It Must Sound So Cool to Boycott Israeli Cultural Institutions

Jhumpa Lahiri’s debut story collection from 2000 earned her a Pulitzer Prize. I liked “Interpreter of Maladies” very much. It was a well-written, sensitive portrayal about Indian immigrants struggling to preserve their own culture and heritage while acclimating to a very different — and not always welcoming — American environment.

But now I’m done with Lahiri, because she clearly has her own malady of antisemitism, demonstrated by adding her famous name to an open letter calling for a boycott of “complicit” Israeli cultural institutions in the “genocide” in Gaza. 

More than 6,000 other writers have signed the letter, sponsored by the warm and fuzzy sounding Palestine Festival of Literature, or Palfest. Signers include winners of the Booker Prize, Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, MacArthur Prize, and other accolades: Annie Ernaux, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Junot Díaz, Sally Rooney (who doesn’t allow her books to be translated into Hebrew), Jonathan Lethem, and Ben Lerner. Palfest proudly calls this letter “the largest cultural boycott against Israeli institutions in history.”

This is the latest salvo against Jewish writers and all things Israeli by the publishing and literary world. Tagging Jewish writers as “Zionist,” even when their work has nothing to do with Israel, has caused publishing contracts, speaking engagements and relationships with agents, other writers, and booksellers canceled.

Tagging Jewish writers as “Zionist,” even when their work has nothing to do with Israel, has caused publishing contracts, speaking engagements and relationships with agents, other writers, and booksellers canceled.

Even Bernard-Henri Lévy, the renowned French philosopher and author of nearly 50 books, has been censored. Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Oct. 27, Lévy explains that a book industry journal called Shelf Awareness accepted and then canceled an ad for his new book, “Israel Alone,” bought by Lévy’s publisher, Wicked Son. With 60,000 subscribers, losing the ad could significantly hurt book sales.   

Lévy shared the weak-kneed, overly fragile explanation for pulling the ad: Shelf Awareness’ publisher feared his partners would have “trouble they haven’t asked for and don’t wish to have.” And what if bookstore employees complained to management that they didn’t support the book? What if customers complained? The publisher wouldn’t risk the possibility that anyone might discover the existence of a book with “Israel” in the title.  

“At first I was stunned,” Lévy wrote in his essay. “I found it almost unbelievable that the name Israel can become unspeakable in a part of this great country, which since the Holocaust has been the second homeland for Jews. But here we are. It seems that no Jewish author, no one remotely connected to Judaism, is safe from this kind of exclusion.”

He called this episode a “pathetic act of censorship” that won’t harm him, and his rebuttal to the ad cancellation is to launch a speaking tour on college campuses. 

Lévy is far more concerned for younger authors, such as Elisa Albert, shoved off a panel at the New York State Writers Institute in Albany, N.Y., when two other panelists refused to share the stage with a “Zionist.” Or Joshua Leifer, not overtly pro-Israel but canceled anyway at powerHouse Books in Brooklyn, N.Y., “because he was slated to discuss his new book with a rabbi, Andy Bachman.”

The slamming of doors against Jewish writers, coupled with the zest with which thousands of writers and publishers signed the Palfest letter, is creating a backlash. The letter demands a boycott of all Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers, festivals, literary agencies, and publications said to be “complicit in violating Palestinian rights.” 

In an Oct. 31 essay titled “Stop the Boycott of Israeli Culture,” published in The New York Times, Jerusalem-based literary agents Deborah Harris and Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs note that these cancellation efforts may be hot but are not new. More than 10 years ago, they saw that books by their Israeli clients were being rejected at acquisitions meetings, with editors showing “open disdain for anything Israeli. The gates have been closing well before this latest war.”

Because bookstores around the world frequently offer prime real estate to “the Israel-Palestinian table,” where the preponderance of books exclusively present a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel side, the myopia feeds on itself. “The few Israeli books that make it to these tables occupy only a paltry corner,” they observe. 

Calling the Palfest letter “a counterproductive and misguided rebuff by the very people who have been our comrades in the sacred mission of making books,” they argue, “It cannot be that the solution to the conflict is to read less, and not more. For authors who would in any other case denounce book bans and library purges, what do they hope to accomplish with this?

“You can lead a cultural boycott of Israeli literary institutions only if you believe that we don’t deserve to be there in the first place. And if that is your position, you are not looking to solve this conflict and alleviate suffering and death and herald an independent Palestine. You are advocating the expulsion of the other indigenous people of this place, the people about whom you apparently read very little.”

Adam Kirsch, editor of the Wall Street Journal’s Review section, also decried the Palfest letter, its outrageous claims and far-reaching demands. “Some of the world’s leading writers have decided that the best way to change Israelis’ minds is to refuse to talk to them,” he writes in an essay titled “A Writers’ Boycott of Israel Betrays the Values of Literature,” published Nov. 2.  “The boycotters have fallen victim to our era’s mania for ideological purity — the profoundly unliterary idea that disagreement is a reason to reject dialogue, rather than the best reason to begin it.”

A pro-Israel open letter by writers and others in the publishing industry now has more than 1,000 signatories and can be found here: https://www.creativecommunityforpeace.com/blog/2024/10/29/authors/

Judy Gruen is the author of “Bylines and Blessings,” “The Skeptic and the Rabbi,” and several other books. She is also a book editor and writing coach.