Notebook: (1) Writing and War

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Gaza Public Library, from photographs released by the Municipality of Gaza on November 28, 2023

As the year draws to a close it is hard to fathom how much war has engulfed us, and of course our first thoughts must be for those who are lost, harmed, unhoused, captive, grieving, and how to bring the violence to an end. But the two wars crowding our horizon have also roiled the realms of expression and ideas in ways that have felt particularly intimate and painful. First came the test after the invasion of Ukraine, considered by us in Book Post last year (“Freedom and Kindess”), which asked: Does our sympathy for the afflicted nation and its heroic resistance demand that we close our ears to every sound emanating from the realm of the aggressor? In the eighteen months since our post there have been more instances of anti-war Russian expression being extinguished by sympathy for aggrieved Ukraine, such as when the appearance of two Russian writers elsewhere in the PEN World Voices Festival prompted two Ukrainian writers to withdrawn from it, and when Russian-Israeli author and resistance editor Linor Goralek’s participation in a festival in Tartu was cancelled when two Ukrainian writers threatened to withdrawn on its account; even popular American writer Elizabeth Gilbert halted publication of a novel set in Soviet-era Siberia over similar objections. These flare-ups punctuate ongoing calls to “decolonize” Slavic studies and dismantle Russia’s historic cultural dominance over its until-recently-subject neighbors. I think sometimes of our writer Sumana Roy’s pleas to liberate “postcolonial” literature from its moralizing obligations.

Now the war in Gaza stirs our emotions even closer to home, if not literally: the fate of the Holy Land is deeply wound into European and American culture through sacred literature and thought, and the Jewish and Arabic diaspora has contributed incalculably both as a historic cultural influence and as flesh-and-blood presence in our overlapping civilizations. Hence I think the particular fury with which the a distant catastrophe has riven and inflamed our already smoldering culture wars.

There is so much ordnance being thrown around about freedom of expression and its capacity for aggression that I wanted to try to bring together in one place, for my own reflection and perhaps yours, instances we have seen in the last six weeks of war playing out in the realm of thought. The moment invokes questions not unlike those raised to the north. To what extend does acknowledging the heinousness of Hamas’s assault of October 7 on thousands of unarmed civilians demand closing off the scope of expression around its aftermath?

On October 13, days the Hamas attack, the Frankfurt Book Fair, probably the most important international convocation of people working in the literary arts, announced less than a week out that Adania Shibli, a Palestinian (actually, Bedouin) author would not be receiving a planned literary prize for her novel Minor Detail (nominated in the US for a 2020 National Book Award), “due to the war started by Hamas.” A letter protesting the decision was immediately circulated, signed by more than 1,500 authors including Nobel prize winners Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Olga Tokarczuk, and a group of international publishers protested in a separate letter. On October 12, the mayor of the French town Choisy-le-Roi cancelled a play by the Freedom Theater, a Palestinian group based in the Jenin refugee camp. Paddy Cosgrove, chief executive of Web Summit, one of the world’s largest technology conferences, resigned on October 16 amid controversy over remarks on social media denouncing Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza. On October 20, New York’s 92nd Street Y announced that it was cancelling a conversation that night between the novelists Min Jin Lee and Viet Thanh Nguyen, who had been a vocal supporter of Palestinian causes. Several staff members resigned, the Y’s entire literary series was placed on hold, and an improvised reading was held at McNally Jackson Books downtown. On October 19 the editor of Artforum was fired for signing and publishing a letter from artists supporting Palestinian autonomy and calling for a cease fire. At least four Artforum editors resigned in sympathy. On October 21 the University of Vermont cancelled a long-planned live lecture with the Jerusalem Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, rescheduling it online. On October 23 a Berkeley professor lost his job as an editor of a science journal for retweeting an Onion satire on certain moralizing sensitivities (ironically). At the end of October Palestine Festival of Literature and New Jim Crow author Michele Alexander labored to find a venue willing to host a colloquium with author Ta-Nehisi Coates, historian Rashid Khalidi, poet Natalie Diaz, and others on the crisis. Columbia Law School cancelled a program with Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch one hour before it was to begin on November 20, and the university withdrew support from a panel on the work of its own Palestinian scholar Edward Said on November 29. Also on November 20 the Harvard Law Review, run by students, voted not to publish an article it had commissioned after the October 7 attacks by a Palestinian doctoral candidate in human rights law, Rabea Eghbariah, based on “concerns that the piece might provoke a reaction from members of the public who might in turn harass, dox or otherwise attempt to intimidate our editors, staff and HLR leadership.” The article was later published in The Nation. Screenings of the film “Israelism,” a documentary made by American Jews about their evolving commitment to Israel, were cancelled at the University of Pennsylvania and Hunter College. In early December three actors in a Sydney, Australia, production of “The Seagull” wore the Palestinian keffiyeh during a curtain call, and the company lost board members and funding. The French publishing house Fayard ceased filling orders for The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, noting its contract had expired in February of 2022. In December the Long Island enclave of Sag Harbor fired its town Santa, a specialist in finance in Arab countries, after he made remarks questioning Israeli policy at a forum at a local synagogue.

