Booker Prize Nominees and Sally Rooney Up the Ante When It Comes To Literary Antisemitism

We’ve reported in these pages about a rising tide of antisemitism in the literary world following last year’s Hamas terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli civilians. But for the most part, the antisemitic incidents have involved small-potatoes figures, random bookstore employees, literary-festival volunteers, and young-adult novel authors appearing on panels. But now bigger names are taking positions that would shock even the hardiest Holocaust survivors.

This week, someone leaked an alarming, as-yet-unpublished open letter to the Times of London, in which numerous award-winning authors call for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in genocide” against the Palestinian people. Mind you, they’re not calling for a boycott of a publisher that put out a Benjamin Netanyahu memoir, or just condemning the Netanyahu government. They mean Israel literary festivals and other related institutions. Let’s quote the letter:

“Culture has played an integral role in normalising these injustices. Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades,” it says.

The irony of published writers criticizing “culture” won’t be lost on anyone with half a brain cell. Let’s name these ignoble culture warriors. Bestselling writer Sally Rooney is the top name on the list, if only by virtue of her popularity. She’s been a prominent anti-Israel voice pretty much since anyone remotely began caring about her opinions about anything. There are others.

Indian novelist Arundahti Roy, a longstanding voice of the left, is on there, so are Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner, both nominated for this year’s Booker Prize, and Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah. Kushner, whose latest novel we’re set to pan on this site later this week, is a particularly upsetting inclusion, as she’s Jewish, so she should know the danger of silencing Jewish voices, whether or not they’re guilty of what the letter accuses. But she’s hardly alone among American Jewish writers, who have been speaking out against Israel with a force they never display in speaking out against antisemitism.

This goes far beyond condemning the Israel government’s wartime tactics. The signatories of this letter are condemning Jewish cultural institutions, saying they do not matter, engaging in a rhetorical act of pure antisemitism. If, in the extremely unlikely event that their stupid boycott has any effect other than diminishing Jewish culture, do you think they’ll rescind that criticism? Of course they won’t. Jewish institutions, and Jewish people, are not part of the diaspora of tolerance that the contemporary progressive left preaches. Jews do not matter to them, No boycott will ever be enough. Whether you support what the Netanyahu government is doing or not, you have to be against what these writers are doing, because it is a dangerous precedent in a time of extreme peril for the Jewish people around the world.

Fortunately, not everyone agrees with them. The Times article on the letter quotes several people, including Jack Reacher creator Lee Child, who sells more books in a month than Rachel Kushner will in a lifetime, calling this proposed boycott “nuts,” and he is actually quite empathetic to the plight of the Palestinians, saying he’s for a “two-state solution.”

I also have, in my digital hands, a copy of a counter-letter, still in the editing stages, that various figures in the literary and entertainment world, including people who we’ve written about on this site, have already signed. They’ve asked me not to quote the letter, so I won’t, but they do bring up a 1933 Nazi boycott of Jewish authors, which led to widespread book burnings. That’s not exactly a direct comparison. The Nazis were, at that point, a political movement calling for the ban of Jewish books. Instead, what we have today are governments of all ideological stripes defending Jewish people, but cultural figures–including prominent Jewish ones–condemning them.

I have signed that letter that condemns the condemners, who are on the wrong side of history. I’m a famous author, after all. Other people I know have signed it, and will sign it. If you get a chance, you should sign it too.

Apparently, a Booker Prize nomination is no shield from bigoted, ignorant opinions about the Jews. The way things are going in the literary world, antisemitism suddenly seems like a prerequisite.