If you’ve been following Jewish literary goings-on of the last several years, decades, centuries, you’re likely to have noticed that there is a kind of re-ghettoization underway for Jewish authors since Oct. 7. It’s a more exaggerated version of what’s been happening for Jews generally, and akin to what’s going on with Jews in other areas of the arts. This is new, and it is surprising. In the 2010s, the most recent past, virtually all Jewish writers were subsumed into the category of white writers (as in, Philip Roth, stodgy white male), no longer cast as ‘ethnic.’ This could feel like an erasure of specificity, and like frustrating timing as this was the precise moment the publishing industry was (ostensibly) looking for diversity, but not quite antisemitism.

What’s happened in the past few years is a renewed obsession with the Jewishness of writers, both from outside observers and by the writers themselves. But it’s not about Jews now counting as ‘diverse.’ There’s an expectation that if you’re Jewish, you will have signed some open letter about Gaza or some other one about antisemitism. There are whisper networks about writers dropped by their publishers simply for doing Jewish content during these times, as though it harms Palestinians to write a novel where a Montreal Jew eats a St. Viateur or a Fairmount.

There are initiatives, some more persuasive than others, aimed at boosting Jewish writers. I find myself supporting at the very least the existence of these efforts, while also wondering what it means for Jews and writing that there’s this surge in expectation that the audience for a Jewish book is limited to other Jews. To me, this closing-off is the meta-story of Jewish literature, certainly in the English-speaking world. What a thing it is, that has happened. I did not see it coming! So I was a bit surprised to see a big new Vulture article with the headline, “A New Jewish Plotline: In the wake of Gaza, should Jewish American writers be tackling different stories?”

I took the bait where the subhed was concerned. I’m not sure which jumped out at me first. It may have the “should,” as though novelists or short-story writers owe it to some greater entity or essayist to write about any which topic.

But “in the wake of Gaza” had me wondering why AmericanJewish writers would be under this unique obligation, at a time when America itself is up to all manner of unpleasantness, most notably the hundreds of thousands of USAID-cut-related deaths. Why single out American Jewish writers in this way, when if they ought to be handwringing about anything (and I do not believe in making handwringing mandatory), it would be with what it means to be American? Is this not........

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