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roma★
shark vs the universe
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Three Goblin Art
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@chutzpahchesed
Cara Drook, Reclaiming La Belle Juive, (2022 –).
'"La belle Juive" translates to "the beautiful Jewess." It is an archetype of Jewish women that is repeatedly shown in paintings and media throughout history. "La belle Juive" is rooted in antisemitism and misogyny. My goal with this collection is to have Jewish women take control of their narrative and reclaim "La belle Juive." I want to return dignity to the subjects and show what truly makes Jewish women beautiful.'
subreddit entitled “AgainstHateSubreddits” hand waving and masking (if not openly encouraging) antisemitism? in no way a surprise.
it is functionally insane that jews are expected to be deferent and piously self deprecating while we are only intermittently treated as human beings.
some of the most powerful global institutions on an economic and social level are the dominant religious powers that have denuded the narrative of the jewish religion.
they have regularly denied us being its makers when it was convenient in order to depose us our positions of influence and security.
and we’re expected to be delicate and graceful when people slaughter us in the name of the religions that built over our memory? reprehensible
dude. tell me you know nothing about the holocaust without mentioning the word holocaust. please for the love of god learn. about anything regarding antisemitism. please. please stop assuming every jew talking about antisemitism is a zionist. you are an uneducated, ill mannered fucktwit
“when jews talk about their oppression it’s jewish exceptionalism”
“weaponizing antisemitism”
“weaponizing the holocaust”
“essentializing antisemitism”
“eternal victims”
“victim card declined”
^^some of the most insidious antisemitic concepts i encounter because their goal is to kneecap our ability to even talk about the bigotry we face. i’ve included both nominally left-wing and right-wing versions.
it’s also particularly gross that a few of these are used by some leftist jews
I think I've said this before, but there's one thing that's become extremely apparent to me from the last two and a half years of dealing with Western Leftist Jew-Hate.
Specifically, a tremendous amount of the assumptions, conclusions, and general arguments made by them make much more sense if they--implicitly or explicitly--believe that:
there was a break of continuity, both in religious practice and ethnic descent, between modern Rabbinic Judaism and Second Temple Judaism.
that modern Rabbinic Judaism is a modern, post-Reformation/Enlightenment reconstruction of an extinct religious tradition composed of post-Christian converts (akin to neo-pagans)
the sole group who can claim ethnic descent from the Second Temple-era Jews are Palestinians.
There's a lot of cross-pollination with Khazar Theory, obviously, in there, but it stands on its own to at least some extent.
Yeah, this about sums it up, and what I find especially interesting about it is that a lot of the cross-pollination with Khazar Theory seems to be happening when Leftists who have casually absorbed all of the above then later encounter Khazar Theory in the wild, and just kind of go "hmm, well sure, that fits right in with my existing worldview, so I guess I'll go ahead and incorporate it into my belief system without any further inquiry!" Which is kind of odd when you consider that it's about as buck wild a fringe theory as Fomenko's New Chronology, or the Bosnian Pyramids.
Like I think that an area where a similar thing often occurs (but where the stakes are maybe a little bit lower) is the phenomenon of people learning bad Egyptology from TikTok, and then accidentally falling all the way into ancient alien conspiracy circles, just because those are the main other groups which jive with, eg. the based-on-literally-nothing claim that they heard from someone on TikTok (who was not in any way an archeologist) that Hatshepsut's name was censored due to transphobia. You don't need to be an eg. "radiocarbon dating skeptic" in order to get taken in some unsupported pop Egyptology theory... but once you're there, man, you're quickly going to have to either consider why it is that so many proponents of this quirky little academic theory are radiocarbon dating skeptics, or else become one yourself. And it seems like on average, it's a lot easier for folks to fall all the way into the pseudoscience than it is for them to admit that the first thing they swallowed was wrong and that they fell for it.
Passover silver Seder cups
Silversmith: Hieronymos Mittnacht (1708–1769) (?), 1761-63. Inscribed in Hebrew: “I will free you from the labours of the Egyptians” [Exod 6:6)]
Late 17th Century
tiktok posts even mentioning Jews, just Jews, NOT zionism or Israel, NOT Gaza, JUST JEWISH PRACTICES: *comments with 100k likes about how ALL Jews are "z*o baby killers"*. *comments with 140k likes about how at this point "all Jews are guilty by asssociacion and should accept it".*
tiktok post about an ACTIVE RUSSIAN SOLDIER CONFESSING HIS FRIEND RAPED A UKRAINIAN WOMAN IN FRONT OF HER YOUNG CHILDREN: *commemt with 130k likes about how "Russian Soldiers just wanna go home and live peacefully with their families"*. *comment with 285k likes about how "both sides are tired of the war".* *0 comments about how the rapist's actions are wrong in a any way shape or form*.
