JFREJ Risk Takers Award acceptance speech

November 16, 2006

Tony Kushner

              In preparation for this night I was trying to remember when I first heard of JFREJ.  Then I remembered – I was at a demonstration, many years ago, years before I met my husband, Mark Harris, so it’s OK to tell this story, even with him in the audience, I was at a demonstration, I can’t remember what for, but it was noisy as some demonstrations are.  And I saw a really hot guy in the crowd.  I wanted to cruise him, and I’ve never been good at that, so when we wound up standing close to one another – this didn’t happen accidentally! – I asked him what the letters on the button he was wearing on his denim jacket stood for.  “What’s JFREJ?” I asked, thinking it was as good a line as I was likely to come up with.  He told me, but it was noisy, and then he got swept away – well OK he walked away, unimpressed with my line I guess – and I was left thinking I’d misheard him, I was sure that he couldn’t have said what I thought he’d said.   “Jews for Racial and Economic Justice.” Impossible!  It was even sexier than the sexy guy with the button, “Jews For Racial and Economic Justice,” I was sure my desire-addled senses had cooked it up, like a... like a... well, like a political wetdream!

              I’ve never considered myself a risk taker.  I’m an artist.  Risk-taking implies courage, and I’m nervous about overemphasizing the amount of courage actually needed to do what I do.  Of course it takes courage to do what I do, but then again which ten consecutive seconds of anybody’s life doesn’t require courage? Just getting out of bed and facing the newspaper these days risks a kind of toxic disequilibrium, reading the newspaper in these perilous times risks the fatal discouragement of any truth-seeking, fact-based, indebted-to-causality-history-and-narrative-based activity –  like art, or, well, like staying sane. The courage you need to make art is dwarfed by the courage you need to continue to have faith in human progress.     

              I’ve never felt I was especially courageous. I know that I lack  the moral fiber to be complimented on my courage without profound damage being done to my wobbly attachment to reality.  If I have done risky things with my art, it’s only because I want to entertain. I want people to love me, and by people I mean outside of my immediate family, who more or less have to love me.  I mean lots of people.  My grasp of reality isn’t so wobbly that I imagine I can get more than a handful of people to love me purely on the basis of personal charm or hours spent in the gym and at the orthodontist’s  or the number of dinner tabs I pick up.  I believe if I want a lot of people to love me – and I do, I have no idea why, it can’t save me from dying and I’ve also learned that the more people you convince to love you, or at least like you, the more theater critics you get, for every new person who loves or likes you an additional theater critic appears, just to balance things out.  And yet I still want to be loved, or at least liked, it’s sort of sinister and pathetic but among dishonorable pathetic impulses it’s certainly not worst.  To make people love me I try to make art that entertains, and truth is more entertaining, finally, than lies, truth is more durably entertaining than lies, and truth attracts a better class of people.  Truth occasions risk, because truth is elusive, and so it forces you to reach for things that lie beyond your comfortable grasp. 

              I remember reading in an essay by Marshall T. Meyer the sentence:  “Fear is the inevitable concomitant of activism.” Fear is, in fact, the inevitable concomitant of action. I hope I’ve scared myself enough to have deserved this honor.  I know I haven’t, so I accept this award on behalf of my aspirations rather than my accomplishments, and as a pledge to scare myself more.  I’m very, very embarrassed, and also very very grateful to have received it, and to have received from a group that has meant so much to me, as an artist, as an activist, as a Jew – in pursuing racial justice and economic justice, JFREJ honors the civil rights advocacy and socialism that are among Jewish-American culture’s crowning achievements – and of course I’m grateful to have received it in such remarkable company, to share this evening with the heroes of TWU, and with Grace, a writer whose work I admire as much as anyone who’s ever written, and from whom I’ve have learned so many invaluable things – about writing and life. 

              So whether or not I’ve earned it, it’s important that I say thanks, thanks, thanks for giving it to me.  As Marshall T. Meyer’s teacher Abraham Joshua Heschel points out, saying thanks is of critical, maybe even paramount  importance: 

“What is the truth about being human?  The... acknowledgment of opaqueness, shortsightedness, inadequacy.  But truth also demands rising, striving, for the goal is both within and beyond us.  The truth of being human is gratitude; its secret is appreciation.”