Jewish Writers Need Your Help!

I recently presented my most recent novel, BABYLON: A Novel of Jewish Captivity to a particularly responsive group, made up of a combined synagogue Sisterhood and Hadassah book club. The question-and-answer portion of the talk was extremely lively.

Then things got serious: I was asked about being a Jewish author today.

The literary community and antisemitism

I’m sure people – even many fellow writers – aren’t aware of how much of the literary community have turned their backs on Jewish writers.

Many have stated in their submission guidelines that they will not accept work from Zionists or anyone sympathetic to Israel. Publications, including those I was once proud to be included in, have leapt onto the virtue-signaling bandwagon, making philosophical statements that defame Israel as apartheid, genocidal, and colonizers. None of these accusations are true; all of them stem from misinformation fueled by social media. Is the reason why many Jewish writers are fielding more than the usual number of rejections? Who can know in the current climate?

Don’t believe me? Here is the extensive “Writers, Beware” list my friend Erika Dreifus has been compiling of publications that have embraced the left-progressive, anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist stance. The sheer magnitude of this growing list is terrifying.

Jewish books have been review bombed, besieged by 1-star rankings by anti-Israel individuals, most of whom don’t bother to read the books they are condemning. This includes my friend Talia Carner’s The Boy with the Star Tattoo.

Book events of Jewish authors have been cancelled, ostensibly due to concerns about pro-Palestine protests. (A major event of mine was postponed and then cancelled because of this.)

Protests disrupted book selling at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and presenters were urged to begin their sessions with an unofficial statement about Israel/Gaza that upset and even frightened Jewish attendees. Read more here.

Then there is the now well-publicized story of Joanna Chen’s beautifully nuanced essay about her life in Israel in Guernica, which the publication saw fit to retract after publishing it, stating they regretted ever including it. This after several editors resigned, declaiming the piece as “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness” and “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” This New Republic interview will allow you to make up your own mind about this sensitive piece.

In fact, things have gotten so bad that  the Jewish Book Council has undertaken a campaign to catalogue all instances of antisemitism in the literary world.

What can I do – as a reader – to help?

Having described just some of this at the aforementioned book talk, there came a particularly wise question from the audience: What can we readers do to support Jewish authors?

I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting the question and I’m sorry my response – “buy their books” – was as glib as it was. Realizing that readers who want to help deserve a more comprehensive answer, I turned to a couple of Jewish-based Facebook communities and asked the same question. Here were some of the responses:

• Invite Jewish authors to speak – not only at synagogues and Jewish groups, but everywhere. If an author isn’t local, have them join you via Zoom. (This includes Israeli authors, many of whom write in English.)
• Write honest reviews and ratings of Jewish books to balance out the malice and intensity of review bombers.
• Spread the word about Jewish books, especially those just launching, widely on social media.
• Ask local libraries and bookstores to order these books.
• Check for inclusion of Jewish books on round-ups that are not explicitly Jewish in nature, including seasonal roundups, beach reads, romance, sci-fi/fantasy, and more.
• Look at your child’s reading lists – is the only “Jewish” book included about the Holocaust? This is an important topic, of course, but shouldn’t be the only aspect of Jewish culture and history, as well as contemporary Jewish issues, that all kids, Jewish or not, learn about.
• Make your voices heard against publications that are explicitly anti-Zionist. If you are subscribed to them, drop the subscription and let the publication know why.
• Oh, yes. And buy their books.

More great examples of what readers can do particularly to support Jewish children’s books can be found on this blog post.

And a special note to my non-Jewish friends

Not Jewish? Don’t believe these actions don’t pertain to you? Frankly, we need your help. It’s painful to feel this isolated. Silence from you increasingly feels like betrayal. As one of the writers responding to my request for ideas said: “We cannot do this all ourselves. Our allies have got to start being loud with us.”

Please. Be loud with us. Help us through these troubled times.

With thanks to all who contributed to my Facebook request for ideas!