A children’s puppet show in New York made headlines recently—the New York Post called it an “Israel-bashing hate fest”—after performers encouraged children to jeer at Israel. Not a government, not a policy, but an entire people was reduced to a single target via a cultural form that made the targeting look playful and benign.
What most people don’t know is that some of the institutions and funders behind that puppet show have been supporting a much bigger production for years.
One of its most consequential figures wasn’t on the stage at all. His name is Amin Husain, and he is a New York University professor.
In January 2024, recordings of him went viral. In them, he rejected Hamas’s designation as a terrorist group; dismissed reports of the Oct. 7 atrocities as lies; and called himself a “proud antisemite.” NYU suspended him shortly afterward. Since then, Husain has remained out of the spotlight, even as the networks and concepts he helped establish continue to make headlines.
The mechanism
Boxcutter Collective, the group behind the puppet show, traces its lineage to Bread and Puppet Theater, an explicitly political troupe that emerged from the radical counterculture and antiwar movements of the 1960s.
Members are friends and collaborators of Monica Hunken, a “creative direct action trainer” and, separately, a longtime colleague of Husain’s.
In a 2013 Everyday Rebellion video titled “Creative Resistance Tips,” Hunken and Husain, both credited as founders of Occupy Wall Street, teach “protest choreography” in the form of a children’s game. Participants “hop hop hop” as a signal, physically “melt” into a defensive crouch and learn to lock fingers with thumbs tucked in because, they’re told, police “love to grab thumbs and break them.” The delivery is cartoonish. The content provides instructions on how to confront the police.
Puppetry occupies an unusual cultural space. Americans associate it with Jim Henson, Sesame Street and childhood innocence, but it has a long history as a vehicle for explicitly political and radical ideas.
The festival at which the anti-Israel puppet show appeared received support from New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and philanthropic foundations like the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Mellon Foundation, along with funders connected to the Henson family, such as the Jim Henson Foundation and the Green Feather Foundation. Several of these funders also appear to support Creative Time, which gave Husain and his partners a major public stage during the Occupy Wall Street era.
The pipeline
Creative Time, founded in 1974, later launched Creative Time Reports, an editorial platform addressing politics and global issues through artists, some of them activists. Its supporters over the years included DCLA, NYSCA, the Open Society Foundations, the Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Lambent Foundation, fiscally sponsored by the Tides Center.
None of this means that every artist, employee or funder mentioned above shared the politics examined here. But Creative Time’s programming during this period is worth examining.
During the Occupy era, it platformed Husain and collaborator Nitasha Dhillon, central figures in this network and among Occupy’s lead organizers. The duo is behind Tidal Magazine, Occupy Theory, Gulf Labor/G.U.L.F., MTL+ Collective, Decolonize This Place and FTP/Defund the Police.
We trust institutions to fund art. We don’t think to ask whether they are also funding a worldview.
At its 2012 Occupations Summit, Husain and Dhillon presented Palestine, BDS and Occupy as parts of the same struggle, linking them to debt, neoliberalism and global capital. Husain invoked the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa as a model for BDS, spoke of “reclaiming” occupation and described himself and Dhillon as “culture producers.”
Creative Time’s 2011 Summit speakers included progressive journalist and Pacifica network broadcaster Laura Flanders, whose work has focused on raising “radical spirits” and shifting power “from the few to the many.” By 2024, she was appearing at NYU alongside Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine figures Andrew Ross, Chenjerai Kumanyika and Paula Chakravartty—members of Husain and Dhillon’s broader activist-academic circle.
The summit said the gathering could provide “clarity as to possible tools and practices” for “culture producers and others” as the movements grow.
That phrase matters. “Culture producers” help shape ideas, language and moral assumptions: what people care about, believe is right and are willing to fight for. An idea carried by an artist, exhibition or institution does not arrive looking like a campaign. It looks like expression, creativity and experimentation, and carries institutional legitimacy. That can give radical politics something valuable: ambiguity at entry and normalization over time.