Never. NEVER. EVER. let anyone tell you they "care about all genocides equally" or "would absolutely speak up about war crimes and atrocities committed against Ukrainians as well". Even posts by Russians themselves condemning ONE specific active combatant for RAPE dont get actual rapists an ounce of criticism for their act. Not even one comment about anyone's heart breaking for that Ukrainian rape survivor and her babies. NOT ONE. and before you assume, all those highlighted ccomments are in English, not Rrussian. Where is the outrage? wheres the baby killers comment? wheres the "all Russian soldiers deserve to die for this" comments? nowhere.
These people do not care. These people have never cared. These people only care when they can bully Jews for existing. It's never been about ANYTHING else. PLEASE stop falling for what morons say on tumblr about how *they* absolutely would show empathy to all war crime survivors eually. They're deflecting. They do NOT care about the innocent, they do NOT care about war crimes, or the civilians these crimes affect, they do NOT care about the wellbeing of babies or toddlers, they don't even think that specific soldiers actively raping civilian women are bad. It's NEVER been about that. EVER. Stop letting people convince you otherwise.
justice for that civilian survivor whos trauma is not even worth mentioning in the eyes of the west and justice for her toddlers who had to be in the room and witness it.
.
i think that when people call israeli bomb shelters “bunkers” it’s intentionally to conjure up associations of “wealthy privileged people being cowardly and hiding from the consequences of their harming The People” (bc that is what they believe) instead of “civilians taking shelter from war”
but they’ll call them bomb shelters again when it’s time to spin a different narrative. for example, “the israelis aren’t letting indian migrant workers into bomb shelters, so they’re sleeping in the train station!! they’re all white supremacists/jewish supremacists!!”
when, actually:
- anyone is allowed in any public bomb shelter
- the train stations are bomb shelters
- lots of white jewish israelis were sleeping there too
it’s part of a concerted effort to paint israeli civilians as the equivalent of american billionaires in the mind of americans
so when they encounter people they really cannot fit into that framework, they have to shift it, to keep israeli civilians as villains
and similarly, i think a lot of people look at october 7th as basically fyre festival (a group of wealthy privileged people getting their just desserts)
Can we talk about the lack of critical thought in these claims?
You have 15-90 seconds to make it to a bomb shelter once you receive an alert. Some people run there in nothing but a towel because they were in the middle of a shower.
What are the logistics of banning certain people? Is there an Israeli bouncer?
Are they at the door like
Bitch please.
What about the vast majority of Jews being Mizrahi (as in, their families have never set foot outside the Middle East?) Do they check IDs on people who are too brown for their liking?
What an amazing feat to filter out hundreds of people in 15-90 seconds!
And they complain about 50K+ Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes, yet never point out that Hamas won’t let civilians into shelters? They’d rather complain that *checks notes* Israel does?
It reminds me also of the claims that Israel has a space laser that vaporizes entire human bodies, but that Israel also harvests human organs from killed Palestinians.
So the magical space laser vaporizes everything, but leaves the organs intact?
Antisemites are so fucking stupid I stg.
Beyond the Golem & the Dybbuk lies a forgotten world of Jewish magic and folklore myths!
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On July 9th, after a rocky relationship with Jewish writing since 10/7 (to put it mildly), PEN America actually decided to interview Jewish and Israeli writers and put together a relatively thoughtful piece about it. It included Jewish and Israeli writers noting that publishers have told them it is not the right time to publish Jewish stories, insisting a name be changed from Yael to Sue, and other pretty damning evidence that the industry has become openly hostile to all Jewishness.
If you read the Instagram comments, it's a hellscape. Poet Mohammad el-Kurd, who in January 2024 said "we must normalize massacres as the status quo" wrote "boo hoo." More upsetting to me was Molly Crabapple (writer of a recent bestseller glorifying the Labor Bund as a reasonable path forward for contemporary Jews) who basically commented that her success as a Jew in the writing world proves the discrimination is bogus. But of course what she fails to note is that you can only succeed in the Jewish writing world right now if your writing is *explicitly anti Zionist.* and I don't mean just an antizionist writer, but a book that forwards antizionism as an argument. Several of the interviewed Jewish and Israeli writers weren't writing about Zionism at all. They simply weren't writing about *antizionism specifically* which is the only way to publish Jewish writing right now.
