On July 9th, PEN America published an article called “A Silent Moratorium,” which asserts that Jewish and Israeli writers face “blatant hostility, discrimination, and hate” and attempts to chart the “impact on their freedom of expression.” The PEN article affirms a narrative advanced across Jewish media and mainstream press alike that—as the headline of a piece by James Kirchick in The New York Times put it—“a chill has fallen over Jews in publishing” amid the war on Gaza. The article has since been joined by other attempts to quantify the damage to Jewish letters: An article by the writer Meg Keene attempted to provide data to support the claim of a precipitous dropoff in Jewish books since 2023. The ADL recently added another report to the pile.
Last week, we published a report written by Josh Lambert, director of Jewish studies at Wellesley College, and Dan Sinykin, director of graduate studies at Emory University—both researchers of publishing history, with expertise between them in contemporary Jewish literature and quantitative literary studies. The piece took on the claims of the PEN America article, about which they wrote, “Digging into its anecdotal reports of abandonment by agents and missing book deals, online harassment and review-bombing, we found that many of the claims were too vague to qualify as evidence, and that many accounts . . . turn out to be imprecise at best and entirely false at worst.” They also examined Keene’s data and ran some of their own; it turns out the picture of the number of Jewish titles being published looks very different with a more solid methodology.
On this episode of On the Nose, Arielle Angel speaks with Lambert and Sinykin about what these accounts of anti-Jewish sentiment in publishing got wrong, and what it means about the current market for both Zionist and anti-Zionist books.
Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for editing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”
Links and Further Reading
“What PEN America Got Wrong About Antisemitism in Publishing,” Josh Lambert and Dan Sinykin, Jewish Currents
“A Silent Moratorium,” PEN America
“I gathered the data on Jewish fiction publishing. The trends are alarming.,” Meg Keene, JTA
ADL report on antisemitism in publishing
Josh Lambert’s Jewish book column, “State of the Genre”
Hunting in America by Tehila Hakimi
“I'm not happy about it, but I wrote about PEN.,” Josh Lambert’s Substack
Chad Post and the 3% rule
“A Bookshop Cancels an Event Over a Rabbi’s Zionism, Prompting Outrage,” Ginia Bellafante, The New York Times
“Examining the ADL’s Antisemitism Audit,” Shane Burley and Naomi Bennet, Jewish Currents
The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder
Erasure by Percival Everett
“Repetition and Solipsism in the ‘Israel Debate’ Play,” On the Nose, Jewish Currents
“An Open Letter to the Jewish Book Council From a Concerned Group of Jewish Writers,” Literary Hub
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Transcript forthcoming.
