NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} had planned to write about the lovely Meiji Modern exhibition at the Asia Society, which is showing Japanese art from the late 1860s to the early 1910s. It’s an undervalued time for Japanese art, mainly because the art of this period — the Meiji were the imperial family and named the era — is still viewed by old-time art historians as compromised by Western culture. The exhibition debunks this view with startlingly good art. I’ll write about it in my weekend piece.

Alas, I’m derailed by news about artists and art organizations writing open letters and calling for strikes in solidarity with “the Palestinian struggle for liberation,” all stimulated by the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians. In this context and as a practical matter, “the Palestinian struggle for liberation” means Hamas and antisemitic violence.

The good news is how few people are falling for it. The art strike on October 20 fizzled. An open letter, much touted among Hamas supporters in the art press, is a dud. Yes, Harvard and Penn lead the way in Hamas love among the coeds, but the artist community has been, and jaws ought to drop, circumspect. Good artists, and even the so-so ones, tend to be poetic, sentimental, teasing, supple, and enigmatic. Killing babies is none-of-the-above and beyond the pale.

Out of tens of thousands of art organizations worldwide, only about a hundred groups actually went on strike. The Poetry Project was one. Speaking for the group, Will Farris said, “As artists, we can’t imagine better futures without imagining a free Palestine.” I read three of Farris’s poems. One reads, in part:

I understood my life
meant nothing, still

it spilled

in every corner, light

a siphon
futuring

This lake

Though not a poetry critic, I will say that this seems wispy to me. Hamas, I suspect, has zero tolerance for poets. Hamas can’t imagine a future for any artists other than defenestration.

I wonder how many of these places have “work from home Friday” policies. Is the strike contemptible, lazy preening?

Of the few arts organizations that went on strike, I know two. It’s not that I travel in proto-Hamas circles. It’s that I do know a broad cross section of humanity.

The White Pube is one. It’s the collaborative identity of two young women artists, one in Liverpool and the other in London. They write about art, bad museum practices, video games, movies, and feminism. This week, they’re making the boo-hoos about Gaza, acting as if Hamas doesn’t run Gaza and no innocent Israeli civilians are dead. I read their rant. It’s standard Corbynista fare. The Brits have a terrible antisemitism problem, but this isn’t my topic.

A few years ago, I wrote about the Tate Gallery’s decision to close its elegant restaurant because its wall murals by Rex Whistler, painted in 1927, included two tiny vignettes deemed today to be racist. The Tate wouldn’t give me a high-resolution image of these vignettes, you know, so people could see and judge for themselves. “Top secret,” they said, as if they were protecting codebreakers at Bletchley.

The White Pube had photographs of the offensive images. I asked, they gave, and I had my story. The figures depicted in these sections of the mural are tiny. I suggested hiding them behind a portrait of Queen Victoria and getting on with life.

Printed Matter in New York is another story. A nonprofit operating since 1976, it’s the prime art organization promoting artists’ books. Artists’ books are one of the most rarefied, elegant genres in the art world. They’re handmade, usually a few pages but sometimes more, mixing visual art and text. All the decisions are made by the artist. There’s no publisher or designer. The art is sequential, unfolding as we turn the pages. Artists’ books are often witty and erudite. Artists who make only artists’ books rarely have dealers. It’s too small a niche. Printed Matter is one outlet for their work.

And they’re on strike . . . in support of “Palestine.” What do they really mean? What were they thinking? Did the trustees of Printed Matter authorize this? Hamas, which runs Gaza, sent terrorists to kill young Jews at a peace concert. I asked the press person and the interim executive director why Printed Matter went from artists’ books to “a strike for Palestine.” Not a peep. Are they all at a paragliding lesson?

This brings me to the open letter that Artforum magazine has published as a news story. Sprinkled throughout are clichés such as “Palestinian liberation,” “genocide,” that tried-and-true bugaboo “oppression,” “war crimes,” and “immediate ceasefire.” The letter has not a single tear, and not a word, about terrorist hit squads targeting civilians in Israel. The signatories added their names to the statement, even though they know that Hamas kidnapped hundreds of innocents and murdered about 1,400 — babies, women, entire families, and old people — including more than 30 American civilians. Nothin’ about them. And no mention of Hamas, the terrorists who run Gaza and who are card-carrying members of the Death to America cult.

