In the wake of October 7 and the ensuing escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Steven Spielberg’s Munich has only felt more relevant. Watching it now, 20 years after it premiered, almost every moment is charged with insight so deep it begins to feel like foresight. Conversations characters have in the film mirror, almost word for word, conversations happening today, whether in media or among people in private.
Munich was the beginning of a long, ongoing collaboration between Spielberg and the award-winning playwright Tony Kushner, who’s gone on to write Lincoln, West Side Story, and The Fabelmans for Spielberg. Kushner’s screenplay about Israel’s assassination campaign against targets that it believed to be involved with the Munich massacre is remarkably dense. Working from a previous draft by Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth, Kushner—a noted leftist who’s spoken critically of Zionism—gave the film ideological force. Eschewing a straightforward narrative of massacre and revenge, the film explores the moral degradation experienced by the perpetrators of violence, and argues that Israel’s actions perpetuated the conflict at the expense of lives and humanity, both Palestinian and Israeli. Although it’s centered on Israeli secret agents, it grants perspective to Palestinians, rarely seen in Hollywood films before or since.
To have written a film with such staying power is an amazing feat, so I was naturally curious to know how Kushner felt about it all these years later. In November, I spoke with Kushner over Zoom about working with Spielberg on Munich, the controversy that greeted the film upon release, and his thoughts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict post-October 7.
Tony Kushner: I know exactly. It was the summer that we were filming The Fabelmans. In my job to drive Steven crazy, I kept saying to Steven, over and over, that I felt like this movie, although in almost every regard being nothing whatsoever like Munich, was more like Munich than other movies that we had made in terms of its seriousness, and that we had to be really tough with it. The thing we were both eager to avoid [in The Fabelmans]—and I really think we did avoid it—was anything that smacked of sentimentality. And I may have even said it sort of jokingly, originally, “I want you to think about Munich.”
When Steven showed me Munich for the first time—I saw it with Kathy Kennedy and [Spielberg’s wife] Kate Capshaw—we went into this little screening room, and he came in and said, “Okay, you’re about to watch the most depressing movie I’ve ever made.” And he left. I don’t know that I even agree that Munich is depressing, although it’s very dark. But with The Fabelmans, I wanted to really keep us tough-minded about it. Because, you know, it’s family, and it’s his parents and the whole thing, and it felt like it would be easy to slip into warmth and nostalgia.
And after I said this about 95 times one day, he said, “When was the last time you actually watched Munich?” And I said, “Around the time that it came out.” So, he said, “Come to the house on Sunday, we’re going to watch it together.” And honestly, I thought, y’know—we were working six-day weeks, and I thought, Ugh, that is really the last thing on earth that I want to do, is go and watch an almost 20-year-old movie, and a downer, on my day off. But I said, “Sure.” I thought it was a good thing to do, and I was curious.
The only sort of completely new revelation about it—and it was a big deal for me, because I just hadn’t taken it in when we were making the movie—was that I began to realize that every single time a person dies in the movie—and there’s a lot of death in that movie—
Even in the big massacre scene, every time somebody dies, right before they die on camera, there’s a moment of humanizing. A moment where you have to look at this person as a human being. And I thought back to what he said that afternoon when we watched it in the screening room for the first time. The reason it’s so hard, emotionally, to sit through, is that it doesn’t give you any opportunity to cheer for the death of anyone. In fact, it takes that away from you. It won’t let you turn it into a video game, or a spectator sport. No audience watching Munich will ever stand up and applaud because whoever you decide are the bad guys get killed.
I can’t even remember now if I asked Steven about that. I think I’ve told him since then. But it was not something that we discussed, and it’s not in the script. It’s just this impulse of his. Part of it was in editing, he and Mike Kahn, when they were putting the movie together. So that blew me away.
You know, I’ve seen this now in so many Spielberg films. Mark [Harris, Kushner’s husband] and I decided to rewatch Jaws, and at the very end, after the shark blows up—and I remember when I was watching it when I was 18, when it came out, and hearing the audience cheer—but the next thing that happens is you go under the water, and there’s this huge cloud of dark red, and the fin is spiraling through the water to this very melancholy music. It’s an elegy. It just immediately cuts the legs out from under, but it also engages you empathically, and it implicates you. It makes you feel grief, even at the death of an enemy. And that’s Steven. That’s in pretty much everything he does.
