PEN Writers Group Rebuffs Calls To Drop Israel Sponsorship Amid Outcry
The literary writers’ group PEN American Center is refusing to drop Israeli government sponsorship from its annual festival, despite calls by dozens of members to do so.
According to a news release issued Tuesday by Adalah-NY, a group that supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, more than 100 writers signed onto a letter demanding PEN “reject support from the Embassy of Israel” for its World Voices Festival to be held later this month in New York.
Among the signers, according to Adalah-NY, are Pulitzer Prize winners Junot Díaz, Richard Ford and Alice Walker, and award-winning author Louise Erdrich.
According to a PEN American Center spokesperson, the General Consulate of Israel provided a small contribution to underwrite the costs of airfare, hotel, per diem, interpreters and related expenses contribution for individual Israeli writers selected for participation by the festival.
In an email to members cited by Adalah-NY, PEN American Center said it was maintaining the Israeli funding because of a policy against “cultural boycotts of any kind” and the need to “promote dialogue.”
“It is deeply regrettable that the Festival has chosen to accept sponsorship from the Israeli government, even as it intensifies its decades-long denial of basic rights to the Palestinian people, including the frequent targeting of Palestinian writers and journalists,” the letter says.
Other well-known signatories to the letter include Angela Davis, Russell Banks and South African writer Breyten Breytenbach.
PEN American Center, the festival organizer, is a U.S. branch of the writers’ freedom of expression organization PEN International.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO