By Gal Beckerman
Saturday, July 11, 2026
On Thursday morning, PEN America, the free-speech
organization, posted an article
detailing the “isolation and exclusion” many Israeli and Jewish writers have
felt since October 7, 2023. The authors describe being blacklisted at
publishing houses, boycotted by activists, pressured to downplay their
Jewishness, and called out in online witch hunts including a viral crowdsourced
spreadsheet that asked: “Is your fav writer a Zionist???”
Drawing attention to such suppression would seem to fall
squarely within the mandate of this watchdog group, whose motto is “the freedom
to write.” And yet, publication of the article—which makes no policy
recommendations and is written in a mournful, rather than accusatory, tone—was
enough to make PEN America’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, decide to
resign in protest within hours.
PEN America currently sits on a widening fault line, one
that divides old-school liberalism, which treats the right to speak as more
important than any particular ideology, from a surging and fiercely ideological
left that sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy. Still, it was a shock to learn
that this article—mainly a collection of writer testimonials—set off an
eruption.
Mengestu had been in his position for only seven months
following a few years of turmoil at the organization, much of it over Israel
and Gaza. When I reached him, he described the PEN article as a possible threat
to the constitutional rights of those who advocate for shunning Israeli
products (including art) according to the standards of the BDS (boycott,
divestment, and sanctions) movement. Apparently setting aside the question of
defending free expression for Israeli and Jewish writers, he focused on the
rights of pro-Palestinian activists. A document like this from PEN, he felt,
could provide more fuel for legislation that targets proponents of BDS. Such
legislation already exists in most states, though it is usually aimed at
businesses and individuals seeking government contracts. “It’s the first
amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,”
Mengestu wrote in an email. “PEN America as a free expression organization is
supposed to defend that right.”
I spoke with several current and former PEN staffers and
board members who characterized his position, expressed in emails he wrote to
the board, as highly partisan. From their perspective, the leader of their
organization was arguing that merely reporting on the stifling of one group’s
free expression amounted to suppressing the rights of another.
Some PEN staffers came away feeling that his worry about
the free speech of pro-Palestinian protesters and student activists foreclosed
any defense of Israeli and Jewish writers—even writers, such as the Israeli
novelist Etgar Keret, who have condemned the war in Gaza and have suffered
consequences both outside and inside Israel. (It should go without saying,
though maybe it needs to be said, that it would be meaningless to have
free-speech organizations if they defended only speech they agreed with.) These
staffers also expressed sadness that even a small effort to fulfill PEN’s
mission by describing the experiences of writers under political stress was met
with such a dramatic gesture of rejection, seemingly because of those authors’
identity.
PEN does in fact defend the rights of people who want to
engage in boycotts, even though it “emphatically opposes” organized efforts to
shut down speech. In practical terms, this might mean condemning a literary
festival’s ban on a group of writers but defending an individual’s refusal to
attend. As Mengestu and others pointed out to me, the organization amended its
guidelines on this point and reissued them on Thursday, at the same time as the
article was posted. “We see no contradiction between opposing boycotts
ourselves, and defending the right of others to engage in them,” the new
language reads,
in part.
Many people inside the organization, including its
co-CEOs, Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, believed that publishing the
article about Israeli and Jewish writers was a matter of principle. When they
first began serving as interim leaders last fall, after two years of
organizational crisis marked by protests following October 7, Lopez and Rosaz
Shariyf went on a “listening tour.” (Their positions became official in
February.) They heard again and again from authors who described a chilled
environment for any books related to Jewish themes or involving Jewish
characters. As with any issue that affects the freedom to write, this one felt
important for PEN to investigate.
The resulting document took months to produce—an unusual
length of time, I was told, in part because of the scrutiny that such reporting
would surely face. The authors of the article spoke with people such as Deborah
Harris, a prominent literary agent who represents many Israeli authors. She
described being unable to sell any works of literary fiction by them in the
American market since the October 7 attacks. “The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t
know how to publish this author right now,’” Harris said.
Some of the information in the report was highly
anecdotal; for instance, a romance novelist named Meg Keene says she was told
by her agent to strip out all Jewish references from her book and to change one
character’s name from Yael to Sue. But there was also some attempt to offer
hard data, including the fact that a hotline set up by the Jewish Book Council
for reporting “antisemitic literary-related incidents” has so far
received 350 self-reported complaints over two years.
The article does not conclude that all of these
experiences were the result of BDS. In fact, it considers a constellation of
factors: “It is difficult to assess how much of what the writers PEN America spoke
to are experiencing stems from cultural boycotts and broader efforts to protest
the war; how much from anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or antisemitic sentiment; and
how much reflects matters of business or taste, which are also shaped by
geopolitics.” The objective of the article was rather to describe the effect: a
sense of diminished opportunity for free expression and the feeling of being
targeted because of one’s “identity, nationality, or views.” The release also
mentions the “dire consequences” that Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers
and artists have faced over the past three years, including “arrests,
harassment and threats, deportation attempts, and detention.”
The document does not project the authority or
condemnatory conclusions of an official PEN America report. The report produced
last fall about the cultural destruction of Gaza, “All That Is Lost,”
represents a far more comprehensive effort to capture the result of Israel’s
war. This new article, in contrast, felt to some PEN America outsiders more
like a “blog post”—and an equivocal one.
