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Work of art makes ‘Jewish statement’ in UCLA dispute

The tortured saga of a UCLA graduate student who left the campus due to what he called pressure from pro-Palestinian elements got a happy epilogue of sorts last week.
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November 22, 2016

The tortured saga of a UCLA graduate student who left the campus due to what he called pressure from pro-Palestinian elements got a happy epilogue of sorts last week.

On Nov. 14, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management unveiled “Warsaw,” a 2011 art piece by financier-turned-artist Robert Weingarten, depicting the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, on a second-floor landing of the school’s Cornell Hall. The business school’s decision to display the piece averted a donor’s threat to pull his art collection of more than 20 pieces that hang in its halls as a result of the student controversy.

The events that led to the unveiling of “Warsaw” began when Milan Chatterjee, a UCLA law student and former president of the Graduate Student Association (GSA), decided over the summer to leave the university, citing harassment by the pro-Palestinian community. Chatterjee, who is Hindu, faced blowback after he made GSA funding for an event contingent on there being no discussion of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

His departure was spurred by a “hostile and unsafe campus climate,” he wrote to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block.

When J.P. Morgan executive David Pollock learned of Chatterjee’s decision to leave, he was ready to take back the art collection he and his wife, Lynn, had lent to the business school some five years before. They had planned to leave their art there in perpetuity. Pollock called Weingarten, an old friend who created the artwork in the collection already on loan to UCLA, to discuss the situation. In the car with Weingarten when he took the call on speakerphone was Steve Fink, who, along with his brother, is a large donor to UCLA.

Listening in on the conversation, Fink had an idea of what Pollock could do instead of pulling his art: Why not lend the business school an additional art piece, this one representing the Jewish experience, to be hung alongside the others?

“That was gonna make a statement,” Fink said at the unveiling. “A strong Jewish statement.”

Exactly a week later, Pollock called back Weingarten, who knew exactly which art piece fit the bill.

“I said, ‘I have something exactly in mind,’ ” Weingarten told the Journal.

Weingarten decided to lend UCLA “Warsaw” to hang along with his other works in Pollock’s collection.

In “Warsaw,” pictures of the ghetto uprising are overlaid on modern photographs of the Polish capital. Weingarten said he was inspired by a trip he took to the location of the ghetto, where there was “no reminder, virtually,” of what had taken place. His work allows the viewer to look through the present and into the past, he said.

“You’re looking at a very thin layer that separates civility and society from hatred and horror,” he told the crowd of some two dozen that gathered for the unveiling.

Pollock said he was “100 percent” satisfied with the compromise, calling it a “win-win situation” for him and the university.

Speaking at the unveiling, he pointed to previous incidents on UCLA’s campus, such as when student government representatives questioned a nominee for student office about her Jewish background in February 2015, as evidence of a pattern of anti-Israel intimidation at the school.

“We have to push back in every capacity,” he told the Journal at the event.

Learning of Chatterjee’s situation, Pollock said, it seemed threatening to pull his art was his best means of pushing back. But when he dashed off an email to Anderson Dean Judy Olian, herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, she responded with a “really heartfelt and sincere” note expressing her concern.

“They heard me immediately,” Pollock said.

Olian quickly agreed to the idea of incorporating a new piece of art that speaks to the Jewish historical narrative.

“This is as much a part of the education of our students — who we think of as future leaders — as what they learn in the classroom,” she said at the unveiling.

In a campus conversation on BDS often characterized by dissension and distrust, the “Warsaw” episode was a rare instance of compromise.

“It’s positive when community members and alumni find ways to stay engaged with the university even as they question its actions,” Rabbi Aaron Lerner, executive director of Hillel at UCLA, wrote in an email. “That keeps them involved in the conversation and shows their devotion to UCLA, making it more likely that they will be able to create positive change here.”

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