JTA — An unpublished novel has paved the way for the birth of a new Jewish fiction imprint, in the leading edge of a flurry of initiatives to combat antisemitism in the publishing industry by taking hold of the means of production.

Meg Keene had an enthusiastic agent with a long track record of sales when she submitted her novel, a romance with Israeli characters, to publishers in 2024. But Keene said she was repeatedly told that her book seemed “too Jewish” to publish at a time when the war in Gaza had turned anything that could be perceived as pro-Israel radioactive. As has happened to an untold number of Jewish authors in recent years, her book did not sell.

Now, Keene is the eponymous tastemaker at the helm of a new imprint within Wicked Son Press, a 5-year-old publisher that has mostly released right-leaning nonfiction.

Over the next year, Meg Keene Books will release four to six novels that she and the founders of Wicked Son believe will elevate Jewish voices and reconstruct a bygone communal Jewish literary conversation. She will also edit a forthcoming literary magazine designed to shape the Jewish book-buying audience.

“My goal is to make Jewish publishing feel really cool,” Keene told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“I’m planning to acquire books across genres — male authors, female authors, romance, thriller, literary fiction — you know, the works,” she added. “I also intend to put everything I have behind each book, and sort of ask the Jewish community to support these books and make the case for them.”

At the same time, she said, she has broad support from Wicked Son’s co-publishers to depart from the conservative and explicitly pro-Israel stance that has characterized most of their recent and forthcoming releases, which include the posthumous memoir of pro-Israel philanthropist and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson and a treatise on anti-Israel sentiment on US college campuses by the activist and former professor Shai Davidai.

“I really dislike books that are where you can sort of hear the author tapping the mic to do an op-ed through fiction,” Keene said. She added, “Not only am I not going to publish quote-unquote conservative fiction — I’m not going to publish ideological fiction at all.”

David S. Bernstein, who runs Wicked Son alongside Adam Bellow, said he is on board — though he notes the openness has limits.

“The one thing that we insist that our authors believe is that they’re Zionists,” he told JTA. But, he added, they also have to be good: “Are we going to do schlocky novels just because they have a Zionist message? Absolutely not.”

Zionist authors — and those perceived, correctly or not, to be among their ranks — have faced a broad backlash in the literary world since the deadly Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. Intense pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activism that left some Jewish writers........

© The Times of Israel