To make matters worse, the article, for the crime or suggesting that cultural boycotts that treat Israelis as inhuman are bad actually, was so heinous apparently, that Pen America's President, Dinaw Mengestu, immediately resigned, outraged that it was published at all.
Writer Elissa Wald, who is quoted in the PEN article even notes that they didn't publish much of her actual criticism that would surely have further angered readers:
"They left out the part where I said I thought PEN America's capitulation to antizionists -- by which I mean, among other things, their surrender to cultural boycotts, their amplication of the genocide libel, their shift in focus to issues like "free speech on campus" which are outside the scope of their (literary- based) mission, and the intense internal pressure on Suzanne Nossel to step down as leader of their organization was contemptible and pathetic, especially since their primary purpose is to defend freedom of expression." She wrote on Facebook.
The fact that a relatively sanitized "refusing to publish Israelis and Jews based on their nationality and ethnicity is bad actually" has caused this kind of uproar is unsurprising but another reminder that the writing world is rapidly closing itself off to Jews. Who knows, maybe we'll invent a new art form again like we did with comic books last time.
from here
Interviews with Israeli and Jewish writers who report facing rising isolation and exclusion.
Jerusalem-based literary agent Deborah Harris represents dozens of leading voices of Israeli literature, from established titans to debut authors of “literary gems.” Her agency typically sells five to 10 literary novels a year into the United States. Since Oct. 7, 2023, they have not sold a single one.
Harris told PEN America that editors with whom she has worked for years simply don’t respond to her submissions, or reject them outright. She has been asked by some editors not to submit Israeli authors in the future.
“The standard line is, ‘I wouldn’t know how to publish this author right now,’” she said in an interview with PEN America. “Right now, we’re completely in this place where no one will even look. No one believes they can get a book that they love through an editorial meeting.”
In interviews with PEN America, more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals described a widening cultural isolation since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza. Many spoke of rising hostility and exclusion both domestically and internationally that has taken a heavy and worsening toll.
The horrors of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks and the devastation of Israel’s war and what human rights organizations and experts have determined to be genocide in Gaza, have had catastrophic human costs. The political and cultural debates around the war have fractured communities and families and spurred conflict in institutions worldwide, from corporations and cultural organizations to campuses.
The war has also had serious repercussions for free expression globally, including in the United States, as PEN America has documented and spoken about extensively. Palestinian and pro-Palestinian writers, artists, and activists have faced dire consequences for their expression including arrests, harassment and threats, deportation attempts, and detention, in addition to cancellations and exclusion in the literary and cultural spheres; Israeli and Jewish writers and artists on all sides of the conflict have been silenced and faced a range of threats and repercussions.
In this piece, we share the stories of Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views. They describe an environment that has impacted their reputations and livelihoods, led people to self-censor, and created an overall chilling of their ability to write and create freely. This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all.
Rising Isolation and Exclusion
Writers and others in the Israeli and Jewish literary community, in interviews with PEN America, reported event disinvitations and cancellations, and new and growing barriers to publication. They also recounted being harassed on social media, review-bombed on Goodreads, and subjected to online calls not to be read, platformed, or engaged with if they had ever shown support for Israel or Zionism. Some writers described being ignored by agents, publishers, literary journals, and magazines. Many requested anonymity to protect their safety and careers.
It is difficult to assess how much of what the writers PEN America spoke to are experiencing stems from cultural boycotts and broader efforts to protest the war; how much from anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, or antisemitic sentiment; and how much reflects matters of business or taste, which are also shaped by geopolitics.
But the writers’ accounts revealed the blatant hostility, discrimination, and hate that some Jewish and Israeli authors are facing, and the impact on their freedom of expression. Writers PEN America interviewed shared that they have been told by their agents to remove Jewish characters and references to Israel from their novels, or downplay Jewish identity because it won’t sell. They related stories of publicists having to be replaced because they refused to work with Israeli writers. “I do think that we have essentially been hounded out of literary life,” one author said.
