What oh what is going on at PEN America? It is a time-honoured case of, there’s no pleasing everybody. And I must alas count myself among the displeased.

First, on July 9, the esteemed free-expression organization ran a report by Lisa Tolin, Geraldine Baum, and Malka Margolies. “‘A Silent Moratorium’: Interviews with Israeli and Jewish writers who report facing rising isolation and exclusion,” is what it sounds like: a reported article about the shunning of ‘Zionists’ in the literary world. Many of the stories themselves will be familiar to readers of this column: the Guernica debacle of 2024, the Zionist-author-hunting spreadsheet of the same year. Indeed, one writer’s April appearance on The Jewish Angle is even cited:

“The author Meg Keene received multiple offers from agents on her romance novel with Jewish themes. One agent told her that in order to sell, she would need to strip all Jewish references from the book. “The best friend character was named Yael, and she said we cannot sell a book with a character named Yael, we need to rename her, like Sue. And I didn’t do those things, and the book didn’t sell,” she told Canadian Jewish News.”

It is a neither-here-nor-there document. On the one hand, it’s sort of amazing that this thing that’s been on the Jewish community’s radar for years is being taken seriously, complete with concrete examples of things beyond bad vibes that Jewish and Israeli authors have experienced. (For example: “When children’s author K. Marcus posted a Facebook ad for her new picture book, Frankenstein’s Matzah: A Passover Parody, it was targeted with comments accusing Jews of supporting genocide. Marcus is American and the book is about a child who brings passover matzah to life.”)

On the other, the report brings in, as context, the war in Gaza, in a way that suggests it’s only natural that authors in no way personally implicated in that war—a group of largely left-wing, pro-peace sorts—would be collateral. It was maybe a step towards something, but was also one of those anti-antisemitism statements that has an ‘and Islamophobia is also wrong’ tacked on, a problem not because Islamophobia is grand, but because you are actually allowed to name one issue at a time, and naming a second, unrelated one has a way of falsely presenting things as zero-sum that are not.

Then came Dinaw Mengestu, a novelist, deciding that this report was one Zionism too many as far as he was concerned. He promptly resigned as president of the organization. It’s well and good to talk of the free expression rights of Jews, but what about the free expression rights of those who wish to express that they want to hear nothing from Jews, other than self-flagellation? Don’t they deserve consideration? (BDS stuff, effectively.)

Then came a new PEN statement, on July 15. “A Statement to Our Community,” by co-CEOs Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, that includes a vow “to be better.” They stand by the earlier report, but in a way that involves the holding of a proverbial nose with one hand and the other, outstretched, holding something revolting, head turned away. They explicate at length about exactly how awful Israel is, how nobly anti-Israel PEN has been. Whereas the July 9 report spoke of “what human rights organizations and experts have determined to be genocide in Gaza,” the July 15 statement takes a more direct line: “We have said plainly, and continue to believe, that what has happened in Gaza is a genocide.” Who exactly “we” are gets complicated here,........

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