The tempest has subsided, and the playwright Tony Kushner will receive his honorary doctorate from the City University of New York after all. After a single trustee convinced the majority of his fellow board members to deny the award on the basis of Kushner's viciously negative pronouncements about Israel, the weight of almost the entire New York cultural apparatus was brought to bear, and in short order the board's chairman called, successfully, for the decision to be overruled. The whole uproar, brief but ferocious, was an object lesson in the present state of cultural and intellectual politics in America.
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