One example writers cited of this hostility is a spreadsheet that circulated online in May 2024, titled “Is your fav author a zionist???” which included authors to be boycotted, based on whether they had expressed “Zionist” views and whether they had sufficiently criticized Israel. The list included a wide range of Israeli, Jewish, and non-Jewish writers. Authors were included on the list for a host of reasons, for example, based on a single Instagram post, attendance at literary events, posting “both sides” statements, objecting to boycotts, visiting Israel, or writing about an Israeli fictional character.
Two years ago, the Jewish Book Council opened a hotline for reporting “antisemitic literary-related incidents.” They define antisemitism as “prejudice against or hatred of Jewish people,” which “can take many forms, such as verbal or written language, in-person or online harassment, vandalism, and violence directed at a person or institution because they are Jewish.” The Council told PEN America they received about 350 self-reports by July 2026, including incidents related to boycotts, literary events, submission guidelines, cancellations, and social media. “I can tell you unequivocally, I am surrounded by writers who are telling me that (they are being fired by) their editor, their publisher, their agent, their publicist,” said the writer Elissa Wald, who created a book club called Never Alone and two other substack magazines for the Jewish community. “Often they’re being dropped not because of any Israel stands or any Zionism. They’re being told it’s not the right time for a Jewish book.”
For agent Deborah Harris, the hardest part is having remarkable Israeli writers denied a chance to make a mark in world literature, and having readers denied books that reflect important perspectives.
“Literature is what breaks down the walls,” Harris said. “Only literature can do that.”
A Chilling Effect on Israeli Writers
For many Israeli writers and translators, the loss of opportunities has been devastating. One translator who has been involved with trying to bring 20 to 30 Hebrew-language projects to international markets said he did not know of a single project that sold.
“It was the international market that gave them some hope for some recognition beyond the borders of a very small state,” he said. Harris, who has sold foreign rights for her Israeli clients for four decades, explained that books that can’t find a U.S. publisher are unlikely to sell in other countries.
U.S. publishers have, unquestionably, released some books by Israelis, including prominent post-Oct. 7 memoirs Hostage, by Eli Sharabi and When We See You Again, by Rachel Goldberg-Polin, the mother of murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin. But the agents and writers PEN America interviewed said fiction is another story. The chilling effect on the market for fiction titles might not be immediately obvious because only a handful of Israeli authors are published in the U.S. each year, and contracts are typically signed years in advance and confidential.
William Kolbrener, an English professor at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, said his creative writing students feel hopeless. “All of our students feel right now, what am I going to do with my manuscript? It’s not even that our students are getting rejected. There’s just nobody out there” who is interested in reading their submissions, he said.
A creative writing PhD student at Bar-Ilan, Ronit Eitan, said she finished a novel two years ago, but has not tried to submit it. “I held it back for the past year and a half because nobody wants to hear my voice,” she said. Eitan has attended protests and demonstrations against the government and fits what she has long considered the markers of a liberal worldview. “But what I found out is it doesn’t matter how I define myself. It’s not up to me. I’m a Jew first for everyone else,” she said.
In March 2024, the literary quarterly Guernica retracted an essay by Israeli writer Joanna Chen after several staffers resigned in protest of its publication, with one editor saying the piece – about Chen’s experience driving Palestinian children for medical care – made the magazine “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”
In an interview with PEN America, Chen said although the criticism felt personal, she quickly realized it wasn’t about her. According to her, the bigger issue is the extreme polarization of public opinion. “You can be pro-Palestinian, or pro-Israel, or whatever, you can’t be somewhere in the middle, and I am somebody who tries very hard as a human being to at least acknowledge the narrative of people who are not exactly like me,” she said.
The award-winning Israeli writer Etgar Keret describes himself as having “this unique status of being boycotted both in Israel and overseas.” After he signed a petition urging Israel not to starve civilians in Gaza and calling on soldiers to refuse immoral orders, a right-wing TV channel called for a boycott of the petition’s signatories. Municipal leaders in Beersheba, where he has taught at Ben Gurion University and volunteered for years, barred all signatories from speaking in municipal venues. He said both he and his wife have faced death threats and found an X marked on their door.
Outside of Israel, Keret had planned a live interview in Australia with Ira Glass about Keret’s mother, a Holocaust survivor. Amid warnings of protests and threats, Keret and Glass, in agreement with their hosts, decided to decline. And Keret recounts festivals where organizers told him that other writers would resign or refuse to share a stage if he appeared. Some of the writers, he said, insisted that they had no issue with him or his positions but feared that “outside the hall, everyone will know that we sat with the Israeli writer.”
