A US entertainment company apologized on Saturday for canceling a show by Israeli comedian Guy Hochman due to pressure from anti-Zionist activist groups.

Hochman’s tour of North America has been plagued by harassment, reflecting pressure on Jewish and Israeli performers in the US.

The Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, California, had announced that Hochman’s Saturday show was canceled in a statement posted to the theater’s social media.

The statement said that the entertainment company managing the show, the Screening Services Group, had received complaints about Hochman, but that the company could not “find any proof of the accusations.”

The company asked Hochman to make public statements saying that he did not “support the genocide, rape, starvation and torture of Palestinian civilians,” though, the statement said.

Hochman refused and was banned from the facility, the statement said, adding that the company “is not political and does not ask the political beliefs” of its renters and that “we don’t support genocide.”

After the statement was released, the Israeli-American Council (IAC) and Jewish community members contacted the company.

“You conditioned his ability to perform on his willingness to issue a public political declaration disavowing alleged atrocities — accusations that are routinely used to demonize Israelis collectively,” the IAC said in a letter to Michael Hall of the Screening Services Group and the theater.

The demands were antisemitic under the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which Beverly Hills adopted in 2020, the letter said.

“Requiring an Israeli individual to publicly deny blood libels or adopt a prescribed political narrative — absent evidence,........

© The Times of Israel