Playwright Arthur Miller was awarded this year’s Jerusalem Prize, but for last week’s ceremony he sent a videotape in which he criticized Israel’s policies. This angered Jerusalem’s newly elected ultra-Orthodox Jewish mayor who said “Miller was a ‘universal dramatist’ who had reached his peak more than 50 years ago. He condemned the tendency of intellectuals to ‘always criticise the actions of the state of Israel and sometimes even impose colonial criteria on the issues’. He further attacked Miller for sitting on a ‘literary Olympus tens of thousands of kilometres from here to voice criticism’.”