In 2015, Creative Time’s summit featured Bill Ayers—a former leader of the Weather Underground, the radical terrorist group responsible for bombings like the 1971 attack on the U.S. Capitol—on a panel titled “The State of Education,” about American pre-K-12 education. A resume that included terrorist bombings would have ended a career yesterday. Today, it’s considered a credential.
Creative Time later developed a think tank on “Invitations Toward Reworlding,” described as integrating the “transformative theories, ethics and aesthetics that guide liberation work” into actionable planning. Support came from Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
By 2014, this network of activists and funders had international reach. A Russian Art Archive record identifies Husain and Dhillon at a MediaUdar Moscow lecture on Occupy amid anarchist, communist and anti-fascist imagery, including a banner reading “MAKING ANARCHISM A THREAT AGAIN!”
We trust these institutions to fund art. We don’t think to ask whether they are also funding a worldview.
Before Occupy
Husain’s appearance in this ecosystem began earlier, at 16 Beaver Group, a Lower Manhattan gathering space launched in 1999 that became a hub for radical, anti-capitalist and anarchist discussion before Occupy. Many figures who later shaped Occupy were already moving through it. Tracing the network back to 16 Beaver was one of the most significant findings of this investigation. It demonstrates that pro-Palestinian organizing is far more extensive in Husain’s world than implied by the Occupy movement’s public image.
By 2003, 16 Beaver’s archive was circulating material for the Third North American Conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, focused on campus organizing, divestment and movement-building. By 2006, it was hosting a reading and discussion with the notoriously anti-Israel Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi.
Asked in 2017 how Occupy relates to Palestine, Husain offered one of the clearest accounts of the strategy: “I purposely didn’t push the Palestinian issue front and center because I knew what I was doing … was helping Palestine. That was my engagement.”
By 2016, Artists Space had turned 55 Walker St. into a three-month Decolonize This Place residency organized with MTL+, Husain, Dhillon and collaborators, including Kyle Goen, Amy Weng, Yates McKee and Andrew Ross. Its federal filing describes the project’s focus as “Free Palestine,” black liberation, indigenous struggle, labor and de-gentrification built around assemblies, training and skillshares.
Goen says he intentionally blurs the lines between art and activism. In 2003, he was already producing militant political imagery, including art titled “By Any Means Necessary.” Decolonize This Place, Husain’s group, which echoes Goen’s visual language, has repeatedly collaborated with the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. In 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department designated Samidoun a “sham charity” serving as an international fundraiser for the PFLP terrorist organization.
Here the funding trail reappears. Lambent Foundation funded Husain and Goen’s work through Artists Space and was already among Creative Time’s supporters. Lambent is fiscally sponsored by Tides Center, which has separately received tens of millions of dollars over the years from the Open Society Foundations.
At the same time, Artists Space was running extensive programming in New York City public schools. Its 2017 filing says it administered 172 classes to 118 students at P.S. 140 and a seventh-grade intensive at M.S. 324 examining “notions of identity and history.” I have no evidence the 55 Walker political programming reached those students. But the same institution operated in both worlds: activist organizing and public school programming.
One unsettling feature of this history is who helped set the terms of debate. Some figures embraced militant politics, defended “armed resistance” or, as Husain later did, rejected Hamas’s terrorist designation. Yet they were elevated through respected cultural institutions and elite universities, shaping the vocabulary that society adopted as moral, legitimate and permissible.
In 2026, a puppet show can go viral as though it were an isolated event. But much of what looks spontaneous in the present has been decades in the making.
Funding records can’t tell us what every foundation or public agency understood about what they were funding. They can tell us where the money went, which institutions hosted and who the organizers were.
Artists are entitled to be political. The key question is whether the institutions supporting this work and the public that funds some of it recognize when art transitions from merely reflecting a political perspective to building one.
