On June 3, the Noguchi Community, a group of “current employees, former employees and concerned community members” at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York City, called for a boycott of the museum by visitors, “programmatic partners,” artists and curators, and the resignation of its top leadership.

The demands are an escalation by the group after the museum refused to respond to a May 23 open letter signed by over 600 people calling for officials to take responsibility for the role that it has played for an extended period in creating a hostile work environment, suppressing the freedom of speech of workers and a pattern of harassment and vindictive behavior.

The group also demanded that the museum leadership provide a public plan for a review process, leadership training, diversification of the board of trustees and a rescinding of the infamous “keffiyeh ban” of August 2024. At that time the museum’s leadership prohibited staff from wearing the scarf, a garment associated with the Palestinian struggle, worn around the world as a symbol of solidarity, particularly in opposition to the current genocide in Gaza.

The group has issued several documents, including an analysis of worker abuse by management and a timeline of the most recent events. Accusations by the staff on management passivity about issues such as sexual harassment of museum employees go as far back as 2016, but it is after the Gaza genocide that these issues came to a head.

The open assault on democratic rights began when, the group alleges, Deputy Director Jennifer Lorch pressured a department head to fire a Muslim employee who opposed the museum making a statement on the October 7 incursion by Palestinian forces.

The keffiyeh ban, a direct assault on the democratic rights of staff, was prompted by a series of verbal complaints, letters to the museum and outright provocations by Zionist supporters who condemned the museum for allowing staff to wear the garment. The ban, at first promulgated verbally and without discussion by Director Amy Hau and then moved into policy and implemented in a staff meeting last August 15—where those wearing a keffiyeh were required to leave—provoked outrage among the staff, many of whom walked out in protest. The museum then closed its doors for two days. August 21 and 23 saw further staff job actions after Hau announced a ban on all “political” clothing (which has only been applied to the keffiyeh).

As news of the ban became public, members of the community organized a read-in inside the museum on August 25. The next day, the museum fired its Director of Visitor Services, who had implemented the ban. The general sense of staff, however, was that he was being scapegoated and that it became clear that Hau’s actions were backed by the Board of Trustees.

On September 4 the museum fired three Gallery Assistants who showed up to work wearing keffiyehs. A protest took place in front of the museum that week and the Director of Finance resigned in opposition to the firing of the Director of Visitor Services. Hau, the museum’s director, doubled down on the museum’s policy against “political dress” shortly afterward.

These actions have resulted in the refusal of programmatic partners to work with the museum and protests from artists, including prominent novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, as well as the repeated closing of the museum to the public.

Most prominent cultural institutions in New York City and around the world have either sidestepped the issue of the Gaza genocide in an unprincipled manner or taken retaliatory action when staff members have demanded a stance of open opposition to the mass murder. The WSWS noted recently that “every leading institution in the US … throws principles and democratic concerns out the window confronted with pressure from the far right and the pro-Israeli lobby.”

The list of such abuses and episodes is a lengthy one.

Most recently, the Whitney Museum in New York City censored a performance of “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance,” which takes it title from a line by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, suspending the Independent Study Program and discharging its associate director Sara Nadal-Melsió. In March, the Rhode Island School of Design shut down an exhibition of Palestinian art.

Anti-democratic censorship has become de facto policy for cultural institutions since 92NY, a cultural landmark for poetry, cancelled an appearance by Vietnamese-American Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen because of his opposition to the Gaza genocide in October 2023. Since then, a host of cultural institutions, ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Brooklyn Museum to the Tate Gallery in London have sought to censor artists, staff and members of the public opposed to the genocide.

The attack on the democratic culture of museums is not only facilitated by upper middle class layers who work as managers and directors; it is state policy under Trump, as can be seen by his defunding of the Institute for Museum and Library Services, a lifeline to many smaller and rural museums in the US, and his executive order restructuring the Smithsonian Institution. The latter is part a plan “to wreck the democratic principles embedded in American culture,” as we noted.

The cultural counterrevolution also includes the dismantling by Trump of the Department of Education and the attacks on universities. The Trump administration has sought to impose a Gleichschaltung–the Nazi’s “synchronization” of all elements of intellectual and cultural life–on the campuses and this holds equally true for museums and similar institutions.

The attempts to suppress opposition to the Gaza genocide at the Noguchi and elsewhere reveal the deep conflict between the objectively progressive role that art and culture play in the cognition of the world around us, on the one hand, and the pervasive influence of the oligarchy and its lackies, on the other.

As the Noguchi Community notes in its documents, the attack on its workers’ rights is symbolic

of a greater far-right movement and a greater harm. If it can happen here and be acceptable, then what chance do we have as a society to address the larger issues? If Isamu Noguchi, an artist and activist who stood against fascism, racism and a homogenized society can be utilized to enact this harm, then what else can be taken away from people of conscience everywhere?

Opposition, as the Noguchi Community shows, has not been lacking. Tens of thousands have protested cultural institutions, written letters and signed petitions, just as millions have protested the genocide itself and are now confronting Trump’s efforts to obliterate democratic rights for the entire American population. But protest is not enough. Action is needed to bring to bear the immense strength of the working class against the fascistic Trump government and all those who have collaborated with it in suppressing free speech and other basic rights.

Museum workers must link up with the many millions who are fed up not just with their toxic and even deadly work environments, low wages and silencing, in a broad, international fight by the working class against capitalism.