Pro-Palestine Activists Call for MoMA to Sever Ties with Honorary Chairman Ronald S. Lauder

Last night, pro-Palestine protestors gathered outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York as it hosted the annual assembly for the World Jewish Congress, an influential organization led by honorary MoMA chairman Ronald S. Lauder.

The World Jewish Congress has repeatedly made statements in support of Israel and claimed that anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism. In a 2022 report submitted to the United Nations, the organization denounced what it described as the “false depiction of Israel as a racist state” and said that it was “unjustified” to suggest that Israel had created an apartheid state in Palestine.

Lauder has echoed the views of the World Jewish Congress in his own personal statements. “The security of Jewish communities worldwide is at stake, and the rise of antisemitism, often disguised as anti-Zionism, is a direct threat to every Jew,” he wrote on X in October. Lauder has close ties to the Israel’s far-right Likud party under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has served as the Israeli emissary to Syria. In 2019, Lauder thanked then-US President Donald Trump for his support of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. The region, home to a sizable Druze population, is recognition under international law as Syrian territory.

At a 2021 demonstration inside MoMA, speakers with the pro-Palestine group Within our Lifetime explicitly called out Lauder, who earlier that year had urged the Israeli Foreign Ministry to “create a strong public relations and information division” to combat global antisemitism.

The demonstration was announced in advance by Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), who called for protestors to gather at MoMA at 5 p.m. The New York Police Department, preparing for disruption, had barricades set up along the sidewalk by 4:30 p.m. The doors to the building bearing Lauder’s name opened around 6:00 p.m. The protestors, many clad in keffiyehs, had already arrived.

Roughly 50 activists, artists, and cultural workers—some formerly employed by MoMA—gathered on the sidewalk on West 53rd Street with drums, whistles, and fliers, one of which labeled Lauder “Ronald Slaughter.” A banner was unfurled that read in big, bleeding letters, “MoMA Trustees Fund Genocide, Apartheid & Settler Colonialism.”

A protestor, holding the edge of the banner, called out, “We stand in protest against the genocide-denying World Jewish Congress using MoMA’s facilities today.”

WAWOG’s social media posts, as well as the material handed out at the protests, cited the 2021 Strike MoMA campaign, a ten-week long series of demonstrations that denounced MoMA’s reliance on patrons—principal among them former museum chairman Leon Black—whom activists accused of profiting from war, environmental ruin, and occupation. In a sequel of sorts to the 2021 campaign, on Tuesday activists demanded that MoMA leadership divest from people and organizations tied to Israel.

This time, the activists directed their energy at Lauder, an Estée Lauder cosmetics heir who gifted $65 million to the museum in 2005. Lauder, who appears on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, is a powerful figure within the world of New York museums. The one-time MoMA chair has given significant artworks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was a founder of Manhattan’s Neue Galerie.

Tuesday’s protest came roughly a month after the war in Gaza passed its one-year mark. Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s air and ground assault of Gaza, more than half of them children and women. In September, Israel expanded its military operation to Lebanon and Syria, decimating entire Lebanese villages and imperiling world heritage.

“Shame,” protestors screamed at the black-tie partygoers who trickled into the museum between a corridor of barricades. The event was billed as the 2024 Theodor Herzl Award Dinner, after the Hungarian Jewish writer who theorized Zionism as it is now known today. The dinner’s honorees were Jon Huntsman, a former US Ambassador who, along with Lauder, threatened to stop funding the University of Pennsylvania after it hosted a Palestinian literary festival, and Tal Huber, the graphic designer behind the viral “Kidnapped of Israel” posters referring to hostages taken on October 7.  

Some of MoMA’s guests turned away almost immediately rather than walk past the throng of protestors pressed against the metal gate. One guest tried (and failed) to start a fight. But more often, guests filmed or photographed the protestors, who in turn did the same. Police roughly matched protestors in numbers and with each additional barricade, both parties were slowly pressed closer.

Then the night grew taut and threatened to snap. Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tuesday’s spokesperson for WAWOG, was handcuffed by NYPD officers and escorted to an unmarked police car. Rushing to her side, protestors demanded to know the charge. For a few tense beats, protestors blocked the car’s path, only to disperse at risk of their own arrest. Later, some claimed that the charge was jaywalking (not a crime in New York City as of October), while others said harassment. When questioned by ARTnews, a police officer present at the arrest said, “I don’t know.”

ARTnews has reached out to MoMA, the NYPD, and Lauder for comment.

Across New York, museum leaders have struggled—or outright refused—to address the war in Gaza. In March, MoMA faced scrutiny after security denied entry to a visitor in possession of a keffiyeh. The museum later apologized, stating that it did not have a policy banning the garment, which is a symbol of Palestinian culture. The Noguchi Museum in Queens, meanwhile, has faced widespread condemnation for firing employees who wore keffiyehs to work, after instating a new internal policy that barred “political dress.”

“When you have billionaires putting money into a cultural institution, it’s naive to think that they don’t have a say over how that institution runs or which artists are uplifted or what art is not considered valuable,” Liv Senghor, the lead organizer of Planet Over Profit, a climate-focused activist group collaborating with WAWOG, told ARTnews at the protest.

Some of the reading materials provided on Tuesday quoted a letter published in 2021 by the Strike MoMA Campaign: “Given these entanglements we must understand the museum for what it is: not only a multi-purpose economic asset for billionaires but an expanded ideological battlefield through which,” the rich “polish” their reputations.

While Lauder was the focus of Tuesday’s action, the protestors present stressed that hierarchies of power—in museums, in life—are rarely sustained by a single individual, just as their dismantling, too, takes time and numbers. And artists, of course.

“Art has tools to challenge hegemonic narratives,” said protestor Eren Can Ileri, who works alongside Senghor as a strategist. “We need art to fight this fight, however we need to keep challenging these institutions, we need to support art outside MoMA, outside the Whitney, the Met, the Brooklyn Museum.”

He glanced down the crowded sidewalk before adding, “And we need to support protestors.”