Bernard-Henri Lévy landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Oct. 8, 2023; he had spent the previous 24 hours desperately searching for any available flight to Israel.
He immediately headed south to Kibbutz Kfar Aza, becoming the first international journalist to document the atrocities and the acts of courage on the ground. His accounts carried particular weight given his stature as France’s preeminent philosopher, globally respected intellectual, and unwavering advocate for human rights worldwide.
Lévy built his reputation through direct engagement with the world’s most pressing conflicts, making frequent trips to Ukraine’s frontlines while producing powerful documentaries about Russian aggression and Ukrainian resistance, often under active shelling; championing Kurdish independence amid fierce battles; and bearing witness in Libya, Nigeria and Armenia.
Wherever oppression surfaces, Lévy trades the comfort of his Paris residence to stand alongside those fighting for freedom.
Israel’s struggle against the Hamas terrorist group, he has long argued, represents a crucial battle in the free world’s resistance against forces threatening to overwhelm it.
These themes animate Lévy’s compelling new book, “Israel Alone.” Given his prominence—he writes columns for several of the world’s leading newspapers and maintains direct access to global leaders—the book garnered enthusiastic reviews and quickly sold out its first printing.
To build on this momentum, his publisher, Wicked Son, sought to place an advertisement in Shelf Awareness, an influential industry newsletter reaching 600,000 readers, primarily bookstore owners and managers. The publication’s advertising representative agreed to run the ad within days.
However, the representative soon contacted Lévy’s publisher to announce the advertisement’s rejection and promise an immediate refund. The reason? The ad would cause “unwanted trouble” for its customers.
When Melanie Notkin, representing the publisher, pressed for clarification, she recorded a conversation that merits careful attention for its surreal quality: The mere presence of “Israel” in a pro-Israel book’s title would provoke anti-Israel elements within publishing, rendering the ad untenable. Despite protests, the rejection stood firm, prompting Lévy to pen an incensed response in The Wall Street Journal.
“For the first time in my life,” he wrote, “I have been censored. … It seems that no Jewish author, no one remotely connected to Judaism, is safe from this kind of exclusion.
The march of folly
Lévy’s assessment proved prescient. A sampling of incidents from just the past year demonstrates how American publishing—an industry that achieved its zenith in the 1950s and ’60s under significant Jewish leadership—has devolved into an openly antisemitic environment that enables persecution of Jews without pretense.
Consider Elisa Albert, a progressive feminist author. In September, she welcomed an invitation from New York State’s prestigious literary festival to moderate a panel on adolescent girls. Shortly before the event, however, an organizer regretfully informed her that fellow panelists—acclaimed authors Aisha Abdel Gawad and Lisa Ko—had withdrawn, refusing to share a platform with a “Zionist.”
Blacklist
Earlier this year, James Kirchick, a leading Jewish journalist in America, published an exposé in The New York Times revealing the crisis’s true depth.
Just as in Joseph McCarthy’s darkest days, the industry maintains blacklists of those deemed unemployable: Kirchick uncovered a list of more than 200 editors, writers and industry professionals suspected of excessive Jewish pride, complete with color coding to denote varying degrees of Zionism and support for Israel.
Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, for instance, earned the dreaded “red” classification as a “Zionist” because, according to the list’s anonymous creators, she “frequently visits Israel and speaks positively about these visits.”
Writer Kristin Hannah received the same designation for sharing a Magen David Adom donation link after Hamas’s attack.
And Gabrielle Zevin—author of bestsellers “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” and “Young Jane Young”—was placed in a slightly lower category of Israel supporters. Her offense? Speaking at a local chapter of the Hadassah women’s organization.
Predictably, the list’s author, known on social media only as Amina, encourages followers to boycott everyone mentioned.
Conversations with various publishing house editors suggest the list has achieved its intended effect. One literary agent, speaking anonymously for fear of professional retaliation, told Kirchick, “Today it takes real courage to publish proudly Jewish authors or books about the Jewish experience. If you believe in Israel’s right to exist, the industry now considers it appropriate and desirable to completely cancel you.”
Another author, also requesting anonymity, expressed concern that despite his new book containing no Jewish themes, reviewers and readers might boycott him simply for being proudly Jewish and appearing on one of these defamatory lists of Jewish authors.
“We’ve been hearing about such lists for months,” said Naomi Firestone-Teeter, CEO of the Jewish Book Council, which promotes Jewish books and authors. “It’s chilling.”
In a recent official statement, another council board member, Elisa Spungen Bildner, declared that such lists “echo the 1930s. Calls to boycott Jewish writers or books are equivalent to book burning.”
