R.I.P. Morality in Publishing

On Monday, July 28, a gunman from Nevada entered an office building in Manhattan with an automatic rifle out and ready. By the time the attack ended, he had killed four people.

It was clear within hours that the shooter was actually seeking to kill people at the NFL Headquarters but never got close to the NFL floor at all. His victims were an off-duty NYPD officer, an unarmed security guard, a young woman working late, and an executive from Blackstone caught in the lobby.

You would have thought that four innocents murdered going about their work in midtown would have provoked only mourning, but Maya Sulkin of The Free Press wrote about the disturbing digital celebration of the murdered executive from Blackstone. Wesley LePatner, 43, a respected real estate executive, charity board member, and mother of two, was villified on social media as “a valuable instrument” of “evil corporations.” She also happened to be Jewish. Her inadvertent shooting, as Sulkin put it, made her “a symbol of everything they hate.”

Within a day of the murders, an X user posted a grotesque, four-line celebration of her execution. A surprising number of X users reposted his tweet – approaching 9k as of August 4 – but Sulkin heard about one repost on Instagram that shocked the conscience. It was by Thomas Gebremedhin, vice president and executive editor at Doubleday Books, who echoed the suggestion that LePatner should “rest in piss.”

Gebremedhin has an astonishing literary pedigree. He’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and worked as editor and writer at Vogue, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal before joining Doubleday in 2020. In an interview this May with Alia Habib, Gebremedhin spoke of his appreciation for an unreliable narrator, his devotion to editing excellent opening and closing sentences, and admitted, “We are gatekeepers in some way but I really try to keep an open mind when reading. Publishing is homogeneous, and you’d be surprised by the kind of lack of diversity of thought and politics and experience, lived experience.”

This need for empathy is precisely why his puerile response is so inadequate. After multiple sources messaged Sulkin screenshots of Gebremedhin’s Instagram where he reposted the imprecation, his two-sentence apology tendered to the New York Post was as follows:

“I sincerely apologize for reposting a tweet that attempted to justify the killing of a Blackstone executive — I shared it without fully reading the caption, which was deeply irresponsible. I take full accountability for the harm caused and have no desire to contribute to a culture already overwhelmed with rage and noise.”

A successful apologizer owns up to what he’s done, understands why it’s bad, and makes sure to not repeat it. This apology barely gets to one out of three. Gebremedhin is an active contributor and host of a culture overwhelmed with rage and noise. He’s already admitted that publishing needs to be open to experience, but somehow that does not include the lived experience of Jews.

Gebremedhin calls for more diversity in publishing, and often speaks of his wide range of interests, but his actions reflect publishing’s erasure of modern Judaism, in which roughly 90% consider themselves Zionists. Gebremedhin signed the infamous Sally Rooney boycott of Israeli institutions, which has led to an international blacklisting of Jewish writers. Not just Israelis, which in itself would be bigoted, but any Jewish writer who does not condemn Israel.

Gebremedhin created a new paperback reissue imprint, Outsider Editions and, though he says his goal is to “take our understanding of the contemporary canon and make it more expansive, more complicated, and more just,” his own list is exclusively anti-Zionist.

One of the first six titles he hand-picked to reissue is a memoir by Jean Said Makdisi, who has long been associated with the PLO. Gebremedhin also signed an upcoming book about the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism written by Benjamin Moser, an anti-Zionist Jew who signed the Rooney boycott. These are more than just coincidences. It’s a pattern of carefully considered choices.

And it is deeply disingenuous for Gebremedhin, a brilliant line editor of many award-winning books, to claim that he hadn’t read the tweet fully before he took it from that platform and reposted it on his own Instagram account. He’s edited books hundreds of pages long. If Gebremedhin can’t be trusted to edit a four-line piece that he puts out under his byline desecrating a murdered woman, how can he be trusted to curate and edit a whole slice of American culture, let alone Jewish culture?

His apology for dishonoring the memory of a slaughtered innocent is pro forma, meant to be tucked away during publishing’s quietest month. And he will, probably, not need to untether, because it seems that no one in publishing cares about the murder of Jews. But it is an indelible moment in Gebremedhin’s literary career that his response to a meaningless murder, to the image of a terrified woman, trying to hide behind a pillar as a gunman stalked her, is to tell her to “rest in piss.”