I'm not happy about it, but I wrote about PEN.

On the latest in junk cultural journalism.

I will try to keep this short. Maybe you’ve seen the story about the free speech and writer support organization PEN America? How the organization’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, resigned in protest about an article about how Israeli and Jewish authors are being ostracized or censured because of their Zionist views or because of their identities?

Here’s the original PEN article. Here’s a report by Gal Beckerman at The Atlantic, and here’s the New York Times’ coverage.

And here’s what I have to add: This is all so profoundly stupid it makes my head hurt.

First, let’s do our little ritual: Antisemitism is real, and it matters.

Also, specifically literary antisemitism matters. That said, it does not help anyone to promulgate a mishmash of writers’ resentments and rumors and paranoid fantasies, as the PEN article does. If one cares about these issues, it is worth doing a little bit of independent investigation, and consulting sources beyond interviews and opinions. A bunch of aggrieved writers proves exactly nothing: it is always possible to find aggrieved writers, people who feel like their work isn’t getting as much attention as it deserves.

Apparently, the authors of the PEN article spent “months” on their piece. That’s hilarious, and appalling, when you look closely at what they’ve published.

Here’s one account they relay: “Jewish-American author Lisa Barr said her novel Woman on Fire received 450 one-star reviews as a result of an organized review bombing.” Go look at the 1-star reviews of this novel on Goodreads and Amazon. (I did; it took me maybe 10 minutes.) Every single one of them looks legitimate. Here’s the beginning of one such review, from a person named Jessica Cook (who has reviewed at least a hundred other books on Goodreads):

Many of Barr’s 1-star reviews are from 2022, when the book was published.

Here’s another way to do a quick reality check on the general claims in the PEN article. Search “Israel” in Kirkus Reviews, the pre-publication book review magazine that critics use to find books to review. In 2004 and 2005, which I selected somewhat haphazardly as a control period, “Israel” came up in 66 articles. In 2024 and 2025, “Israel” came up much more: 127 articles. “Hebrew” went from 29 to 73 mentions; “Israeli” from 49 up to 71. To be fair, “Gaza” also went from two mentions in 2004-2005 to 52 mentions in 2024-2025, but that’s probably because of, you know, the genocide?

With striking incompetence, the PEN article claims that “U.S. publishers have, unquestionably, released some books by Israelis”—and it then mentions two recently published October 7th-related memoirs before continuing—“But the agents and writers PEN America interviewed said fiction is another story.” The clear implication of this sentence is that U.S. publishers have not, in recent years, released “fiction” “by Israelis.” This is false and frankly a bizarre thing to suggest.

The following is a list of works of fiction written by Jewish Israelis, in Hebrew, then translated to English and published by U.S. publishing houses in 2024 and 2025. It is not a comprehensive list, as I just spent about 20 minutes gathering it from simple web searches (which is something that apparently the PEN authors could not manage to accomplish in the “months” they worked on their article):

• Yishai Sarid, The Third Temple (2024).

• Maya Arad, The Hebrew Teacher (2024).

• Tehila Hakimi, Hunting in America (2025).

• Maya Arad, Happy New Years (2025).

• Iddo Geffen, Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory (2025).

• Yishay Ishi Ron, Dog (2025).

• Etgar Keret, Autocorrect (2025).

• Yariv Inbar, Behind the Trigger (2025).

The authors do go on to qualify their claim, noting that “the chilling effect on the market for fiction titles might not be immediately obvious because only a handful of Israeli authors are published in the U.S. each year, and contracts are typically signed years in advance and confidential.” Which is true. So, maybe, before you publish a piece that is called “A Silent Moratorium,” you could, like, search for evidence that the phenomenon you’re describing is actually, like, happening?

To be clear: I am not saying that no Jewish authors have ever, or recently, been the victims of antisemitism. I am not saying that no Israeli authors or agents have ever been criticized or excluded from opportunities or mistreated. (If you want to listen to a nuanced, informed, and useful conversation on the topic of cultural boycotts and Israeli artists, listen to Arielle Angel’s recent conversation with the filmmaker Nadav Lapid.) I would be delighted to read a thoughtful, well-researched article that tracks meaningful changes in cultural production, and I would not be especially surprised if such an article did present evidence that there is some antisemitic prejudice, as well as strong anti-Israel sentiment, informing the decisions of some gatekeepers in the publishing world. That would be important to report on, and to fight against.

But if we want to understand what is happening in contemporary literature and culture, we cannot simply take a survey of disgruntled writers and polemicists and then circulate their statements as fact. I did not talk to Mengestu, or even read his social media statements about why he stepped down as PEN president. But I would certainly be embarrassed to be associated with such a sloppy piece of work, especially one that is guaranteed to feed the pernicious weaponization of antisemitism.