This month, Dinaw Mengestu quit as president of PEN America—an organization dedicated to defending literature and free expression—to protest its publication of “A Silent Moratorium,” a report on Israeli and Jewish writers who described facing rising isolation and exclusion. The article featured interviews with some 30 writers, editors, and agents who described being ostracized, demonized, and silenced for failing to disavow Israel—and in some cases, for simply being Jewish. The piece was denounced by Mengestu, a novelist and journalist, as an “unethical” attempt to interfere with the “constitutional rights” of supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. He said the piece was part of PEN America’s “ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably.”
When he was hired in December, Mengestu declared that “If we do not make room for the plurality and range of voices embodied in our literature, we endanger not only our culture, but our democracy.” That noble aim is incompatible with the zero-sum logic of the BDS movement, which makes “freeing Palestine” contingent on erasing Israel, and insists on anathematizing voices at odds with its master narrative.
The word “Orwellian” has lost its sting in a world where the mayor of New York promises to enforce “international law” by arresting the prime minister of Israel—in compliance with a court that has no jurisdiction in the United States or Israel—and where an Ivy League student accuses Columbia’s administration of withholding “basic humanitarian aid” because it will not send snacks and water to students illegally occupying a building in the name of “freeing Palestine.”
But Orwellian is indeed the word, as William Kolbrener, who teaches creative writing at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, demonstrates below in his beautiful open letter to Mengestu. One of those interviewed for “A Silent Moratorium,” Kolbrener speaks in the name of the Israelis—Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—whose homeless writing he did his best to publish, and whose voices, like his own, testify that a commitment to free speech, literature, and democracy still matters.
—The Editors
Dear Dinaw,
You resigned this month as president of PEN America, an organization founded to defend writers, to protest a report it had published, “A Silent Moratorium.” The report documented something plain: Israeli and Jewish writers have been quietly pushed out of literary life since October 7, 2023—dropped from festivals, passed over for translation or publication, and struck from prize lists. You called this an “unethical” legal campaign that threatened the rights of those who wished to silence them.