And he does it just automatically, partly because he has a very good heart, and partly because I think it’s a sort of ethos for him, that his art comes out of curiosity about the other and the permission that making a movie gives him, [to look] at something that has been decided isn’t human, and saying, “I’m not so sure about this. What are we? What common ground do we occupy?”
So, I was blown away watching it 16 years later. It was the first movie I ever made, and I didn’t know how weird it was to finish filming a movie on, I think it was the 11th of October, and then have it released at Christmas.
Yeah, it’s nuts. For years, I thought, Oh, no, I’m misremembering that. There’s always a year in between. There wasn’t. And now that I’ve made four movies with him, I understand, in part, that was possible because Steven edits as he goes along. The editing trailer is right there. And every spare minute when he’s not actually filming, he’s in the editing trailer. So by the time he’s done with the filming, a rough version of the movie is there. And also, you know, he’s a great freak of nature and his brain is an editing room.
There’s one shot—I always talk about this, I can’t even describe it—it’s somebody like Daniel Craig or somebody in a car. The car is parked, and he’s looking out, and like six things are happening. And I remember watching that going, “I mean, I’m sitting right here, and I’m seeing the machines move around and everything, and I don’t understand.” I’ve always said to Steven, I will never direct a movie because I do not have any sense of spatial geometry. I can understand a proscenium arch, the stage: I’m here, and you’re there, and you walk on and off. I would watch these shots and I just couldn’t understand what he was doing or what I was seeing. But I saw how exciting and how thrilling it was. So I was blown away by that. I was blown away by the performances. I think Eric Bana’s work in it is, I mean, I loved it at the time, but it really is an amazing central performance.
In 2003 or 2004—because it was right after Angels in America had come out on HBO—Kathy Kennedy was in New York, and she called my agent, and she said, “I just saw Angels, and I loved it, and I would like to meet him, and let’s have breakfast.” I was intrigued, and I thought, you know, Why not? I couldn’t imagine that anything would come of it other than that I’d get to meet somebody who made some movies that I like a lot. We had a great breakfast. We hit it off big time.
At one point, I said, “So what are you and Steven working on?” And she said, ‘We’re working on two things. One is a movie about the Munich Olympics massacre, and the other is about Abraham Lincoln, [based on] Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Abraham Lincoln [book].” And I said, “Oh, what an amazing pair of subjects.” My friend Alisa Solomon, who at the time was the sort of Mideast correspondent for The Village Voice, and she’s a good friend of mine—Alisa Solomon and I had just published an anthology of essays called Wrestling with Zion. Grove published it, and it was 35 progressive Jewish Americans writing about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was Arthur Miller, and Susan Sontag, and [three] rabbis.
So I said, “Hey, I’ve just published an anthology about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you want, I’d be happy to send you and Steven a copy.” She said that’d be great, so I sent it to the two of them, and I thought, Well, that was fun, and I’ll never hear from him, and I’ll never hear from Kathy again.
About three weeks later, I got a call. It was a voicemail saying, “Hi, it’s Steven Spielberg, and I’ve just finished reading your anthology, and I really loved it, and I’d like to talk to you about this movie I’m making.” So we got on the phone and we talked about the conflict. I hadn’t really asked Kathy much about what it was about, but when I heard what Steven was making, I don’t know if I said it to him then, I certainly said it later, “You’re walking on some very dangerous terrain,” and he said, “Yeah.” And I was just impressed, because I assumed that it was just going to be about how sad it was that these Israeli athletes had been murdered, which, of course, inarguably, it was a monstrous crime and a great tragedy. That’s sort of what I assumed it would be. It was hard at that moment in history to imagine that anything else could get made.
Yeah. It was surprising to me that he was dealing with the questions. And this was only a couple of years after 9/11, and to talk about things like extraterritorial assassinations and so on, we were still very much in the sort of “Let’s go get ’em” headspace. So I was impressed. And he told me about things that he loved in the anthology that Alisa and I had put together, and they were some of the things that I loved most about it. We had a really long talk, and he said, “Can I send you the script?” And I said, “Sure,” and he said, “If you have time, and you want to give me some notes with your thoughts….”
