Exhibit Canceled After Dispute Between Library and Donor

The two disagreed over a plan to display work by artists with Confederate ties

Photo of Leonard L. Milberg ’53 with a Princeton building in the background.

Leonard L. Milberg ’53

Ricardo Barros

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By Deborah Yaffe

Published April 26, 2022

3 min read

Last summer, plans were coming together for a September 2022 art exhibit at the Princeton University Library, tied to the impending publication of a scholarly book on Jews in Gilded Age America. A longtime University donor was funding the show, an art historian had been hired to curate it, and a Firestone Library exhibit space had been chosen.

But by December, the project had fallen apart amid disagreements over how to handle the work of two Jewish American artists with ties to the Confederacy, one of them a lifelong apologist for the South. When news of the dispute surfaced online nearly two months later, Princeton faced criticism for reportedly refusing to exhibit artists with unsavory political opinions. The University was accused of surrendering to “cancel culture” and sidestepping its responsibility to acknowledge historical complexity.

But in an April interview — his first about the issue — President Eisgruber ’83 framed the dispute as a matter of defending the library’s academic freedom in the face of pressure from donor Leonard L. Milberg ’53 to structure the exhibit according to his preferences. Over the past four decades, Milberg has given the University thousands of prints, manuscripts, and rare books; has endowed two Princeton professorships; and has paid for more than a dozen literary and historical exhibitions and associated publications.

Eisgruber insisted that the library never sought to exclude from the planned exhibit the work of the two artists with Confederate ties — painter Theodore Moïse, a one-time officer in the Confederate Army; and sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran who became a leading proponent of the pro-Southern “Lost Cause” school of Civil War interpretation.

“The question was how to broaden and contextualize this art,” Eisgruber said. “This isn’t about whether Princeton will display controversial art. It’s about how that art gets displayed and who has the editorial control.”

Milberg, who met with the president in December and says he pulled his funding for the exhibit after library administrators insisted on the exclusion, called Eisgruber’s account “categorically false.” 

Exhibit curator Samantha Baskind, a professor of art history at Cleveland State University who is writing a biography of Ezekiel, said she had always planned that the exhibit’s text labels would highlight the artists’ complex, contradictory political and religious commitments. Baskind said that in a conversation she had with University Librarian Anne Jarvis, Jarvis declined an opportunity to review the curator’s proposed presentation of Ezekiel’s work. 

“The library told me that the Confederate artists could not be in,” Baskind said. “They never asked for the contextualization — and it was offered.”

Instead, Baskind said, library officials proposed reorienting the exhibit around a slightly later historical period and provided a list of artists who could be included. According to Baskind’s contemporaneous notes, officials said the new chronology offered a way to “get us away from some of the artists who have a Confederate background, which is not something we want to foreground.” Before Baskind could respond, however, Milberg withdrew his funding.

A University spokesman said Jarvis has no recollection of Baskind at any stage offering to discuss the proposed presentation of Ezekiel. Both Jarvis and Michele Minter, the vice provost for institutional equity and diversity, who was also involved in conversations about the exhibit, referred requests for comment to University spokesman Michael Hotchkiss, who arranged the Eisgruber interview.

According to Milberg and Baskind, library administrators said they feared that an exhibit featuring Confederate-linked artists might draw both protests from anti-racist students and unwanted approbation from white supremacists. But Eisgruber denied that such considerations came into play. “It wasn’t about the reactions,” he said. “It’s about making a presentation of the material that speaks to the intellectual issues that are involved.”

The controversy left some shaking their heads. “Princeton is a place committed to helping students understand the complexity of the past,” said history professor Martha A. Sandweiss, who directed extensive research into the University’s historical entanglement with slavery but had no involvement with the planned Milberg exhibit. “Libraries should not be in the business of limiting access to the materials that reveal the past in all its messiness.”

8 Responses

Ronald D. Coleman ’85

2 Years Ago

How Far We’ve Fallen

When even the PAW can’t adequately cover for Nassau Hall’s cynical woke lies, you know we’ve fallen a long way indeed. It would be an understatement to say that the administration does not come across as candid regarding its motivations or conduct in this article. And the University’s arrogant, anti-intellectual, and cowardly insult to a longtime and grandly generous Princeton donor, paired with its vicious assassination of Joshua Katz, make perfect metaphors for Princeton’s determination to destroy everything noble, idealistic, and honorable (even honesty about what is dishonor) about our shared past. 

Jerry Raymond ’73

2 Years Ago

Congratulations and a Suggestion

I wanted to compliment the PAW on Deborah Yaffe’s piece in the May issue. It treated the topic with the balance and nuance it deserved.

It would be nice if the PAW could better inform its readers with the same sort of treatment of other issues, especially the recent statement by the Committee on Conference and Faculty Appeal about Professor Joshua Katz.

Norman Ravitch *62

2 Years Ago

Recognizing Diversity

The first time I learned there had been Jews prominent in the government of the Confederacy and in the South at all was in high school history classes. It surprised me but my firmer feeling was that it proved that Jews could assimilate into even the Southern culture with success. It was for me a positive thing. Now wokeness is trying to destroy both this fact and this recognition of true diversity. Living for the last 20 years in Savannah I have come to understand that the assumption that all Jews have always taken the liberal side of things is totally false. In Europe, in fact, Jewish authorities for centuries were more inclined to support established elites and their programs when possible; this actually helped Jews to get some relief from the normative hostility their presence aroused among so-called Christians.

