I am an artist first, and that is the starting point for everything that follows.
I did not train for this side of cultural life, but the reality of what has happened in the arts, including the rise of antisemitism within it, has made Freedom in the Arts, the organisation I co-founded with Denise Fahmy, both necessary and urgent.
I came to it because, over the past few years, it became impossible not to notice that something serious had gone wrong in the cultural world I have spent my life in. Too many artists were being quietly dropped, frozen out, ghosted or treated as somehow too difficult, too risky or too politically awkward to support. Organisations were making frightened decisions in private and then dressing them up afterwards as prudence, sensitivity or values. And too many people were being left to deal with all this alone.
That is why Freedom in the Arts undertook The New Boycott Crisis report, and why its findings matter so much.
This report matters because it names, in detail and with evidence, a pattern that many people in the sector have experienced but struggled to describe. What is often brushed off as “cancel culture” is, in reality, a system of informal punishment that can be brutal in its effects. Artists can be ostracised, publicly smeared, quietly dropped, professionally isolated and marked out as too problematic to support. It can happen because of something they have said, because of who they are, because of the people or causes they are associated with, or because the work itself is judged politically suspect. It happens individual by individual, institution by institution, until exclusion begins to feel normal.
Part of that story is the BDS movement – Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. But the real problem is now far wider than formal activist campaigning alone. What begins as boycott pressure from outside has, in too many cases, been absorbed into the habits of the sector itself: into institutional caution, leadership fear, programmer nervousness and the quiet withdrawal of support from artists deemed too risky. That is how antisemitism in the arts so often works now, not always through dramatic public declarations, but through silence, hesitation, euphemism and unequal scrutiny.
Artists are not the only ones affected. Venues often feel lost, pressured, under-led and permanently braced for the next crisis, while agents and managers are trapped in the middle, absorbing both the emotional and financial cost. Programming decisions are increasingly shaped not by excellence, boldness or curiosity, but by fear of what might happen if someone complains loudly enough. This is a dangerous shift. The arts can survive criticism. They cannot do their best work under intimidation.
For Jewish artists and Jewish cultural life, the situation has become particularly acute.
One of the report’s most serious findings is that antisemitism is not incidental to this new climate. It is one of its most troubling features. Jewish artists are too often subjected to exceptional scrutiny, exclusion or suspicion. Work touching on Jewish history, identity or experience is treated as uniquely contentious. Invitations are quietly withdrawn, institutions grow nervous and silence takes hold. Much of this happens without dramatic public rows, through euphemism, avoidance and the slow withdrawal of support.
This is not only a Jewish concern; it goes to the health and integrity of the arts themselves. If Jewish artists become the people who can be dropped without consequence, if Jewish themes become the things institutions feel least confident about touching, then the entire culture becomes more mean-spirited, more cautious and more afraid. A sector that once prided itself on openness begins instead to reward conformity and caution, and to lose the complexity, confidence and moral seriousness that good cultural life requires.
That is why this report is being taken seriously in Westminster. People understand that the arts must not become places governed by fear. They must not become spaces where every event is treated as a political and public loyalty test, where artistic merit comes second to pressure management or where institutions surrender their judgement before anyone has even asked them to. If that continues, British cultural life will become narrower, more intolerant and more divisive, and everyone will lose.
But the report is only one part of the work. The other, and in some ways the more hopeful part, is the Art Beyond Boycott Toolkit. This matters because people need more than analysis. They need help, and they need a way through the confusion.
The toolkit is designed for artists, venues, agents, managers and organisations who find themselves facing pressure and do not know where to turn. It offers practical guidance: how to respond when campaigns begin, how to think about legal obligations properly, how to distinguish between lawful protest and coercive pressure, how to avoid panic and how to act with greater clarity and confidence. It is there to help people navigate difficult situations calmly, lawfully and proportionately. In other words, it is an attempt to stop fear becoming the default decision-maker.
That is why I believe the toolkit matters so much across the arts. Many artists and organisations feel isolated, unsupported and unsure how to respond when pressure begins to build. For Jewish artists and Jewish cultural organisations, the experience is often one of being on the receiving end of that pressure. The value of the toolkit lies in its clarity: it offers practical steps, clear principles and a way of responding that is neither capitulation nor confusion. The toolkit will not solve everything at once, but it can still do something important by helping people recover the confidence to make decisions more clearly, fairly and lawfully.
What all the arts need now is the confidence to programme difficult work, to treat artists fairly, to resist organised intimidation and to recognise that antisemitism in the cultural sector must be taken as seriously as it is anywhere else. Above all, they need to recover a sense that the arts should be a place of freedom, curiosity, argument and experiment, not one in which fear determines the boundaries of cultural life.
The task now is to ensure that British arts culture does not become more fearful, more intolerant and more divided, with Jewish artists once again bearing a disproportionate share of the cost. That is why both the report and the toolkit matter: because this work is not only about naming the damage, but about helping the arts recover their nerve.
Rosie Kay is an award-winning dancer, choreographer and co-founder of Freedom in the Arts, a project to tackle the culture of fear and intimidation artists are facing for expressing their legal views. The report on boycotts in the British art world and the toolkit on how to confront it can be downloaded here and here
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