So I read the script, and I liked it. I had a lot of notes. I had a lot of thoughts and things that I was concerned about. So I wrote, like, 20 pages of notes, and about two days after I emailed it to him, he called and said, “I’ve read your notes. Would you like to try and do a draft of the script?” This was Eric Roth’s draft. And I said, “Well, no one has ever died in any of my plays, except from AIDS, and I’ve never killed anybody in anything I’ve written, and I know nothing whatsoever about filmmaking.” So I said, “I can’t really. I think you’d be wasting your money.”
I probably shouldn’t say this because I think I violated the Writers Guild rules, but he said, “I want you to try, if you want to try it.” And first I said, “Okay, I’m going to write two or three scenes. I’m going to just pick some scenes that I want to write, and I’m going to show them to you, and then you can decide if you want to hire me.” So I wrote these scenes. He really loved them. One of them was an early version of the scene that I certainly hear most about from other people, which is the safe house scene.
I think, at the time, I had written it as almost like a dream sequence, but basically the core of it was that dialogue. I gave him the scenes, and he said, “I really love these. I’d like you to do a new draft of the movie.” And I thought about it and I said, “If you hire me, and you give me a large amount of money, I’m not going to write a word because I’m going to feel like I don’t write that way usually.” I mean, playwrights write, and then you see if anybody wants to do it. I feel nervous about it. So I said—this is what I’m not probably supposed to say, I hope I don’t get kicked out of the Writers Guild.
I said, “I will write the screenplay, but I’m going to write it first, and then you can buy it if you like it.”
And he said, “Great!” I mean, he didn’t say “great.” He was actually a little bit unhappy, I think. But I said, “I really feel like that’s the only way you’re going to get a screenplay.” So I went away, and in pretty short order, I wrote a 272-page version of the screenplay.
Yes.
I read the book. The book is…you know…. The guy who wrote it—I can’t even remember, I’ve blissfully forgotten his name—hated the movie.
No. I decided not to watch it. Steven had already compiled a huge amount of material, so I got to watch all the TV footage of the coverage of the massacre and of the hostage taking. And I did a lot of reading on my own of what we know about the target assassination campaign…So I got enough to get a sense of what I thought that was going on here.
When I worked on Lincoln, after everything was done, I wrote to Eric, who I had met really for the first time when we went to the Oscars together. And I said, “You know, Eric, I’ll be honest, I was angry when I had to share credit with you for Munich, because I felt like all the dialogue is mine. I felt like I’d really worked hard on it. And I hope it’s okay to say that, because I also want to say to you that having now written a screenplay from scratch completely, without anybody else’s work preceding me, I understand how indebted to your work I am and how appropriate the shared credit was.”
Steven and Eric had really laid out a basic structure and a lot of the bones of the story. I got to come in and be smart and whatever, but it wasn’t like staring at Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 900-page, four-way political biography and thinking, How many pages? I mean, the Lincoln screenplay was 500 pages long when I sent it.
Steven loves that! The first thing he said when I sent him the 270-page script of Munich, I’ll never forget it, he called up and he said, “This is great! Nobody’s ever done this for me before.” And I said, “Done what?” and he said, “I mean, look! There’s so much here! It’s so much I get to pick from.” He was really giddy about it. Then we started grinding away at it, and we worked pretty solidly, I think, for the remainder of the summer. Sometime around Labor Day, I was supposed to have sent him the new draft, and I was slow doing it. I was stuck on something. I got a kind of irate call from Kathy Kennedy saying, “I think he’s going to move on if you don’t hand something in.” So I handed something in. I can’t remember if it was greenlit then. We did a reading of it in LA. Javier Bardem was in it.
I walked into the room and there was Blythe Danner, who I had met at various social functions having to do with theater. I said, “Hi,” and she said, “Hi,” and then she said, “What am I doing here?” I said, “I don’t know. Why are you here?” And she said, “I’m playing Golda Meir!” And she was great. It’s just, Blythe Danner is not who you think of immediately to play Golda Meir.
I can see it, too, but I don’t think he was in that role. I think he was maybe in the Daniel Craig role. I honestly don’t remember. I have a vague sense that Ciarán Hinds was part of it then. Mostly what I remember is Blythe Danner. And I think Eric Bana was there. I’m pretty sure he was. And then there was a moment when I think Steven was like—and now I’m used to it, because there’s always a moment right before it’s all systems go, where he says, “Maybe I’m not going to do this.” For different reasons.