Yet these lists gain momentum, with editors and writers reporting, in off-the-record conversations, deteriorating treatment from colleagues. One described a coworker blocking her on all social media and ceasing email responses, another mentioned sudden exclusion from departmental meetings, and another recounted a tearful call from her agent warning that continuing to hold “problematic” positions would force termination of their relationship.
The witch-hunt
This hostile atmosphere peaked at the National Book Award ceremony, the industry’s Oscar equivalent honoring each year’s most distinguished authors.
In an upscale Manhattan venue, publishing’s elite gathered to hear jokes from film star Kate McKinnon (“Barbie”) and songs from Jon Batiste, house musician for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Award recipients, one after another, mounted the stage to speak not about their work or any other global injustice, but about Israel. At least two winners claimed from the podium that genocide was occurring in Gaza. “I hope each of us can love ourselves enough to rise up and ensure the genocide stops,” declared another winner.
The hostages, needless to say, went unmentioned, as did Oct. 7 victims. When a senior Jewish editor stood to forcefully remind the audience about Israeli children still in Gaza captivity, she received a polite but firm request to leave the hall immediately.
This same animosity infected PEN America, perhaps the country’s largest and most influential writers’ organization.
Founded in 1922 by literary giants such as Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, and Robert Frost, PEN America aimed to protect writers’ free expression and ensure the publishing industry embraced diverse viewpoints without fear of persecution or censorship.
But times, as one beloved Jewish poet wrote, are changing: This February, more than 1,500 organization members signed a letter demanding immediate condemnation of Israel and calling on the organization to “wake from its passive, lukewarm, fence-sitting, self-satisfied and mediocre approach and take concrete steps against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
After accusing Israel of systematic and deliberate murder without any factual support from writers or journalists, the letter left little doubt about required action: “We demand PEN America issue an official condemnation naming the killers exactly: Israel, a colonialist Zionist entity funded by the US government.”
Again, one might expect a serious organization to state unequivocally that anyone truly committed to literature cannot engage in one-sided propaganda, especially when that side represents a murderous terrorist organization. One might expect champions of free expression to rise against those who persecute others for their identity or beliefs. One might expect a forceful statement that boycotts fundamentally contradict art’s universal spirit, which should evoke common human emotions and bridge all divides.
But PEN America did none of this. It didn’t even defend itself by citing its numerous anti-Israel statements. Instead, the organization capitulated to pressure and issued a sharp statement calling for an immediate ceasefire.
Even this proved insufficient: More than half of the organization’s writer and editor members announced they would refuse nomination for PEN America’s official awards, the organization’s annual crown jewel.
“Writers with conscience,” several departing members wrote in a statement, “don’t debate facts. There is truth and there is fiction, and the truth is that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”
And PEN America, they continued, “normalizes genocide” by “giving voice to Zionists.”
The departing members also demanded immediate termination of the organization’s head, Susan Nossel, a Jewish woman, due to her “long-standing commitment to Zionism.”
The upheaval achieved its goal: for the first time in almost three decades, the organization announced cancellation of its main festival due to protests.
Seize the day
“There’s no question that Jews are being excluded from the publishing industry at every level and rank—from editors at publishing houses unwilling to publish Jewish books, to literary media outlets refusing to cover Israeli or Jewish books and authors, major festivals no longer inviting Jews, and down to bookstores now boycotting Jews.”
The speaker is Adam Bellow, a legendary American editor and publisher. After an extensive career at prestigious houses such as Doubleday, HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, and after discovering and nurturing some of America’s most successful authors’ careers, Bellow decided he could no longer tolerate the industry in its current form.
This was no easy decision, considering not only his own achievements but also that his father—Nobel Prize laureate Saul Bellow, one of the most important Jewish-American authors of all time—helped to elevate the industry and remained among its most cherished figures for decades.
“In a sense,” Bellow told Israel Hayom, “what’s happening now to Jews in the publishing industry represents a tremendous injustice. This industry was institutional and dormant, the exclusive domain of WASP gentlemen. Jews arrived and transformed the industry into a global powerhouse, just as we did in Hollywood and other industries. And now, we face exactly the same discrimination we see in so many other industries we helped elevate, like universities.”
Which leads us, Bellow continued, to a difficult choice.
“Now we Jews in all these industries excluding us have exactly two options,” he said. “Do we stay and fight to reclaim positions earned honestly through hard work, or do we leave and establish our own parallel institutions, as we did in the first decades of modern Jewish existence in America?
“I won’t presume to judge either way, but I can tell you what I did—which was to leave quickly and establish my own publishing house, which is thriving. So now, as someone once said, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times.”
Originally published by Israel Hayom.