Why This Work
Jewish creativity is not a guest in American culture. It is one of its architects.
ADL has understood the power of representation since its earliest days. Its 1913 founding charter identified the caricaturing and defaming of Jews on stage and in moving pictures as a concern — recognizing that how a community is shown, or not shown, shapes how it is treated.
Today, exclusion rarely arrives as a formal ban. It can look like an exhibition that never leaves storage, a performance canceled amid pressure or “security concerns,” or a Jewish story quietly deemed too risky to publish. Each decision may appear isolated. Taken together, they reveal a larger pattern.
State of the Arts was created to make that pattern visible — to document what can otherwise be difficult to see, measure what has too often been anecdotal and create a public record that institutions, artists and audiences can act on. As the catalogue puts it, absence by its nature can resist proof; RAI’s role is to turn that absence into evidence.
Three Realms. One Pattern.
Museums, stages and pages operate under different rules, economics and pressures. Yet across all three, this research identifies recurring questions about whether Jewish and Israeli identity is being treated as a story worth telling — or as a risk to be managed.
In museums, those questions appear in collections, exhibitions, policies and public programming. In live performance, they surface through protests, boycotts, cancellations and institutional caution. In publishing, they can emerge through decisions about whose stories are acquired, promoted, reviewed or invited into literary spaces.
State of the Arts brings those stories together so they can be understood not only as individual incidents, but as part of a broader cultural landscape.
From Documentation to Repair
Documentation is only the first step.
State of the Arts is designed to move from identifying problems to helping address them. Alongside its research, the initiative connects artists and institutions with resources, highlights practices that can strengthen Jewish inclusion, creates avenues for artists and creatives to share their experiences and provides a foundation for sustained accountability.
For institutions that want to do better, this work offers a path toward improvement. For artists, writers and performers facing exclusion, it provides a platform for their experiences and their work. And for the broader public, it offers concrete ways to support Jewish and Israeli creativity and help ensure that cultural institutions reflect the communities they serve.
State of the Arts will continue to grow over time as an accessible public home for research, artist stories, resources and advocacy.
The art exists. The audience exists.The work now is to bring them together.
Experiencing antisemitism or bias in the arts?
If you are an artist, writer, performer or member of the arts and culture community who has experienced or witnessed antisemitism, bias or discrimination, please Report an Incident to ADL. If you are seeking legal support, you can also submit a request to ADL’s Legal Action Network.