There was never that moment on West Side Story. The only time he freaked out with West Side Story was when I sent him the first draft of the screenplay and I had put Officer Krupke deep in the second act, after the rumble, which is where it was originally written and where I still, to this day, believe it should probably go. It’s the only time Steven’s ever gotten mad at me about a choice I’ve made. He said, “What are you doing? I can’t show anybody this screenplay. You have to move it out immediately. It can’t be there.” He got really freaked out. Other than that, I think we sort of sailed right through West Side Story. But certainly with Lincoln, there were a number of hiccups. All of that stopped when Daniel [Day-Lewis] signed on. With Munich, I think there was a point where he went to a Malibu beach house, and he was sitting by the ocean, staring out and thinking, Am I really going to do this? Then he called me and he said, “We’re going to do it,” and I said, “You do understand that we’re going to get into an enormous amount of trouble.” He said, “Okay!”
I was just doing what I was told. I didn’t know what putting out a movie was like. I had no idea about the whole thing. Yeah, I don’t remember doing many interviews at all. We had hired a crisis manager to deal with the movie.
I was excited about making a movie because I really like movie critics. There’s some really good writers who are movie critics. And as a person who works in theater, I did not have quite as high an opinion of drama critics. There are some very good drama critics, and then there are a lot of not so good ones. I thought, Oh, how great. It’s a whole new bunch of critics. And these people really know their stuff, and they’re smart, and they’re political. And I said to everybody involved, “I think we’re going to be okay, because I think these movie critics are going to be interested in what we’re doing.” And the crisis manager said, “Oh, no, no, they won’t get it. We have to go out to intellectuals.” So the first one he went out to was [then-New Republic literary editor] Leon Wieseltier. And the rest is history.
Yeah, of course.
They gave him a private screening, and he practically broke an ankle getting out of there so he could get to his, whatever we had back then, AOL account or whatever, to warn the world that we had committed the “sin of equivalence,” which then became the buzzword of the moment and got picked up by everybody.
I was right. Then the critics came out and wrote beautifully about the movie. And then, I hate to say it, we got five Oscar nominations and it was like day and night. It was like all of a sudden, everybody loved—well, not everybody loved Munich. There were a couple of people who weren’t speaking to either of us afterwards.
There were very famous people who—not me, because my world is mostly lefty New York Jews who were okay with it. A couple of my Palestinian friends said that they wouldn’t see it because they had made a vow back then never to watch another movie where a Palestinian or Arab actor was asked to be a terrorist. They were just done with it. And fair enough, I could understand that. I was sad because I was proud of the film. But a couple of people, whose names I will not share, were furious at Steven.
I’m still sort of overwhelmed with admiration when I think about his doing this movie and really going the places he went with it, and asking the questions that the movie needed to ask. I mean, he was Mr. Schindler’s List. He was the Shoah Foundation. The pressure that was put on him before the movie was released, even in that very short window, to not release it from various sources—again, I can’t say who—but it was enormous. Steven has enormous courage.
I think we both felt that we were in a world where the rule of law was suddenly being suspended simply because passions overrode rationality, and international law, and international boundaries, and international sovereignty. This kind of weird Machiavellian thing had taken over a lot of otherwise rational people’s thinking after 9/11, and we really felt like, Okay, this is bad. The cycle of retribution, what we’ve known since Aeschylus, is not going to produce anything other than more and more bloodshed. But still, when I watched it in 2021, I was like, Oh my God, we made a movie where at the end, the hero makes a reverse aliyah. He leaves Mossad and leaves Israel and says, “I’m done.” And that’s intense!
I felt very, very strongly that, while of course the murder of innocent civilians and innocent athletes is abhorrent and unforgivable, that no violence occurs without cause, and it originates somewhere, and where does it originate? I think if we’re going to make a movie about this terrible thing, we have to ask those questions. Otherwise, you have to say that the people that did this are operating off of unrecognizable motivations and incomprehensible nonhuman directives and mandates. That is never true of human beings. You can always understand. And the mandate, as far as I’m concerned, of writing about anything, is: Try and understand it. That’s what you’re trying to do. It’s the case that right after the massacre, Israel flew over refugee camps and sent missiles and blasted these refugee camps. That is often left out.
Yeah.
