A Free-Speech Meltdown
PEN America’s president resigned over an article detailing the isolation and exclusion that many Israeli and Jewish writers feel after October 7.
On Thursday morning, PEN America, the free-speech organization, posted an article detailing the “isolation and exclusion” many Israeli and Jewish writers have felt since October 7, 2023. The authors describe being blacklisted at publishing houses, boycotted by activists, pressured to downplay their Jewishness, and called out in online witch hunts including a viral crowdsourced spreadsheet that asked: “Is your fav writer a Zionist???”
Drawing attention to such suppression would seem to fall squarely within the mandate of this watchdog group, whose motto is “the freedom to write.” And yet, publication of the article—which makes no policy recommendations and is written in a mournful, rather than accusatory, tone—was enough to make PEN America’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, decide to resign in protest within hours.
PEN America currently sits on a widening fault line, one that divides old-school liberalism, which treats the right to speak as more important than any particular ideology, from a surging and fiercely ideological left that sees Israel and Zionism as its enemy. Still, it was a shock to learn that this article—mainly a collection of writer testimonials—set off an eruption.
Mengestu had been in his position for only seven months following a few years of turmoil at the organization, much of it over Israel and Gaza. When I reached him, he described the PEN article as a possible threat to the constitutional rights of those who advocate for shunning Israeli products (including art) according to the standards of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement. Apparently setting aside the question of defending free expression for Israeli and Jewish writers, he focused on the rights of pro-Palestinian activists. A document like this from PEN, he felt, could provide more fuel for legislation that targets proponents of BDS. Such legislation already exists in most states, though it is usually aimed at businesses and individuals seeking government contracts. “It’s the first amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu wrote in an email. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
I spoke with several current and former PEN staffers and board members who characterized his position, expressed in emails he wrote to the board, as highly partisan. From their perspective, the leader of their organization was arguing that merely reporting on the stifling of one group’s free expression amounted to suppressing the rights of another.
Some PEN staffers came away feeling that his worry about the free speech of pro-Palestinian protesters and student activists foreclosed any defense of Israeli and Jewish writers—even writers, such as the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret, who have condemned the war in Gaza and have suffered consequences both outside and inside Israel. (It should go without saying, though maybe it needs to be said, that it would be meaningless to have free-speech organizations if they defended only speech they agreed with.) These staffers also expressed sadness that even a small effort to fulfill PEN’s mission by describing the experiences of writers under political stress was met with such a dramatic gesture of rejection, seemingly because of those authors’ identity.
PEN does in fact defend the rights of people who want to engage in boycotts, even though it “emphatically opposes” organized efforts to shut down speech. In practical terms, this might mean condemning a literary festival’s ban on a group of writers but defending an individual’s refusal to attend. As Mengestu and others pointed out to me, the organization amended its guidelines on this point and reissued them on Thursday, at the same time as the article was posted. “We see no contradiction between opposing boycotts ourselves, and defending the right of others to engage in them,” the new language reads, in part.
Many people inside the organization, including its co-CEOs Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, believed that publishing the article about Israeli and Jewish writers was a matter of principle. When they first began serving as interim leaders last fall, after two years of organizational crisis marked by protests following October 7, Lopez and Rosaz Shariyf went on a “listening tour.” (Their positions became official in February.) They heard again and again from authors who described a chilled environment for any books related to Jewish themes or involving Jewish characters. As with any issue that affects the freedom to write, this one felt important for PEN to investigate.
The resulting document took months to produce—an unusual length of time, I was told, in part because of the scrutiny that such reporting would surely face. The authors of the article spoke with people such as Deborah Harris, a prominent literary agent who represents many Israeli authors. She described being unable to sell any works of literary fiction by them in the American market since the October 7 attacks. “The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now,’” Harris said.
Some of the information in the report was highly anecdotal; for instance, a romance novelist named Meg Keene says she was told by her agent to strip out all Jewish references from her book and to change one character’s name from Yael to Sue. But there was also some attempt to offer hard data, including the fact that a hotline set up by the Jewish Book Council for reporting “antisemitic literary-related incidents” has so far received 350 self-reported complaints over two years.
The article does not conclude that all of these experiences were the result of BDS. In fact, it considers a constellation of factors: “It is difficult to assess how much of what the writers PEN America spoke to are experiencing stems from cultural boycotts and broader efforts to protest the war; how much from anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or antisemitic sentiment; and how much reflects matters of business or taste, which are also shaped by geopolitics.” The objective of the article was rather to describe the effect: a sense of diminished opportunity for free expression and the feeling of being targeted because of one’s “identity, nationality, or views.” The release also mentions the “dire consequences” that Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers and artists have faced over the past three years, including “arrests, harassment and threats, deportation attempts, and detention.”
The document does not project the authority or condemnatory conclusions of an official PEN America report. The report produced last fall about the cultural destruction of Gaza, “All That Is Lost,” represents a far more comprehensive effort to capture the result of Israel’s war. This new article, in contrast, felt to some PEN America outsiders more like a “blog post”—and an equivocal one.
