Enter as Israel

PEN America and the Price of Jewish Testimony

PEN America’s charter holds that “literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.” Its boycott policy echoes the commitment: “political and national passions should not prevent or interrupt intellectual and cultural exchange.”

A writer is not an envoy of her government, and her work is not a communiqué from the state whose passport she carries. She enters literary exchange through her sentences and should not have to establish her politics, prove her distance from a government, or be weighed against a war in order to be read.

Yet in July 2026, PEN published a report that made the principle conditional.

The Report

“A Silent Moratorium” is drawn from interviews with more than thirty Israeli and Jewish writers, agents, translators, and editors describing a publishing world that had closed to them since October 2023.

The Jerusalem-based literary agent Deborah Harris represents dozens of leading voices of Israeli literature; her agency typically sold five to ten literary novels a year into the United States, and it has sold none since October 7, 2023. Editors she has worked with for years have stopped responding or rejected them outright, and some have asked her not to submit Israeli authors again. The standard line, she says, is that they wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now.

The writer Elissa Wald described colleagues being fired by their editors, publishers, agents, and publicists. They are dropped, she said, without reference to any position on Israel or Zionism; they are told it is not the right time for a Jewish book. Two Israeli writers for U.S. general-interest magazines said their submissions were run through a series of ideological checks, among them whether the piece used the word “genocide”; one gave up journalism over it.

The harm is hard to name because it operates off the record: manuscripts go unread, calls go unreturned, and refusals carry no stated reason. Their accumulation suggests a pattern, yet the pattern belongs to no one in particular. As one writer told PEN, no one receives a rejection that says “We’re not going to publish this because you’re a filthy Zionist.”

The consequences extend beyond manuscripts left unpublished. Writers describe organized harassment, review-bombing, and public blacklists, including a circulating spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a zionist???” that identified authors as targets for boycott. Many spoke to PEN only on condition of anonymity, fearing for their safety as well as their careers.

Political positions do not exempt Israeli and Jewish writers from exclusion and harassment. Etgar Keret, one of the writers named in the report, has urged Israel not to “starve” civilians in Gaza and called on soldiers to refuse “immoral” orders. He is boycotted abroad regardless. Ronit Eitan, a doctoral student in creative writing, has attended protests against her government and embodies what she had long understood to be the markers of a liberal worldview. Yet, as she puts it, none of this changes the fact that she is “a Jew first for everyone else.” Joanna Chen’s essay about driving Palestinian children to medical care was retracted by Guernica after staff resigned in protest.

The Tolls

The PEN report captures all of this, but before the writers’ stories can be told, a preface exacts three tolls.

The first is grammatical asymmetry. The report describes “the horrors of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks and the devastation of Israel’s war.” Hamas is identified as the author of an attack; Israel is made the owner of the war. “Israel’s war” establishes the moral frame into which the writers will enter: an account already organized around the presumption of Israel’s responsibility.

The second lies in a single word, “genocide”: the gravest charge, leveled indirectly through the authority of “human rights organizations and experts.”

The third is imposed through sequence and placement. Before the report turns to its subject, Israeli and Jewish writers, it first records the suffering of Palestinians. The placement makes the passage a condition of admission: harm to Jews may be heard only after Palestinian suffering has been acknowledged.

The irony is that this requirement reproduces the very conflation everyone disavows: Israeli writers are not their government, and Jewish writers are not Israel. Yet all the writers who follow that paragraph arrive carrying the state with them.

Before they may describe what happened to them, they are made to enter as Israel.

The Perimeter and the Resignation

On the day the report appeared, PEN amended its June 2007 “Position on Cultural and Academic Boycotts” by adding a third paragraph.

PEN had long defended boycott advocacy on free-speech grounds, notably by opposing the federal Israel Anti-Boycott Act, and had restated that position in a 2025 FAQ. The new paragraph simply made the distinction explicit: PEN saw “no contradiction between opposing boycotts ourselves, and defending the right of others to engage in them.”

The timing is telling, as is the fact that the report directed readers to PEN’s official position on cultural boycotts with the newly added language. PEN established a perimeter: while the report could document the exclusion of Israeli and Jewish writers, that documentation was not to become an argument for restricting boycott advocacy.

The amendment changed nothing about what PEN believed; it only marked the limit of what PEN was prepared to let the report mean.

Within days of the report’s publication, PEN’s president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, resigned.

Mengestu feared that, by presenting the exclusion of Israeli writers as discrimination, the report could be used to justify restrictions on boycott advocacy. PEN therefore had to consider, he argued, whether its own work might “restrict or limit or suppress what is constitutionally protected speech.”

The amendment should have assuaged the concern. Mengestu nevertheless believed that publication itself created the risk, and the perimeter PEN had drawn was not enough.

Israeli and Jewish harm could be documented, but not acknowledged: it entered only once its political uses had been anticipated and contained.

The Strudel

PEN’s report documented the consequences of conflating Israeli and Jewish writers with the Israeli state, yet allowed the same concern with political implication to shape its own framing. The writers were judged by the political positions assigned to them; the report was judged by how its findings might be used rather than by what it actually argued. Mengestu resigned rather than remain tied to that possible use

Keret wrote about the affair on his Substack. Neither man is a victim, he concedes; the suffering in Gaza and Israel far exceeds a novelist’s trouble publishing a book. Yet Keret gives impassioned interviews and Mengestu “demonstratively resigns,” as though either gesture could decide the fate of the world.

Keret tells a story about his mother, a Holocaust survivor who used to play Wagner records in the evenings in Ramat Gan. One night a neighbor heard the music and objected: she couldn't play an antisemite's music in front of the children.

He's also dead, his mother said. The neighbor pressed — the Nazis loved his music.

So they loved it, she answered; they loved apple strudel too. Should she stop eating apples?