Pulp puts the squeeze on festival as Jewish author speaks out
Adelaide Festival has saved its opening night concert, while a New York Times columnist has broken his silence after being embroiled in Writers’ Week controversy.
Britpop band Pulp will play their February 27 show in Adelaide’s Elder Park after the festival board apologised and reinstated cancelled Palestinian-Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah.
It was a near miss for the Adelaide Festival, with frontman Jarvis Cocker confirming the band had been in talks with organisers all week, raising concerns about Abdel-Fattah’s removal.
Had the Festival not apologised to the author, Cocker said the band would have cancelled its free performance on the opening night of Adelaide Festival.
Cocker shared a picture of Randa on social media, saying: “Dr Randa is happy with that apology. We are happy that the situation has been dealt with and are now prepared to perform at the music festival once more.”
“This will be a free concert, open to anyone who respects the freedom of all voices to be heard,” Cocker said.
The apology came from board members who were newly appointed on Tuesday, after the resignations of all but one member who was on the board that decided to drop Abdel-Fattah from the lineup.
In a statement to social media on Thursday night (Adelaide time), the band said it was “appalled” to hear of Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation but that they believed the new board was acting “in good faith”.
“Our management and representatives have been in dialogue with the festival organisers since last week, when the situation was first made public,” the statement said.
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“Having informed them that we had decided to withdraw from the festival in support of the boycott, we were asked to delay an announcement while they sought to resolve this crisis for all sides.
“We want to make it absolutely clear that Pulp refuse to condone the silencing of voices. We celebrate difference, and oppose censorship, violence and oppression in all its forms.”
It comes after local advocacy group Musicians for Palestine Kaurna Yarta ran a campaign urging Pulp to boycott the Festival in response to the January 8 decision to drop Sydney-born Palestinian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from its Writers’ Week lineup.
Adelaide Festival Executive Director Julian Hobba said several artists were interested in an apology.
“I was aware of Pulp’s interest in an apology to Dr Abdel-Fattah, which was shared by a broad swathe of artists in the program and the rest of the community,” Hobba said.
“The apology was made by Adelaide Festival because it was sincere and because we believed it was best aligned with our values.”
Abdel-Fattah thanked Pulp for their solidarity online.
Jewish author speaks out after double-standard accusations
Jewish-American author and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman said he did not attend the 2024 Adelaide Writers’ Week due to timing, but did not withdraw from the event.
The Pulitzer Prize winner would have appeared at one 2024 event via livestream and told Nine Newspapers that he “was told by email that the timing would not work out”.
“I said, no problem. End of story. That is all I know,” Friedman said.
When asked on Thursday if Friedman would be invited to Writers’ Week 2027 – as Abdel-Fattah had – the new Adelaide Festival board chair Judy Potter said it would depend on the appointment of the next Writers’ Week director and “will be decided at that time”.
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Potter said she could not answer questions about past board decisions regarding Friedman, but that she was not aware of past board members being prohibited from speaking about his Writers’ Week appearance.
Former Adelaide Festival board member Tony Berg – who resigned in October, before Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation – is the only member who has spoken publicly about Friedman.
Other board members have not responded or declined to comment when contacted by InDaily.
Berg – who is also a former governor of the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce – has called Abdel-Fattah and former Writers’ Week director Louise Adler “hypocritical”.
“I regard it to be utterly hypocritical of Randa Abdel-Fatah and Louise Adler to now accuse the board of repressing freedom of speech when they have both actively sought to deny it to Tom Friedman,” Berg said in a statement.
Berg also alleged that Adler gave the board an “ultimatum” in 2024 that she would resign if Friedman was not disinvited.
Adler did not respond to InDaily‘s request for comment. She told Nine Newspapers that Berg had breached confidentiality.
Friedman’s comments come a week after SA Premier Peter Malinauskas first referred to Friedman’s removal as a precedent for Abdel-Fattah’s removal from the high-profile literary festival.
“I think there’s a suggestion that that was a scheduling issue now, call it what you like, after the correspondence from Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, they removed the pro-Jewish Israeli speaker,” Malinauskas said on Sunday.
Abdel-Fattah was one of 10 signatories to a letter to the Adelaide Festival board in 2024 advocating for Friedman’s removal, saying they had “grave and urgent concern” after Friedman authored an OpEd in the New York Times that compared various Middle Eastern groups to insect vermin requiring eradication.
The New York Times published a second OpEd on February 7 titled ‘The Value of Listening’, where Friedman acknowledged international backlash to the piece.
Adelaide Festival Board Chair Tracey Whiting wrote to Abdel-Fattah and the other signatories on February 9, 2024 saying Friedman did not participate in the 2024 event “due to last-minute scheduling issues”.
“Asking the Adelaide Festival and Adelaide Writers’ Week to cancel an artist or writer is an extremely serious request,” Whiting’s letter said.
“We have an international reputation for supporting artistic freedom of expression.”
Former Adelaide Writers’ Week director Jo Dyer told InDaily on Sunday that any attempt to conflate the two writers would seem to be “trying to spin a situation to represent it as something it is not”.
“As a director of Writers Week, you get people petitioning you to include and exclude people all the time,” Dyer said.
Friedman’s “removal” from the festival was not public at the time of the 2024 festival, and correspondence regarding this was only made public this week after the Premier and Berg referenced Friedman.
Correspondence between Friedman and Whiting or other Adelaide Festival representatives has not been made public, and Friedman declined Nine Newspapers’ request for a copy.