Carl Heimowitz ’64

2 Years Ago

Guidance in the Words of Lincoln

From Abraham Lincoln’s last public speech April 11, 1865:

“We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union; and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact, easier, to do this, without deciding, or even considering, whether these states have even been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these states and the Union; and each forever after, innocently indulge his own opinion whether, in doing the acts, he brought the States from without, into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it.”

Too bad our greatest U.S. president never got to weigh in.

Clearly Princeton’s current guardians would find Lincoln “utterly immaterial.”

Howard Levy ’85

2 Years Ago

Missed Opportunity for Greater Understanding

I have followed with dismay the controversy over the cancellation of the exhibit of Jewish art in the Gilded Age of America over the inclusion of pieces by two Jewish artists with ties to the Confederacy, despite the exhibit curator’s plan to highlight these artists’ “complex, contradictory political and religious commitments” (On the Campus, May issue). Frankly, even though these artists’ works represented a very small part of the exhibit, I would have been fascinated to learn more about them and how and why they held the views that they held, especially given the prominent role of so many American Jews in our nation’s progressive causes and civil-rights issues. This seems like a missed opportunity for discussion, and yes, even argument, that could lead to a greater understanding of these artists’ perspectives. 

Maybe not coincidentally, on the day that I read this piece in PAW, I also read the just-released Anti-Defamation League 2021 Audit Report and accompanying materials detailing the explosion of antisemitic incidents in the U.S., New Jersey, and, sadly, in Princeton. So much of antisemitism involves attributing negative characteristics to Jews, whether based on historically unfounded stereotypes or on the positions taken by the Israeli government. I fear that the cancellation of the exhibit, and even the media coverage thereof, could contribute to antisemitism by creating an unwarranted association between Jews and the Confederacy. I don’t think the University’s stance here is helpful, and it contributes to the unfortunate climate of “choosing sides” without thoughtful discussion and debate.

Leonard L. Milberg ’53

2 Years Ago

More About Artists Theodore Moise and Moses Ezekiel

The recent article in PAW about the canceled art exhibit that I sponsored (On the Campus, May issue) failed to relate that four paintings by the former Confederate Jewish artist Theodore Moise were shown five years ago at the Princeton University Art Museum, and later at the New-York Historical Society. That exhibit, which I also sponsored, provided full disclosure and was free of incident. Those paintings included one of Moise’s Aunt Penina, the poet laureate of Charleston, South Carolina, and author of the rare first American Jewish hymnal (a copy of which I donated to Princeton); and another of Henry Clay, which was borrowed from the Met.

The statue “Faith” was carved by Moses Ezekiel, the other former Confederate in question, a man who was ennobled by three European monarchs. “Faith” was a marble version of one of the two figures in Ezekiel’s 24-foot monument that has been displayed in Philadelphia since 1876, near the Liberty Bell. There is an American eagle in the monument, attacking a snake which, according to historian Beth Wenger, represents slavery. We also planned to exhibit Ezekiel’s portrait busts of Abraham Lincoln, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, and the sculptor’s friend the composer Franz Liszt. Ezekiel lived and worked in Rome for some 40 years.

Rocky Semmes ’79

2 Years Ago

A Grave Mistake

The recent letter by Leonard Milberg ’53 (Inbox, July/August issue) regarding controversial statuary — particularly that by the talented hand of Confederate sympathizer Moses Ezekiel — brings to mind an arresting anomaly centered, literally, around one of his massive works at Arlington National Cemetery (ANC).

ANC is the military cemetery across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. often described as “our nation’s most hallowed ground.” There among 639 acres of memorial grounds stands the Confederate Memorial, a monumental monolith named “New South” created by the aforementioned sculptor, who apparently considered it the “crowning achievement of his career,” according to a 2017 story in the Forward.

The massive megalith (with its representational African American “Mammy”) is surrounded by Confederate dead laid under concentric circles of tombstones, unique in their pointed tops, setting these apart from ANC's otherwise characteristic radius-topped tombstones.

One need not begrudge the dead; no matter one’s background or social station all of us, from our last breath, fill the same size hole. But surely these dead are more appropriately interred in some Confederate cemetery (such as in Richmond, Charlottesville, or Chattanooga) than in the ANC.

These graves being unique within the ANC, by their singular headstones and circular distribution (all the graves other than these are distributed in neat geometrically orthogonal rows) sets them apart as something evidently special and distinctive.

But how is it that we distinguish these dead, among the some 400,000 at ANC, with what appears arguably to be a special status? These dead fought to rend apart a republic that still fights varied tyrannies for solid footing. For what reason does the nation honor them uniquely?

Martin Schell ’74

1 Year Ago

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

May I ask Rocky Semmes '79 if the equation "uniqueness = honor" is somewhere engraved in stone (irony intended) in Arlington National Cemetery? The unique arrangement of Confederate headstones only conveys distinctness, not honor. Distinction can be perceived as either praise or condemnation, as anyone who has experienced life as a minority can testify.

Meanwhile, others claiming moral high ground have complained about the integration of Confederate and Union veterans in the list of alumni war dead engraved in Nassau Hall's vestibule.

The fact that cancel culture appears to take both sides on the same issue should give readers pause. I highly recommend the online letter by Carl Heimowitz ’64 on this topic, citing Lincoln.

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