The very phrase “cultural boycott,” Keret insists, is an oxymoron—“two words that shouldn’t be together,” like “military intelligence”—and argues that when artists and institutions police which texts can be read or which writers can be heard, they echo the very traditions of censorship they claim to oppose.
Keret warned of a world in which every writer is sorted as “your artist or my artist,” and where cultural boycotts become a way to avoid the risk of being changed by what one reads. “Literature is not there to fortify your ideas,” he said. “Literature is there to confuse you. And if you don’t have the courage to be confused, then don’t talk to me about culture or cultural boycotts.”
Several writers interviewed by PEN America said they’d been discouraged from writing about Israel by agents or editors. They noticed other writers de-Israelified their books by not mentioning their country of origin on the book jacket, for example. They said there seemed to be an appetite for only a certain kind of Israeli story.
“There’s basically a silent moratorium, or at least it seems like that, about Jewish material that’s not explicitly anti-Israel,” one author said. Harris said because she has been unable to sell literary fiction, she has focused on nonfiction for now. She has big books coming out about bats and the brain and the alphabet – all of which have nothing to do with Israel, though they are written by Israeli authors. But she says even nonfiction books aren’t immune from pushback. “I have had nonfiction books where the team of publicists and marketing had to keep being replaced because people would not work on those books, because they were written by an Israeli writer,” she said.
Two Israeli writers for U.S. general interest magazines said articles they submit are put through a series of ideological checks, such as whether they use the word genocide. One said he gave up journalism as a result. “It’s not worth being punched in the face for that. I left the conversation.”
Yossi Klein Halevi, a U.S.-born Israeli author and journalist, is among those who signed a letterorganized by the Creative Committee for Peace opposing the boycott of literary and cultural institutions. Halevi, who has written for years for leading U.S.-based opinion outlets, said he now prefers to write for Jewish publications.
“I’ve always written for mostly liberal left-of-center publications. And I no longer felt that I could trust the readership. …I didn’t want to write for people who thought that Israel had become Nazi Germany. ”
In interviews with PEN America, Israeli and Jewish writers described a climate where Zionism is treated as a slur. While there remains no popular agreement on what it means to be a Zionist, recent survey data suggests that one-third of American Jews self-identify as Zionist and nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state. Calls to exclude Zionists from publishing could therefore mean excluding people with a wide range of voices and views. “There’s a lot of lack of clarity of what Zionism even means,” one author said.
Some voices within Israel have expressed dismay that the boycotts in literature, film, and other arts will hamper the ability to tell stories critical of the current Israeli government, at a time when the Israeli government is also restricting the space for dissent. In early 2026, the culture ministry under Miki Zohar canceled dozens of annual arts prizes and grants that support independent writers and artists. Zohar at first cited budget cuts, but later said that the awards were biased toward the left “while clearly ignoring artists whose views represent the majority of the public.”
Many of the writers interviewed by PEN America who spoke about feeling blacklisted by the industry have publicly criticized Israel, signed petitions, and protested against the Israeli government. Several writers expressed frustration that those who are being silenced are people like Chen who have worked towards coexistence and peace.
Broader Impact on Jewish Writers Outside Israel
No organized boycott has called for targeting writers solely because they are Jewish. But in writers’ groups and online forums, Jewish authors outside of Israel have described losing agents, publishers, and book events since Oct. 7, because they are Jewish, they identify as Zionist, or they are sympathetic to Israel.
The spreadsheet of authors who were labeled as Zionist that circulated online in 2024 shook the Jewish community. It went viral on X and listed authors who had been published in Israel, posted pro-Israel content on social media, or had any connection to Israel, however indirect. One novelist was listed for creating a social media post expressing concern for Jewish friends after Oct. 7 and failing to mention Palestine. Another was listed for giving a talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s group, and including a character in her novel who the spreadsheet describes as “also zionist lowkey.”
Kathleen Schmidt, a publishing veteran who blogs at Publishing Confidential, criticized the list and those who would punish authors over the actions of the Israeli government. “Singling out Jewish authors and telling others to boycott them is antisemitic. If you don’t believe in book bans, you shouldn’t be okay with boycotting authors for being Jewish,” she wrote.