Yes. It’s an interesting combination of stuff, because Steven, very often when he’s making a film, the first thing you’ll hear is, it’s going to be this kind of movie or that kind of movie. The first thing he told me about it was, “I want it to look like a 1970s, French Connection sort of desaturated….” —I think that’s the right term, like I said, I still don’t know anything about filmmaking, but he and Janusz [Kamiński] were going for a look for this thing. The colors are all sort of grayed out and overexposed. He really wanted it to be a thriller, and I think that there are some really great political thrillers, so I had no objection to that form.
My second or third date with Mark was to go see Saving Private Ryan.
And afterwards, we were talking about the movie, and Mark said that the thing about Spielberg is, during Normandy, the landing on the beach, with everything going on, bullets coming from, the troops landing, from the Germans on the shore, the water, the waves, this, that—700 things are going on in every direction—he said you could stop the movie, in any megaplex, anywhere in the world, and say to anyone in the audience, “What’s going on here?” And they would be able to tell you pretty accurately what they’re watching.
Steven said this great thing to me when we were making Lincoln and were filming one of the big, chaotic scenes in the House of Representatives where everybody’s screaming at everybody. I had given every person in that room a little handout of, were you a Democrat or a Republican? Were you a radical Republican or a centrist Republican? Were you a centrist Democrat or a reactionary Democrat? Where you’ll fit in this thing and what your positions would be, so that they would all know what they were doing. And Steven, who had a terrible cold when we were filming those scenes, came up to me and said, “What are these guys? Who are they? What are they? What are they after?” And I said, “You know, Steven, in a way, it doesn’t matter at this point. It’s just everybody’s yelling at everybody else. It’s chaos,” and he said, “Oh, anybody can make chaos. I want to make chaos that means something.”
There it is. I came to realize, it’s part of what’s fundamentally democratic about Steven’s filmmaking, he doesn’t want to make things stupid, but it bothers him to think that he’s making anything that is not accessible to everyone. He wants, on some level, to have a huge embrace. The franchise is broad.
But still, I said, “I don’t know how to make chase sequences,” and he said, “I’ll take care of that.” I think one of the reasons that the script was so long, the first draft, was that I tried to kind of come up with some. He was very sweet about it and said, “Yeah, it’s interesting,” and then got rid of all of it.
Right.
Yeah. That line came from a moment when I was talking to Steven about the endless back-and-forth between [the Palestinians and Israelis]. That there would be a bombing in Tel Aviv and then there would be rocket fire. And I said the thing that a lot of people are not getting about this is, these two sides are each serving each other’s purpose. Each one wants to win and destroy the other side, but there is a conversation, a back and forth, a dialogue. This is how they speak to each other. And it’s also how they keep the war going. He liked that, so we made that line.
Yeah, yeah.
It has been for decades and decades, before the founding of the state of Israel. All the way back into British Palestine. It’s a terrifying fact of this struggle that it has been locked in this. With the [Oslo] Accords and the Taba resolutions, before W. became president, there were moments when the situation was inching towards a breakthrough. Something new, rather than just recycling the same garbage. I shouldn’t call it garbage, because it’s not. It’s immensely complicated issues. But it sort of gets recycled so much that it becomes impossible to encounter it without feeling a sense of rage and exasperation. It’s like, when do we stop saying the same things and actually figure out how to fix this? Because it’s not an unfixable problem, but it requires determination and goodwill and a belief in diplomacy and so on. And the courage to not respond to every act of terror with disproportionate military force.
On 9/11, in 2001, I had written a play called Homebody/Kabul that was about to go into rehearsal at New York Theatre Workshop. We went into rehearsal on October 4th, so the play was written. It had been written in the years leading up to 9/11. It’s all about Afghanistan, and there’s a line in it—one of the characters says, “You’re afraid the Taliban are coming to New York? Don’t worry, they’re coming to New York!” My musical Caroline, or Change, one of the main plot points is taking down statues of Confederate soldiers.
It’s not prescience. I think it’s just that, unfortunately, it takes us a long time to figure out how to fix things, and make things better, and change. If you find a way to apprehend some quality of truth and reality, it’s going to probably last longer than if you fuck it up and say the wrong thing. I don’t know that I would say that Munich feels prescient.
