Renowned authors are pledging to boycott Israeli cultural institutions — and showing they imperfectly grasp the concept of liberty. Photo by Chalffy/iStock by Getty Images

Sharon Rosen Leib October 31, 2024

I normally do not sign cause-related group petitions or open letters. They strike me as performative, self-important and virtue-signaling groupthink. But I made an exception this week to join some 1,000 writers, literary agents and Hollywood bigwigs in opposing a growing boycott of Israel’s literary establishment because of the Gaza war.

The letter I signed was a response to an open letter signed by writers whose thoughtful books and stylish prose I love, like Jhumpa Lahiri (The Interpreter of Maladies), Leslie Jamison (The Empathy Exams) and Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror). 

“We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” reads the boycott letter. It calls the war a genocide and “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” The signers say they will no longer allow their work to be translated into Hebrew, and accuse publishers and other “Israeli cultural institutions” of “obfuscating, disguising and artwashing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades.”

I was particularly disturbed by the 1950s-era McCarthyesque word “interrogating.” I imagined a new blacklist including Israeli writers and editors I admire, with the “are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been” litmus test updated to reference “affiliated with the Israeli military” rather than “a member of the Communist Party.”

I’m not Israeli, but I sometimes write for Israeli publications. Back in the 1980s, I worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and volunteered on an archaeological dig. I also dated an Israeli soldier. I know enough about how McCarthyism worked to understand that an interrogation could easily land me on someone’s “are you now or have you ever” blacklist.

Good literature is supposed to evoke thoughtful discourse and empathy. I have empathy aplenty for the devastating human cost of the Gaza war. And I’ve long been critical of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership — like countless Israelis, including many of the country’s leading literary lights. But it’s wrong, and destructive, to respond to any government’s actions with a Stasi-style, thought-police boycott of a country’s cultural institutions and creatives.

The fact that Percival Everett, author of this year’s Booker-prize nominated James, signed on strikes me as theater-of-the-absurd-level irony. Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure — which became the basis for the brilliant 2023 satirical film American Fiction — lampoons reductive racism in the book industry, skewering shallow, herd-like agents, editors, publishing houses and some writers for embracing only the most cartoonish Black experience.

In signing the boycott letter, Everett is joining a new, sheep-like literary herd. He and the others effectively erase writers and literary events whose work could actually help people understand the human tragedy of the ongoing Gaza war in all its dimensions.

In the unfortunate timing department, my well-read, 79-year-old aunt gave me James as a birthday gift last weekend. Everyone in her book group enjoyed it – an unprecedented consensus — but I can’t bring myself to crack it open now. My husband was so upset by the open letter’s wording that he encouraged me to toss it. But I don’t believe in canceling writers over politics, so James will just sit on a shelf until my internal steam cools.

Reading the boycott letter depressed me beyond measure. I felt powerless until I reached out to a friend, a producer and literary manager, who has shepherded books into movies. He sent me the counter-letter, sponsored by the Los Angeles-based Creative Community for Peace.

“We believe that writers, authors, and books — along with the festivals that showcase them — bring people together, transcend boundaries, broaden awareness, open dialogue, and can affect positive change,” it says.

And continues, “We believe that anyone who works to subvert this spirit merely adds yet another roadblock to freedom, justice, equality, and peace that we all desperately desire.”

This aligned with how I’d been feeling and general common sense, so I broke my rule and signed. I was proud to join authors like Lee Child (of the Jack Reacher series), Howard Jacobson (a Booker prize winner), the musician-writers Ozzy Osbourne and Gene Simmons, and a few Nobel laureates.

Now that James and a few other books in my waiting-to-be read pile are on ice, maybe I’ll check out one of Jacobson’s comic novels instead. I could use a good laugh to lift the open letter-signing literary blues.

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