“PEN does not muse that the removal of a Toni Morrison
novel might be a matter of taste,” Allison Lee, the former head of PEN
America’s Los Angeles office, told me, referencing the group’s many reports
that have condemned book bans over the years. “Only one group of writers, it
seems, must have the case for their suppression respectfully contextualized
before the harm done to them can be acknowledged—and even then, only
provisionally.”
Most discussion of Israel and Palestine has devolved into
a zero-sum game. The simple act of drawing attention to what Israelis and Jews
might be experiencing was always going to be read as a position statement for
the organization. “The blog post was brave and right,” Andrew Solomon, a former
PEN America president and current honorary board member, told me. He opposes
the current Israeli government, but he does not see why that should preclude
him from defending Israeli writers. He has also done work in Ukraine—he risked
his life to deliver vehicles to Kharkiv earlier this month—and said he would
still speak up against the mistreatment of Russian writers, regardless of what
Vladimir Putin does.
“Why would anyone complain of acknowledging the suffering
of anyone else?” he asked. “Is the lie that some people’s suffering matters
more than that of others the role of an organization dedicated to free speech
and truth? I don’t deny Palestinian suffering and don’t see that acknowledging
and representing it means I cannot acknowledge suffering in Israel too.”
Solomon’s position is shared by others on the board, a
fact reflected in the decision of the organization’s leadership to stand by the
article. But Mengestu was named president in order to solve a serious problem
at PEN America, one that this new crisis threatens to expose again.
***
In 2024, PEN America went through something like an
internal revolt after a large number of prominent writers, including Naomi
Klein, Michelle Alexander, and Lorrie Moore, issued a series of letters making
escalating demands that the group take a harder line on Israel, and
specifically that it characterize the war in Gaza as a genocide. (The new
article uses the word—but among Mengestu’s objections is that the designation
was attributed to “experts” and other organizations.) A group of writers
attacked the then-CEO, Suzanne Nossel, calling for her resignation. In one of
their letters, they describe Nossel as having “longstanding commitments to
Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.” So many writers
pulled out of the 2024 World Voices Festival and that year’s literary awards
that both events were canceled, and the annual gala was nearly called off too.
(Nossel, who ran the organization for more than a decade and left
in October 2024 partly in response to the protests, had grown PEN America’s
membership and influence as well its revenue, which increased fivefold.)
An organization that had prided itself since its creation
in 1922 on protecting free speech and the defense of writers—no matter who they
were—was thus overtaken by a passionate and sizable contingent that demanded
the group become vocal advocates on behalf of Palestinians and in opposition to
Israel. One of this constituency’s central demands (they called themselves
Writers Against War on Gaza, or WAWOG) was that PEN America be more accepting
of BDS and not condemn writers who joined calls for a blanket cultural boycott.
When Mengestu assumed office, WAWOG announced in an
Instagram post that it
had achieved “VICTORY AGAINST PEN AMERICA” (the same group today offered a
“salute” to Mengestu’s “principled decision” to resign). But in one early interview,
the new president promised to “mend and rebuild.” Since then, PEN America has
focused considerable attention and resources on Gaza. In addition to its
extensive Gaza report last fall, the organization has spent as much as
$500,000, according to several insiders, on helping Palestinian writers and
artists.
Besides helping Palestinians artists, PEN America has
made other efforts to keep the protesters inside the tent. In January, the
group released a statement condemning the
cancellation of performances by the incendiary Israeli comedian Guy Hochman—in
keeping with its general stance against “ideological litmus tests”—but later withdrew
it in response to backlash. At this year’s World Voices Festival, which
included more than 140 writers from more than 40 countries, not a single
Israeli was part of the program.
In light of these shifts, last week’s article came as a
genuine surprise, including perhaps to Mengestu. The PEN America board does not
have any editorial control over the work of the staff. But after the release of
the report on the cultural destruction of Gaza, the organization decided to
share potentially controversial publications with board members in advance.
They saw the article two days before it was published, and a number of them
decided to meet to discuss it. I could not confirm whether Mengestu was part of
these conversations. When I asked him about it, he didn’t respond to the
question. Board members are held to confidentiality about their internal
discussions. (Among these members is the Atlantic staff writer George
Packer.) Mengestu delivered his judgment on the article and decision to resign
in emails to the board.
The next president of PEN America will decide the group’s
course—and that course is hard for anyone to predict. The decision by Lopez and
Rosaz Shariyf to publish the article was described to me by many people I spoke
with as an act of “courage.” (I should acknowledge that others who declined to
speak with me might feel very differently.) And yet they expressed no desire to
return to the tumult that the organization experienced in 2024. The younger
members of the staff who, according to Mengestu, were upset by the article’s
appearance, and the hundreds of writers who have signed petitions opposing PEN
America in the past, cannot be ignored without imperiling the organization’s
future.
Maybe the most revealing aspect of this eruption, though,
is just how little it took to set it off. Thursday’s article nodded to the
curtailed freedoms of Israeli and Jewish writers without taking any ideological
side. It was far from a battle cry or a shift in priorities. It was just a way
of acknowledging, in the measured but principled language common to PEN
America, that the past three years of discourse have had an effect on a large
group of writers. For anyone who has spoken to Israeli or Jewish artists—as I
have—this is undeniable; you hear it everywhere. This reality does not
neutralize the cause of pro-Palestinian writers or the suffering in Gaza and
elsewhere. The fact that the article was perceived that way, and that it led to
the resignation of a president, tells us all a great deal about the hair-trigger
moment we live in, and about the precarity of the liberal principles on which
PEN America was founded.
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