“PEN does not muse that the removal of a Toni Morrison novel might be a matter of taste,” Allison Lee, the former head of PEN America’s Los Angeles office, told me, referencing the group’s many reports that have condemned book bans over the years. “Only one group of writers, it seems, must have the case for their suppression respectfully contextualized before the harm done to them can be acknowledged—and even then, only provisionally.”
Most discussion of Israel and Palestine has devolved into a zero-sum game. The simple act of drawing attention to what Israelis and Jews might be experiencing was always going to be read as a position statement for the organization. “The blog post was brave and right,” Andrew Solomon, a former PEN America president and current honorary board member, told me. He opposes the current Israeli government, but he does not see why that should preclude him from defending Israeli writers. He has also done work in Ukraine—he risked his life to deliver vehicles to Kharkiv earlier this month—and said he would still speak up against the mistreatment of Russian writers, regardless of what Vladimir Putin does.
“Why would anyone complain of acknowledging the suffering of anyone else?” he asked. “Is the lie that some people’s suffering matters more than that of others the role of an organization dedicated to free speech and truth? I don’t deny Palestinian suffering and don’t see that acknowledging and representing it means I cannot acknowledge suffering in Israel too.”
Solomon’s position is shared by others on the board, a fact reflected in the decision of the organization’s leadership to stand by the article. But Mengestu was named president in order to solve a serious problem at PEN America, one that this new crisis threatens to expose again.
In 2024, PEN America went through something like an internal revolt after a large number of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, and Lorrie Moore, issued a series of letters making escalating demands that the group take a harder line on Israel, and specifically that it characterize the war in Gaza as a genocide. (The new article uses the word—but among Mengestu’s objections is that the designation was attributed to “experts” and other organizations.) A group of writers attacked the then-CEO, Suzanne Nossel, calling for her resignation. In one of their letters, they describe Nossel as having “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.” So many writers pulled out of the 2024 World Voices Festival and that year’s literary awards that both events were canceled, and the annual gala was nearly called off too. (Nossel, who ran the organization for more than a decade and left in October 2024 partly in response to the protests, had grown PEN America’s membership and influence as well its revenue, which increased fivefold.)
An organization that had prided itself since its creation in 1922 on protecting free speech and the defense of writers—no matter who they were—was thus overtaken by a passionate and sizable contingent that demanded the group become vocal advocates on behalf of Palestinians and in opposition to Israel. One of this constituency’s central demands (they called themselves Writers Against War on Gaza, or WAWOG) was that PEN America be more accepting of BDS and not condemn writers who joined calls for a blanket cultural boycott.
When Mengestu assumed office, WAWOG announced in an Instagram post that it had achieved “VICTORY AGAINST PEN AMERICA” (the same group today offered a “salute” to Mengestu’s “principled decision” to resign). But in one early interview, the new president promised to “mend and rebuild.” Since then, PEN America has focused considerable attention and resources on Gaza. In addition to its extensive Gaza report last fall, the organization has spent as much as $500,000 dollars, according to several insiders, on helping Palestinian writers and artists.
Besides helping Palestinians artists, PEN America has made other efforts to keep the protesters inside the tent. In January, the group released a statement condemning the cancellation of performances by the incendiary Israeli comedian Guy Hochman—in keeping with its general stance against “ideological litmus tests”—but later withdrew it in response to backlash. At this year’s World Voices Festival, which included more than 140 writers from more than 40 countries, not a single Israeli was part of the program.
In light of these shifts, last week’s article came as a genuine surprise, including perhaps to Mengestu. The PEN America board does not have any editorial control over the work of the staff. But after the release of the report on the cultural destruction of Gaza, the organization decided to share potentially controversial publications with board members in advance. They saw the article two days before it was published, and a number of them decided to meet to discuss it. I could not confirm whether Mengestu was part of these conversations. When I asked him about it, he didn’t respond to the question. Board members are held to confidentiality about their internal discussions. (Among these members is the Atlantic staff writer George Packer.) Mengestu delivered his judgement on the article and decision to resign in emails to the board.
The next president of PEN America will decide the group's course—and that course is hard for anyone to predict. The decision by Lopez and Rosaz Shariyf to publish the article was described to me by many people I spoke with as an act of “courage.” (I should acknowledge that others who declined to speak with me might feel very differently.) And yet they expressed no desire to return to the tumult that the organization experienced in 2024. The younger members of the staff who, according to Mengestu, were upset by the article’s appearance, and the hundreds of writers who have signed petitions opposing PEN America in the past, cannot be ignored without imperiling the organization’s future.
Maybe the most revealing aspect of this eruption, though, is just how little it took to set it off. Thursday’s article nodded to the curtailed freedoms of Israeli and Jewish writers without taking any ideological side. It was far from a battle cry or a shift in priorities. It was just a way of acknowledging, in the measured but principled language common to PEN America, that the past three years of discourse have had an effect on a large group of writers. For anyone who has spoken to Israeli or Jewish artists—as I have—this is undeniable; you hear it everywhere. This reality does not neutralize the cause of pro-Palestinian writers or the suffering in Gaza and elsewhere. The fact that the article was perceived that way, and that it led to the resignation of a president, tells us all a great deal about the hair-trigger moment we live in, and about the precarity of the liberal principles on which PEN America was founded.