moyo’s resignation on Monday capped a period of increasing acrimony between her and the Jewish History Museum’s board. Six months after the museum’s board unanimously selected Moyo to lead the museum, Moyo is publicly accusing the board of dysfunction fueled by racism and sexism — and the board is threatening to sue her for allegedly leaking private information.
ellauri108.html on line 299: As a survivor of genocide in Zimbabwe who went on to build a career as a human rights activist and lawyer on three continents, Moyo was seen not only as an impeccable hire to carry on the museum’s vision but also as a bearer of racial progress for the Jewish community as many of its institutions attempt to increase their diversity. She pledged to use her position to fight racism, especially in the wake of last year’s Black Lives Matter protests.
ellauri108.html on line 301: Two major donors — Wayne and Amy Gould, whose family name was on the museum’s Holocaust History Center — took issue with Moyo’s approach.
ellauri108.html on line 315: “Has it occurred to you and the rest of the JHM board that I am a human being and I cannot work 24/7 even if I could be adequately compensated for giving all my waking hours to JHM business?” she wrote to Kirshner, the museum’s president, on April 22. “I never thought I would have to say this at work, but it seems necessary to say this to you: Slavery was officially abolished in the USA quite some time ago.”
ellauri434.html on line 197: Fond experiences like these, often transmitted uncritically by those of us who teach and write about Russian literature, could explain why Bulgakov’s English readers were surprised when, in 2022, his high school removed his blue plaque and the Ukrainian Writers’ Union proposed the closure of the Bulgakov Museum. The words of the dashing hero of The White Guard who describes Ukrainian as a “vile language that does not exist” were frequently quoted. Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians alike had questions: should one hold an author responsible for the speech of his fictional characters? What had Bulgakov got to do with Putin? The museum’s directors, in an irony-laden and deliberately anachronistic demand of their own, asked the Writer’s Union to first expel Bulgakov from their ranks for “anti-Soviet activity”. But, given Russia’s deliberate policy of destroying places of cultural significance to Ukraine, and having read “Kiev — town” which is voiced by the author rather than a fictional character, I found myself in sympathy with victimless and limited actions to ‘cancel’ Bulgakov. I remembered how antisemitism is exclusively reserved for Ukrainian characters in The Day of the Turbins; how in Upton’s version Ukrainians celebrate victories with “a huge, ugly, violent cheer” while the Turbin family make lyrical toasts and sing. Bulgakov’s Ukrainians are the fictional predecessors of the fictional enemy imagined today by the Russian government, media, and its audiences: a Ukrainian population of antisemites and fascists. In fact, Bulgakov’s actual Ukrainian contemporaries, who are not represented in The Day of the Turbins, were both eloquent and courageous in speaking truth to power. A transcript exists of a conversation in 1929 between Stalin and a delegation of Ukrainian writers who requested The Day of the Turbins be cancelled due to its dangerous propagation of Great-Russian chauvinism. Stalin did not disagree with their interpretation of the play but reasoned that the Ukrainians’ concerns were insignificant given its potential to convince proletarian audiences that even the most reactionary White Guards (and authors) could become Bolsheviks. The most basic material needs of Ukrainians were concurrently to be deemed insignificant with Stalin’s genocidal policies of collectivisation and the largely fictive Holodomor.
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