A Jewish mother who took her 4-year-old son to what she thought would be a family-friendly puppet show in Lower Manhattan earlier this month was horrified when the performance morphed into an Israel-bashing disgrace, she told The Post.
“The Cardboard Pizza Puppet Circus,” a show created and performed by puppet troupe the Boxcutter Collective that the ensemble describes as “a celebration of” New York City, was featured at this year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival, a multi-day celebration sponsored in part by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.
“Featuring dancing skyscrapers, giant rats, fossil-fuel-fighting flowers, a live brass band, and Lady Liberty herself,” the show’s description reads.
But 15 minutes into the Aug. 13 performance, the show shifted from covering New York-centric topics into controversial political positions against the Jewish state, said the Brooklyn mom, 43, who declined to be named.
“The anti-Israel stuff came out of nowhere,” the mom said.
“It went from pizza rat and parallel parking to accusations of Israel bombing hospitals.”
The “packed” courtyard show, which the mom said was performed to a crowd of about 200 and ran for about an hour, included a skit with eight performers recreating a flotilla, which was met with enthusiastic jeers against Israel from audience members. At another point, remarks were made about American tax dollars going to Israel, she said.
“How does anti-Israel propaganda figure into a play that’s otherwise entirely about New York? Is hatred for Israel as synonymous with the City’s brand as pizza rat?” asked the “proud Zionist” mom, adding that her 4-year-old son “kept asking what was happening when he saw I was taken aback.”
A Soviet Union refugee who now resides in Windsor Terrace, the mother said her “heart was racing,” as she watched many in the crowd appear to agree with “the litany of accusations” made against Israel.
“(I was) feeling like I was surrounded by my ideological enemies,” she said.
“This particular group had very antisemitic views,” she said of the Boxcutter Collective. “It felt like a mob – the hairs on your neck stand up.”
The Boxcutter Collective proved its pro-Palestinian bona fides in the aftermath of the Oct. 7 atrocity against Israel in which 1,200 men, women and children were killed, when it performed in the “Gaza Monologues” in November 2023 – on “The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People” – in response to the “horrific war taking place in Gaza.”
“I knew that if I shouted something against Hamas, the crowd would turn against me, so I kept my mouth shut,” the mother told The Post. “My generation is now experiencing a fresh iteration of antisemitism here in New York that my family escaped back in the Soviet Union.”
Manuel Moran, the festival’s founder and producer, told Jerusalem News Syndicate earlier this week that organizers may have been in the dark about the troupe’s rogue content.
“As with many festivals, the full content of a production is not always known in advance, and the company premiered many elements of this work as part of the event,” he told JNS. “We stand behind our role in providing a platform for artists while recognizing that artists are responsible for their own work and should be able to speak to it directly.”
Moran told the outlet that in addition to a Yiddish-tinged skit appearing during the festival, an Israeli troupe, Hanut Theater Company, was invited but couldn’t arrange visas.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, slammed the performance and festival, saying in a post on X, “This is an inappropriate use of public resources. Publicly funded cultural programming should never contribute to an environment in which Jewish New Yorkers feel unsafe.”
Calls made to the Boxcutter Collective, the International Puppet Fringe Festival, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts went unanswered.
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