Well, that means a lot to me. I feel like we dug really deep and hard, and found some things of real value. One of the things that absolutely impacted enormously—Steven is the opposite of unapproachable on set; everybody sort of feels like you can go up to him. The guys that we hired, especially when we were doing the Olympic Village scenes, the people that we hired to play the Israeli athletes, and also the Palestinians, all had a horse in the race. They were all people with deep feelings about it. The people playing Palestinians, some were Palestinians, some Egyptians. They were people who really had strong feelings about this. And I was kind of blown away by how quickly, the minute Steven said hello, they took advantage and said, “Okay, Steven, let’s talk.” And they talked to him, and he listened, which is the really amazing thing. I could feel him drinking this stuff in.
And we were still having arguments. I mean, we were working on the script on the plane ride over to Malta where we started filming. I sat behind him the whole movie, and he’d say, “What if we do this?” And I would type away, and he loved that. But we were still working on it, and those guys, they had an impact on the way Steven felt about the Palestinian characters. On the complexity of it.
There is one other thing that I could mention that I got from watching it recently. I hope Steven doesn’t mind that I’m saying this, but the one thing that I had not really loved when I first saw the movie—even though I think I put it in the script, but I had put it in the script because Steven really wanted it—was what’s probably the most controversial scene.
The sex scene. At the time, I found it disturbing, and I didn’t know what the point was. I was really moved by it this time, and I think, for the first time, I got it. That really, in a sense, what he’s saying is that what this guy has experienced has invaded every molecule of his being. And that everything he does now, he’s trying to run away from it, to get away from it. Everything he does now for the rest of his life. I mean, some people said he’s suggesting that Avner is trying to fuck to make a new Jewish baby to beat the Palestinians. But that’s not it at all. It’s just a way of showing this person who, even in a moment of ultimate tenderness and empathy, the violence invades everything about us and colonizes us and destroys us. I found it harrowing this time, and really impressive.
Well, yeah, I mean…
Because I really believed naïvely—I mean, first of all, I didn’t imagine Netanyahu. There’s so much that none of us could have seen. You know, in my first play, A Bright Room Called Day, I completely failed to figure it out, but I at least had an intuition that there was some connection between the Reagan counterrevolution and fascism. I had this sense that there was a consonance there that was extremely frightening, and I couldn’t figure out in that play how to do it, but I would never have imagined that we would be in the middle of what we’re in the middle of right now.
You know, I guess I had this feeling that, even though I was a sentient human being and a grown-up watching what happened in Sarajevo, so I should have known better, I kind of thought that with the world's attention focused the way it is on Israel, and on Gaza, and on the West Bank, that just the logistics of really going for a campaign of ethnic cleansing, which of course is going to result in genocide, that I thought, they're not gonna do that.
Do you have family connections to Israel?
No. The first time I went over was because the Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv did Angels in America in 1993. So they invited me over, and I went, and I got to have—this is before the assassination of [Yitzhak] Rabin—I had a lovely long lunch with Leah Rabin.
Who told me to go see this play in the north. In the old Crusaders’ fortress in Akko, there was a Palestinian-Israeli theater company doing a play called Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa, which lasted for eight hours and was one of the most amazing things I ever saw in my entire life. Leah Rabin had told me that she had been there the week before and adored it. It was incredible. It started, you went to a kibbutz outside of Haifa that had been founded by Holocaust survivors, and [one of the residents] had built a scale model of the [Treblinka] camp. For this theater company, on the tour, the docent who talked to you about the camp was a Palestinian actor, and he gave exactly the same speech: They did this to us here, and this is where they burned us in the ovens. But it was a Palestinian. The show was just amazing, and despairing, and incredibly intense and brilliant.
So I had a kind of amazing experience there, and that was the beginning of my connection. I went several more times. I went with Kathy Kennedy to talk to the widows of the athletes, who were given a special screening before we released the movie. We had this incredibly intense experience talking to them. I went with a group of playwrights to meet with various Palestinian theater companies. So went all over Hebron, and the West Bank, and Gaza.
Yeah. We had to leave because somebody had been killed, and there was a big political funeral in the streets and people were firing guns. Our host said, “I think we should probably start to walk towards the cars.” We started walking towards the cars, and these little boys, I mean, they were like 10-, 11-year-old boys, started following us. First they were saying, “Can we see your camera? Can we see your camera?” And we said, “Well, not right now, we have to go to the car.” And then one of them picked up a stone and threw it. And they all started throwing stones and I had to run.
