92NY Digs In

A venerable institution splits with much of the cultural elite.

- By Simon van Zuylen-Wood

ELEVEN DAYS AFTER 92NY disinvited from its stage the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen for signing a controversial open letter critical of Israel, the Y’s CEO, Seth Pinsky, meets me for breakfast at Nice Matin, the Upper West Side brasserie on the ground floor of the Lucerne Hotel, not far from where he lives. We are joined by Rabbi David Ingber, who heads the Y’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Life, and Jonathan Rosen, co-founder of the topshelf PR shop BerlinRosen, whose role here very much falls under the firm’s “crisis management” tab. We are still three days away from the circulation of a follow-up open letter decrying the Y’s reaction to the original open letter, which would be signed by prominent authors Tony Kushner, Leslie Jamison, and John Banville, but the Y is already in chaos following staff resignations and the dissolution of its vaunted literary program.

Pinsky, 52, who made his reputation as an ultracapable technocrat in the Bloomberg administration, has a mild, thoughtful demeanor. But the Y under his watch has been getting pilloried, and he seems eager to publicly reply to the critics for the first time. “I just want to start by saying that this has been excruciating,” he says. “This is much harder than anything I’ve faced ever before. I was in government right after September 11. But there were very few people in New York who were pro–Al Qaeda. We were all in together in terms of rebuilding. During covid, there were very few people who were pro-pandemic. We were all in that together.”