Fifty years ago this week, American Jews were up in arms over a deeply offensive art-and-poetry display at the World’s Fair – but unlike some of today’s aggrieved protesters, they responded with bologna rather than bullets.
The controversy began when the government of Jordan set up a harshly anti-Israel display at its Word’s Fair pavilion, in New York City in early 1964. It featured a wall-size mural of a Palestinian Arab child, flanked by the text of a long anti-Zionist poem.
“For centuries,” according to the poem, Christians, Muslims, and Jews all lived in harmony in the Holy Land, “Until strangers from abroad / Professing one thing, but underneath, another / Began buying up land and stirring up the people…The strangers, once thought terror’s victims, became terror’s fierce practitioners.”