We were also in Hebron, in the streets with netting overhead because of the settlers. You looked at the netting, and it was filled with fragments of brick and stuff that the settlers were routinely throwing down on Palestinians in the streets. It was my first experience going through a checkpoint to go from East Jerusalem to Ramallah, and it took eight hours in the blazing hot sun. The person right in front of me in line, who looked like she was in her 60s, was holding a five-year-old kid and waiting for some teenage boy in an IDF uniform to look at her papers. It was that and the entry into Gaza, which, I’m sorry, there’s no way around it: It looks like Auschwitz architecture. I mean, it just does. Those were really life-changing experiences. I continued to have a connection of sorts, but now that has changed.
Do you go back to Israel? You still have some family there?
Well, we’ve just gone through the, um— [Kushner points to his Zohran Mamdani campaign button].
The responses that I got wearing that pin. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and friends of mine…. I’ve lost a few friends over Gaza, and now I think a couple of friends over Mamdani.
Oh, yeah. Well, these are people who are otherwise completely rational, who genuinely believe that he’s going to move in and install sharia law and kill all the Jews. I mean, it’s psychotic. What they’re doing is looking at this South Asian guy and thinking, Ooh, I don’t like that. Jews should never.
Do you learn from history? Do you learn from being the victim of oppression, or are you a conduit for oppression?
As Auden says, those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
But it doesn’t have to be that way, because you do see people taking shit and saying, “No, I’m not going to get into the worst part of myself. I’m going to get into the better angels of my nature.”
It is. It is. It’s very hard.
You know, part of the reason that we’ve survived for 2,000 years of diaspora is because of this incredibly intense sense of the mishpocha, of the people of Israel, of being part of a living tree. The first time I was in Israel, this wonderful journalist, a gay journalist, took me—I had to convince him, because he didn’t want to go—to Jerusalem. He said it’s crazy there, and I’m going to get killed. He lived in Tel Aviv. And I said, “Please, really, I can’t be in Israel and not see Jerusalem.” So we went to Jerusalem, and I went to the Wailing Wall, and I was looking at all these guys praying in front of the wall, and I said that it makes me so sad that these Jews would look at me and think, because I’m gay, that I’m not a Jew. And he said, “Oh, no, they think you’re a Jew. They think you’re a Jew who should be killed.” [Laughter].
I still believe that there is a very profound thing that Jews hold, that comes from both our having endured thousands of years of torment and also having endured the terrible pain of Jewish history, but also its astonishing perseverance. I think that my non-Jewish friends, who I agree with about many, many things, often don’t get that. It’s one of the reasons that I have a huge issue with saying that “the Zionist army” is bombing Gaza or “the Zionist government” is doing this or that.
Right, exactly. And I remember, not that long ago, that the “Zionist Occupation Government” was what white Christian antisemites called the American government. So I have a problem with that. It feels to me that the use of that word has, intentionally or unintentionally, the value for people who are using it of pulling all Jews into this, as opposed to ascribing this to the policies of a specific country with a specific military and a specific civilian population. I’m not an Israeli. I’m an American, which means my hands are bloody for all of those reasons. But I’m not an Israeli. And I think that’s an important distinction.
I don’t know. I am working on a project that has a lot to do with Jews, but it’s not about Israel. It’s about something that happened in the United States. But very clearly, we know just from that Haaretz interview that you mentioned. [They asked] about Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars, which I said I thought was a morally unimpeachable speech. And I got a certain amount of shit for saying that.
I mean, you can go into any bookstore in the United States now in any reasonably sized city, and there is a section right up front of books about Palestinians, and Palestinian culture, and the Nakba, and books that are critical of Israel up front. It used to be you could go into these bookstores and you couldn’t find a book about Palestinians anywhere. These people have lost the fight about that.
October 7th, and the massacre of people in Gaza, has changed the world’s view, I think.
Right, and it always takes too long for that to happen, but there it is. And I do feel that. When I first started getting into trouble for talking about the Palestinian conflict, there weren’t a lot of people who were talking publicly about the Palestinian conflict. It was a scary thing to do. There were people, but you felt very much isolated. Much less now.
History never goes in straight lines, so there are turns back. I can certainly say that in New York theater, for instance, it’s very difficult for anyone to get a play on about Palestinians from a Palestinian perspective. It’s very difficult for Palestinian writers to get produced in the American theater, and I would imagine even more so in film. It’s considered a very dangerous subject, and people are still trying to hide from it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.