Nathan Thrall, a Jewish American writer living in Jerusalem whose book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama was published on October 3, found his London launch cancelled at the request of police, soon followed by readings in New York, Los Angeles, and Washington. On November 1, he was disinvited from an event at the University of Arkansas because he would not sign an anti-boycott pledge required in Arkansas (as well as other states). On November 8 an Israeli consul phoned the president of Bard College to try to persuade him to discontinue Thrall’s course.

Some of these organizations cited security concerns, but few followed through on promises to reschedule. In some cases professors were censured for openly abusing students or praising violence (as seems to have been the case at Cornell, Stanford, and the University of Arizona). The US Department of Education opened discrimination investigations into (to date) twenty-nine universities and public school systems since October 7, including Rutgers, UCLA, Tulane, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Wellesley, and Penn, investigations that could result in the suspension of federal funding. Most of the investigations appear to address charges of antisemitism prompted by the schools’ failure to contain pro-Palestinian protest. (I have not been able to find examples of writers or scholars formally penalized for expressing views supportive of the invasion of Gaza, although there are many published accounts of students, faculty, and others in academic settings feeling isolated and uneasy and themselves withholding such views.)

German cultural institutions, for obvious reasons, have been particularly resolute in their support for the Israeli response. On November 20 the Berlin Senate withdrew funding for the Oyoun cultural center, causing it to close, over objections to an event with the organization Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East. Jewish Voice had supported the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement, which the German government had classified as antisemitic in 2019. The Heinrich Böll Foundation, affiliated with the Green Party, withdrew their award of the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought from Jewish American writer Masha Gessen in response to her commentary condemning Israel’s attack on Gaza in The New Yorker. The award was later granted (by whom?) before a small audience with little fanfare, and Gessen gave a thoughtful speech. Arendt scholar Samantha Hall observed in The Guardian that “Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today.” Jewish writers and scholars in Germany published an open letter in the magazine n+1 “to condemn a disturbing crackdown on civic life in the wake of this month’s horrifying violence in Israel and Palestine.” (Masha Gessen’s brother, Keith, a founder of n+1, was among the signatories to another open letter in n+1 from American Jewish writers objecting to the censure of criticism of Israel in the US as antisemitic.)

Even before the October 7 attack, a scheduled festival of Palestinian literature at Penn had created an uproar among some locals and patrons of the university. Saying they had no objection to celebrating Palestinian culture in principle, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) contested the inclusion in the Festival of figures who had in its view made antisemitic statements in the past. The defiant rejoinders from the festival’s organizers were indeed highly polemical, but AJC’s enumerated objections did not seem to admit of any political dissent by the participants in such an event either within the festival or at any other time in their lives. The uproar over the writers’ festival, which proceeded over these objections, was the background of the resignation of Penn President Liz Magill after her congressional testimony on December 5. (The organization Alums for Campus Fairness, founded in 2015 to combat campus antisemitism, on this occasion pioneered the practice of renting trucks displaying photographs and contact information for their opponents, a form of protest against academic criticism of Israel that has been recurrent in the months since.)

Correction: A reader pointed out to me that the two Ukrainian writers withdrew from the PEN World Voice Festival on account of the presence of two Russian nationals, not Masha Gessen, as I originally wrote. Read more here. I appreciate the correction.

Read Part Two of this post here

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Ann Kjellberg is the founder and editor of Book Post.

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