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William Kolbrener
English Professor; Executive Director, Writing on the Wall

Writers boycotting (Israeli) writers

Not since the Nazis has the vilification of Jews been affirmed with such moral authority. We Israelis will keep writing
We Will Judge You (ChatGPT)

As reported on Monday in the Guardian, more than a thousand people in the publishing industry — self-described as “writers, publishers, literary festival workers, and other book workers” joined in signing a boycott against Israelis writers. They are targeting, they say, “publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications.” But make no mistake, behind the smoke screen of “cultural institutions” are real live Israelis — individuals.

This is not a boycott against Israeli culture, but against individual writers.

Jews.

We are all, as their argument goes, complicit in the “genocide” of Palestinians.

Sally Rooney speaks onstage during the Hulu Panel at Winter TCA 2020 at The Langham Huntington, Pasadena on January 17, 2020 in Pasadena, California. (Erik Voake/Getty Images for Hulu via JTA, via The Times of Israel)

For the boycotters, led by Irish novelist Sally Rooney (and not “industry workers,” as referenced in their pledge ) — who has refused to have her works translated into Hebrew — Israel has created the “most urgent political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.”

It is not the fate of Muslims in China, the humanitarian crises in Sudan, Yemen, or Syria, but the “genocide in Palestine” which is the greatest crisis of the century.

According to the moral calculus of Rooney et al, the whole publishing industry in Israel, including individual Israeli writers, are complicit.

From the Olympian Heights of Ethical Purity

Not since the Nazis has the vilification of Jews been affirmed with such moral authority. From the Olympian heights of ethical purity, the boycotters condemn all Israeli writers as apologists for Israel’s policies of “ethnic cleansing and apartheid.”

Writers are supposed to be suspicious of stories that oversimplify, but with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the one and only acceptable storyline has become a children’s allegory: The Palestinians are Good, the Zionist Jews, Evil. So Rooney and her fellow boycotters recount a conflict — driven by decades of Arab attempts to annihilate the State of Israel — with bigoted clichés and well-worn antisemitic tropes.

In this fairy-tale account of the attack that began with the murder, rape, and abduction of Israeli men, women, and children, it is only Jews who have sinned. Israel has killed, the boycotters report, “according to Hamas Ministry of Health” (fantasists in their own right), “at the very least 43,362.” 75 years of the Jewish state reduced into antisemitic platitudes.

Who needs nuance? Not when it comes to Israel.

Conscience!

Apologists? (ChatGPT)

The boycotters offer an advanced seminar in virtue-signaling: “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating” — someone went to graduate school — “their relationship to apartheid and displacement.”

After all, “Israeli culture” (meaning all Israeli writers and artists) plays “an integral role in normalizing injustices.” Israeli writers, it turns out, are not only collaborators to Israeli evil, but propagandists, “working directly with the state.”

Israelis are not artist, but apparatchiks.

As the argument for boycotting goes: Israeli writers have been “crucial in obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades.” Art-washing! — all Jewish creativity advances the heinous agendas of Israel.

Not only writers like Amos Oz, David Grossman, and Edgar Keret — but aspiring writers, like those ones I teach in the Shaindy Rudoff Creative Writing Program at Bar Ilan, are all dismissed as Trotskyite enablers of genocide.

Censorship?

Censorship is bad — everyone agrees — but not when it comes to Jews.

Ironically, it’s the boycotters who make their Pravda-like pronouncements — demanding uniformity.

If the boycotters read Israeli authors, a perverse irony their stance, they would find a diversity they do not tolerate in their own puritanical ranks. It’s not Israeli writers whose works are subsumed by one-sided polemic, but the boycotters, updating Jew hatred for intellectuals. But, as Matti Friedman points out on X, progressives writers have “come to hate the same people as their grandparents did, and seem to earnestly believe it’s a coincidence.”

But, it’s no coincidence: the Holocaust and October 7th are both part of the same millennial long history of Western Jew-hatred.

Creativity (ChatGPT)

We Israelis will keep writing — finding the words for our scars, for our trauma, for our losses. We know that creativity allows for ambivalence, paradox, and poetry, for complexity, for describing who we are today.

We will write for each other, and those who want to hear our voices.

We will not be silent.

About the Author
William Kolbrener is an English Professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel, and Executive Director of Writing on the Wall, a platform dedicated to creative expression after October 7th. We fight antisemitism through strengthening ourselves with our shared courage, and our voices, telling the world. Bill is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, Open Minded Torah, Milton’s Warring Angels, and The Last Rabbi. His works explore themes ranging from religious thought and gender studies to literary criticism and Jewish philosophy.
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