Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum closed after staff say exhibit 'frames Palestinian liberation' as antisemitism

Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum remains closed after more than half its staff walked out last week to protest an exhibit that addresses antisemitism in the region.

The “Confronting Hate Together” exhibit focuses on the history of discrimination experienced by Black, Asian-American, and Jewish communities in Seattle.

At a press event previewing the exhibit last week, Cassie Chinn, Wing Luke's deputy executive director, said, “We wanted to look towards the past to see how that might inform our present and our future.”

RELATED: Wing Luke exhibit shows how Black, Asian, and Jewish Seattleites confront hate together

But, in bringing the history of prejudice and discrimination to the current day, the museum's own staffers argue the exhibit suffered from a glaring omission — the ongoing plight of more than one million displaced Palestinians in Gaza.

Explanatory panels highlight a rising tide of antisemitism and hate crimes in Seattle. The exhibit says that graffiti sprayed in November on the Herzl-Ner Tamid Synagogue on Mercer Island that said “stop killing” was antisemitism “disguised as anti-Zionism ... as if the Jews of Mercer Island could control the actions of the Israeli government.”

The exhibit also says that the Palestinian protest cry, "from the river to the sea," is "a phrase defined by the erasure of Israel," which pro-Palestinians activists say is not true.

The exhibit did not mention of a similar rise seen in anti-Islamic, anti-Arab, or anti-Muslim hate. According to preliminary data from the Washington chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, almost 40% of Muslims in Washington have experienced heightened discrimination since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Wing Luke staffers who walked off their jobs on the opening day of the "Confronting Hate Exhibit" last Wednesday said they had requested changes to text included in the exhibit that “frames Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionism as antisemitism.”

"By conflating these two terms, the Confronting Hate Together exhibit is upholding Zionism, and thereby dangerously erasing the violence and oppression of Palestinians," the staff said in a GoFundMe campaign that has raised close to $8,000 for striking staffers in less than a week. Zionism is a nationalist movement to establish a Jewish state in the Middle East.

In response to a social media campaign documenting the staff objections, more than 550 people have written to museum leadership, objecting to the exhibit.

Lisa Kranseler, executive director of the Washington State Jewish Historical Society released a statement standing by the project and the anti-Black, anti-Asian, and anti-Jewish hate it attempts to highlight.

“This exhibit is and always has been about addressing hate at home in our Puget Sound region, featuring local voices and lived experience,” the statement reads.

“Just like any other marginalized group, the Jewish community should be allowed to name harm directed against us and share our lived experiences. The exhibit accurately portrays the local Jewish experience of antisemitism.”

The statement points to a doubling of anti-Jewish incidents in Washington state in 2023, many of which occurred after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

On May 19, 26 staff members signed a letter to the museum’s executive leadership asking that the disputed text panel be removed. Their other demands:

• Acknowledge the limited perspectives presented in this exhibition. Missing perspectives include those of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslim communities who are also experiencing an increased amount of violence, scapegoating, and demonization as Zionist forces continue the genocide in Palestine.
• Require Community Advisory Committee (CAC) review of all pop-up exhibits including a community review of the revised "Confronting Hate Together" exhibit content.
• Center voices and perspectives that align with the museum’s mission and values by platforming community stories within an anti-colonial, anti-white supremacist framework.

RELATED: Washington state sees rise in anti-Arab, anti-Jewish hate incidents amid Israel-Hamas War

Museum spokesperson Steve McLean said the museum had approached one of its exhibit partners in response to the staff requests and that partner, presumably the Washington State Jewish Historical Society, agreed to amend the language of the panel, but not to remove it altogether.

“To go in and completely remove an item would be against the way we do things. You censor one, what's to stop you from censoring all?” McLean said. “This is where the difficulty in our line of work comes is that we're allowing all partners and all communities to have their voices, maybe not all at once, but we certainly are in the business of empowering those voices.”

The “Confronting Hate Together” exhibit is a partnership between the museum, the Jewish Historical Society, and the Black Heritage Society of Washington State. The three groups began planning for the exhibit early in 2023, months before Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed almost 1,200 people. The Israeli government’s response to that attack has continued in Gaza ever since. Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip has reportedly killed more than 32,000 Palestinians.

McLean said Tuesday that the museum is actively working with staff and hopes to reopen soon.

“As far as any specific details or timeline, it’s too early to tell at this point,” he said.

Another partner in the exhibit, Stephanie Johnson-Toliver of the Black Heritage Society of Washington State, said, at this point, she had nothing to add.

“Confronting Hate Together” was scheduled to run at Wing Luke through June 30. It was created as a traveling exhibit, which means it would then travel to other museums. McLean said those plans are now on hold.

“We obviously have a lot of work to do to hear the own internal communities, our staff, who have expressed their concerns. We are obviously listening to other communities beyond them,” he said. “We need to get a better perspective before deciding what the next steps are.”

McLean, who has been with Wing Luke for less than a year, said the museum anticipated a response to the exhibit. But he said the extent of the reaction has opened his eyes to the depth of emotion and the need for further conversation about the ongoing violence, both in Washington state and in the Middle East.

“The response to this exhibit on all sides has been somewhat overwhelming,” McLean said. “Some of it has been really eye opening and supportive, and there's other conversations that the community is having that naturally would make us pause and kind of examine where we can expand or improve or enhance the opportunity for those other voices. It's definitely been a learning experience.”