My rule of thumb is simple and, in my experience, reliable. Scratch the surface of the anti-Israel BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement or groups that cry out for Palestinian liberation and you’ll usually find people who hate and fear Jews. Or who are naïve, ignorant, and delusional. Or all of the above. None of the above is a good look.

The new antisemites are colonizers, all right. They’ve colonized the territory between putz and schmuck.

And I’ve read lots of open letters from “culture workers,” to nab a bit of socialist lingo. They usually put the big names up front and leave the subsequent signers unheralded, to be generous, or ignored as unsung no-names, to be frank.

Nan Goldin is the Artforum letter’s first name. She’s a very good artist, and I commend her for her battle against the branch of the Sackler family that has been grossly enriched by the opioid business. She’s nonetheless a ding-a-ling and probably addled from her years on drugs, and drugs of all kinds and velocity. Her brain might have been fried. She’s really in the protest business now and not creating good work.

After making millions on second-rate, derivative art, Peter Doig’s surely feeling great guilt, funneled into, of all things, Gaza. He’s from Scotland, though, and thinks that Scotland and Gaza are both, well, oppressed. Barbara Kruger? A sloganeer whose last good line — “I Shop . . . Therefore, I Am” — dates from 1987, the same year as Rick Astley’s disco hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Kara Walker has her moments but, let’s face it, after 30 years, her silhouette shtick is wearing thin. She’s a limousine liberal now, and one whose collectors, I suspect, include some Jews. Memo to Kara: Jews in America were on the barricades during the civil-rights movement in vast numbers. Goodness, show some awareness.

After the letter’s handful of these big names is a roster of the inconspicuous. It’s one of the few times they’ll see their names in print.

This brings me back to Printed Matter. It’s a real place, raising last year about $1.3 million from foundations, the NEA, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and art galleries in New York. Cheim & Read, Paula Cooper, Gladstone, Howard Greenberg, Lisson, Metro Pictures, Van Doran Waxter, Amy Wolf, Irving Zucker, and David Zwirner are among the dealers supporting Printed Matter. Carolina Nitsch, a dealer, is on the board.

Printed Matter closed its two offices on Friday, joining an artists’ strike. What is the organization supporting? Its trustees and donors ought to know, and ought to probe. Of all the problems in our country, among them the fentanyl crisis, the flood of immigrants here illegally, and tragic black-on-black murders in our cities, why “Palestine”? Scratch the surface, and watch and listen.

I’m heartened to see so many arts groups decline to strike in favor of killers and against self-defense and the Middle East’s only democracy. When people in the arts in America start supporting the new Nazis, we’re in trouble.

On a bright note, another huge restitution of stolen art — very much under the radar — occurred in London in September. A sacred Ethiopian tabot looted by the British in the Battle of Maqdala in 1868 was returned to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The tabot symbolically represents the tablet sent by God with the Ten Commandments and is so sacred that it can be seen only by the church’s clergy.

About 1,500 Ethiopian Christians packed a church in Battersea in London to watch the procession heralding the transfer. An ornate ceremonial fabric wrapper concealed the tabot as a priest paraded it through the church, with another priest holding a decorated parasol above it. An academic earlier this year bought the thing at an auction with the sole intention of returning it. It’s now back in Addis Ababa.

This tabot isn’t unique but, in this faith, it’s sacred. Ethiopia’s Christian community dates to the fourth century, so it’s ancient as well as big, with about 70 percent of Ethiopians belonging to a Christian church. The Queen of Sheba, visiting King Solomon in the tenth century b.c., is thought by many to have come from Ethiopia.

Our new minister at my little church, a Methodist and Congregationalist affair, is immersed in the history and traditions of Ethiopian Christians. His wife, though American, is from an Ethiopian family. I am learning about Ethiopia from them and was happy to see the restitution happen.