When the Jewish-American author Joshua Cohen was asked if he had won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature because his new book, The Netanyahu, was a good book, he replied:
"That's not why awards are given. That may be the last reason. There's probably a political reason behind it ... I'm the only young white man to have won in years ... but maybe enough Jews have been murdered in the US in the last year to justify the award."
The first sentence in the answer is correct.
Prizes in the art world are awarded, more often than not, on the basis of the identity of the creators and their political agenda, and not on the basis of the artistic quality of the work.
The rest of the answer is a masterpiece of hypocrisy.
Cohen knows exactly what the political agenda is because of which he has won.
In fact, he wrote the book from the only position that would allow him to win.
As his answer suggests, Cohen knew that men of his type, known in progressive academic circles in the United States as "privileged white males," did not win the Pulitzer Prize. .
For the progressive academic elite in the West, the State of Israel represents everything that is privileged and despicable in its eyes - a modern remnant of white and oppressive colonialism, which can be resisted in real time and killed two birds with one stone: atone for the past sins of the West. Once they were given some power, the Jews themselves became rude kalgas of the worst kind.
Cohen took this parable and wrote in his new book a parable, that the visit of the late Prof. Benzion Netanyahu to the home of Prof. Harold Blum of Yale University serves as a pseudo-historical platform for him.
According to the book "The Netanyahu" - the disturbing signs of the rudeness of the Israeli occupier appeared as early as 1959, when the children of the Netanyahu family - Yoni, Bibi and Ido - played noisily in Professor Bloom's living room and soiled the carpet in the snow, Rahmana Letzlen.
Thus, Cohen argues in his not-so-sophisticated parable, a national-Jewish-revisionist stature appears from Benzion Netanyahu's seminary: a photographer of barbarism in Professor Bloom's living room, representing liberal American Jewry in the book. Benjamin will grow and bring this barbarism from power to action, as the first Israeli prime minister to dare to disagree with an American president in a speech to Congress.
A work deliberately written from the position that the establishment encourages has a name: it is called mobilized art, and it is considered inferior because of its lack of authenticity: S. The artists who created these posters were talented, so to this day are dedicated to the aesthetics that created exhibitions in the best galleries, but what to do - it was not authentic.
Despite the famous precedent of art mobilized from the communist side, artists on the left like to attribute such art precisely to the right side of the map.
The truth is that in our time, the academic establishment in the West and in Israel is so skewed to the left that mobilized art can only come from the left.
No Pulitzer Prize, or even just a sympathetic critique, expects an artist who dares to identify with the right.
But there is also consolation in the mobilized art phenomenon of the progressive left, of which Cohen is only one representative.
History teaches us that mobilized art is usually the swan song of the establishment that recruited it.
The phenomenon of artists who feel the need to align with the establishment is characterized by establishments in which there is no room for plurality of opinions, and therefore they freeze on their heels and lose their relevance and power.
It is to be hoped that progressiveness is already moving in this direction.
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