JustNews: There's been a lot of controversy surrounding your receiving an honorary degree. What's been your reaction?Tony Kushner: I'm not really happy about it. To be honest, it's really kind of a tough thing. I was very, very pleased and happy to be invited to come to Brandeis. It meant a lot to me, because the school is named after Louis Brandeis who I admire enormously and because it's a school with a Jewish tradition and I'm very proud of being Jewish, so it was a nice thing. I, maybe stupidly, didn't anticipate the controversy, even after all the noise about Munich, it didn't occur to me that things would reach the kind of noise level they reached. I imagined that, as was the case with Munich, I think, that there were several levels of it. There are people who agree with me and there are people who don't necessarily agree with me but who actually bother to read the essays and interviews I've done, and have a sense of what my politics really are, and don't find my political opinions really appalling, even if they don't agree with them or find them anti-Israel or anti-Jewish, because they're not. And then there are the people who are looking for problems and who have decided to turn me into a kind of a straw demon. And I suspect that the last group is in a distinct minority and makes a great deal of noise and gets an inappropriate amount of coverage in the press.

JN: You mean the Zionist Organization of America?

TK: Groups like the Zionist Organization of America, which as far as I know is one guy and his mother and a Web site-I don't know what that organization is or how many members it has or if it has any legitimacy at all, but it seems it's sort of akin to another group that I know of called the Catholic League which is basically a cranky guy in New Jersey with a fax machine. And you call yourself a group like this and send out a lot of angry e-mails and get everybody hysterical, but I'm assuming that most people would fall into the first two categories and that they're happy that I'm coming.

I have to say that I'm not enormously happy with the way the Brandeis administration and some people on faculty have handled this controversy. I feel that it's laudable that they never entertained for a minute rescinding the invitation, which I think is appropriate. But I don't think it's appropriate to announce over and over again that they made the invitation to give me an honorary doctorate without knowing about my politics, with the implication being, 'We wouldn't have done it if we'd known what his politics were,' which is an odd way to treat someone that they're honoring. And, well, people like [NEJS Prof.] Jonathan Sarna, a person whom I have admired, make statements like 'Well, this person's politics are completely opposed to the politics of Justice Brandeis.'

JN: One thing they've said is they're honoring your art, and not your politics.

TK: Which is nonsense. I don't know what that means. I don't know what that would mean about anybody, but I've worked very hard as a playwright to make it impossible to separate my art and my politics. I'm a political playwright. There's stuff about the Middle East in Angels in America, in [it's second part] Perestroika. I guess maybe the people on the Board of Trustees who are making these claims didn't read that part or were asleep when that happened in the theater. The idea that you couldn't have known my politics or that my politics and my art are separate is really sort of depressing to me. It's like, 'what have I been working for, then?' I don't want to be considered an artist whose politics can be splintered off and put in a little dark corner. I don't like snappy dialogue and I have this kind of regrettable sideline hobby of saying upsetting things about the Middle East . I'm not a sensationalist, I don't go out to cause controversy but I've certainly never shied away from controversial positions when I thought that something needed to be said that might cause controversy.

JN: A lot of the Jewish press has been quoting you as having said, "Things might have been better off if Israel never existed." In your letter to the University recently, you said your views on Israel are more characterized by ambivalence. Could you clarify your views?

TK: Jehuda Reinharz asked me to write him a letter explaining my politics and I did .This has been an interesting lesson for me because I don't talk about things that I really care about in sound bytes. I can't sum up my feelings about the state of Israel in a sound byte because in many ways my feelings are contradictory. When I say that I think the founding of the state of Israel-from my perspective-was a mistake in terms of what it was meant to accomplish, in terms of being an answer to the problem of anti-Semitism and Jewish suffering in the last 2,000-plus years of human history, I still feel that way. I don't think I've ever said, 'It would be better if Israel didn't exist,' or if I have said that I've always, always said that Israel exists now and its secure existence has to be defended at all costs. I've never advocated in any way, shape or form anything resembling the destruction of the state of Israel. But, I feel that as an American and as a Jew that there are issues that are raised by the history of the principles of the modern state of Israel that I have serious issues with.

. There's such an assumption that any criticism of Israel is accompanied by incredible bad faith and it becomes impossible to speak about this. And that becomes a form of censorship. The only thing that's permissible is an absolute silence on the subject or an absolute endorsement of everything that Israel does.

JN: There is, of course, another controversy at Brandeis surrounding a removed exhibit of Palestinian childrens' art. It was taken down because administrators felt it was not displayed in the correct context. Does political art need context? Does it need to be balanced?

TK: No, it's nonsense. It's insulting to the audience. Brandeis students are smart people. What does that mean, context?

. It's embarrassing. It sounded like it was a good exhibit. It's hanging at MIT and it's doing just fine. No eyes are bursting into flames and nobodies dying or falling on the floor having an epileptic seizure because they saw a drawing by a Palestinian school kid and don't know what context means ... I think it makes the University look intolerant and frightened, panicky.