A popular bookstore in Brooklyn axed a planned book launch event at the last minute due to the moderator’s views on Israel – with an employee telling the author that they “did not want a Zionist on [their] stage,” The Post has learned.
Joshua Leifer was just a few hours from taking the stage at Powerhouse Arena in Dumbo Tuesday to discuss his new book with Rabbi Andy Bachman when he learned that the venue was pulling its support over Bachman’s pro-Israel politics.
“[They said they] would not be willing to host a conversation between me and Andy because they wouldn’t allow a Zionist on the premises,” Leifer recalled in an interview.
Leifer — a veteran journalist and author of “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life” — and his wife went to Powerhouse to address the issue, and recorded a tense back-and-forth with the store manager.
“We don’t want a Zionist on our stage,” insisted the manager, who was not named in the audio, which was provided to The Post.
When Leifer pressed for more specifics about the store’s reasoning, the employee clammed up and said the staffer would address the issue more fully in a phone call with the author’s publicist the next day.
The manager then threatened to call security, Leifer said, though that part was not captured in the recording.
The decision to pull the event at the last minute was “unacceptable and unprofessional,” Leifer said.
Disappointed readers found out about the cancellation via a sign on the window citing “unforeseen circumstances” – despite the fact that the store had ample time to vet both men, he added.
“They had roughly a week to vet Andy, in fact they even put the event up on their website with his bio and photo,” Leifer said.
Bachman said he was shocked when he arrived at Powerhouse and learned the event was scrapped.
“It was an utterly shocking, disheartening experience,” the rabbi told The Post.
He said the Powerhouse manager banned his appearance due to problematic assumptions about his beliefs.
“They are basing decisions merely upon their own perception of my identity and this is exactly what’s wrong with the current discourse right now,” he said.
Bachman described himself as a “proud Zionist,” but noted that he opposes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government – including some stances Israel has taken in the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“It’s ample in my writings… but in this day and age anyone who identifies with the right of the Jewish people to their homeland is considered an enemy of their cause and it’s something I never thought I’d experience in my life but I’m seeing it happen in real time,” Bachman lamented.
“I can’t believe that this is how American democracy devolved and yet at the same time this has been an erosion that has been ongoing for many years,” he said. “I think there is deep irrational hatred and fear coming from the right and there is deep irrational fear coming from the left.”
Powerhouse offered to let Leifer take the stage solo, but he demurred in favor of relocating the gathering altogether.
“I took the roughly 30-ish, maybe more, people who had come to the book event and had paid money for it for books and tickets to a bar around the corner where we had the event anyway, kind of improvised,” he explained.
The writer said he was “greatly disappointed” by the cancellation – which also seemed to fly in the face of his book’s content.
“It also was surprising because I wrote a book that’s all about arguments within the American-Jewish community and I thought it would be pretty clear that that argument would involve Zionists as well as non-Zionists. All of this seemed to me like very much in the text so to speak of the book,” Leifer noted.
Both Leifer and Bachman said Powerhouse’s decision reflected the tenuous state of Jewish identity in the US, particularly in the wake of the outcry about the Israel-Hamas war.
Powerhouse, Bachman said, “should be ashamed of themselves for silencing what only was meant to be an interesting conversation about American Jewish identity in the 21st century.
“The fact that they want to censor that shows you where these lunatics are these days.”
The decision also drew outrage from some New York politicians, including former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“Shouldn’t a bookstore in NYC be a place committed to hearing all voices? Aren’t the right-wing the ones who ban books, not us?” he wrote on X.
South Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-15), who has been outspoken about his pro-Israel stance, accused Powerhouse of cancelling the book launch “abruptly and arbitrarily.”
“The far left is making “Zionists” (i.e. most Jews) the exception to progressivism’s rule against discrimination,” he wrote on X.
Joni Kletter, a staffer for Mayor Eric Adams, slammed Powerhouse’s decision as “outrageous” and urged her followers to “buy the book” in support of both Leifer and Bachman.
Powerhouse Arena did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for a comment on Wednesday.