Some Jewish writers we interviewed said that what they felt were worthy books that cater to Jewish readership have failed to find publishers since Oct. 7, for reasons they can’t explain. Even established authors are hard pressed to prove the reason their book was not picked up or did not get reviews or sufficient marketing attention, as some say has happened to recent Israeli and Jewish-interest novels.
“No one is getting a rejection that’s delivered like, ‘We’re not going to publish this because you’re a filthy Zionist,’” one writer said. And yet, “even from a purely mercenary sales perspective, these things should have found homes.”
Zibby Owens, founder and CEO of Zibby Media, has stated publicly that she has “been told directly that select authors wouldn’t come on my podcast and certain bookstores wouldn’t stock the books I publish due to my public support of Israel and the Jewish people.”
Many Jewish authors who do not consider themselves Zionist or support Israel have been affected, according to PEN America’s interviews. But the chill is especially profound for Jewish authors who write about their identity or about Israel.
There’s a feeling that is very hard to pin down, that the cultural and publishing world, and to some extent the art world and the academic world, divide Jews into what in effect are ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews.’ The good Jews are anti-Zionist, and the bad Jews are Zionist,” said a prominent Jewish author who has written on a broad range of topics including antisemitism. “If your work puts you in the category of Zionist, you feel a chill in the air in your dealings with publishers.”
At the same time, some Jewish writers have expressed concern about their exclusion from Jewish literary spaces for their pro-Palestine advocacy or criticism of Israel. Other Jewish publishing professionals and Israeli writers and artists have joined in endorsing a cultural boycott as a tool to force the Israeli government to end the war and change its policies. Judith Gurewich, publisher of Other Press, believes it’s appropriate for publishers to be responsible for the ideas they publish. She said opposition in publishing is not about identity, it’s about the message. “If you have an Israeli that takes an anti-Zionist stand, they’ll be picked up immediately. You can send them to me,” she said. Yehudit Singer-Freud, who specializes in book publicity for Jewish-interest authors, said clients have had trouble getting their work reviewed and planning events for their books. It is hard to know whether the lack of promotion is targeted. At the same time, she said, “There have been people in these writing groups who have said that their editors have told them to remove certain characters or to not mention the Jewish identity or to play that down because it won’t sell.”
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.
Another writer told PEN America that their agent advised them not to write about antisemitism, explaining that no one wants to acquire a book about Jewish victimhood. “He wasn’t endorsing the situation. He wants me to get a good deal,” the writer said.
Several Jewish writers have reported being dropped by their agents. Lee Kofman, author of an upcoming biography of Golda Meir, said she and other writers have heard the same phrase: that the agent “cannot champion your career.” Harris, the literary agent in Jerusalem, said she gets requests every week from Jewish writers in the United States who are seeking new representation because of perceived bias from their U.S. agents.
Hate and Harassment Online
A number of writers described facing intimidation and harassment on social media platforms. Zibby Owens and other Jewish writers have reported being “review bombed” on Goodreads. Once More with Chutzpah, a young adult novel about a high school senior’s trip to Israel, was inundated with dozens of one-star ratings a year before it came out.
“I saw members of the book community act like my debut getting attacked online was something I deserved because I was said to have done things or shared sentiments that are, in reality, directly opposed to how I feel — comments like, ‘This book supports genocide,’ assumptions about the context and content of my story,” the book’s author, Haley Neil, told Kveller.
Jewish-American author Lisa Barr said her novel Woman on Fire received 450 one-star reviews as a result of an organized review bombing. At its peak, she received up to 50 hostile messages a day, including “Die Jew” and threats that her daughter should be raped.
Jewish authors we spoke to said part of the problem is the silence of allies who may be afraid of being targeted themselves on social media. The result is that many Jewish authors feel excluded from conversations in the literary community.
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. “I’m pro Jewish joy. You know, I’m a children’s book writer,” she said.
Some Jewish writers told us the intensity of online discourse had led them to stop posting, or to delete their social media accounts altogether. Author Susan Shapiro said she stopped posting political statements that might be considered polarizing on social media. “Some of my agents, editors, and bosses basically begged me to not post the kinds of things that I used to write,” she said.
Others said they’d self-censored in deciding what to write about, or what outlets to pitch.
“I know that I and other people have tried to figure out, what does it mean to continue to participate in the literary public sphere with integrity?” one author said. “For those who haven’t been frozen out, the cost of staying in is one of giving in to censorship as the price of inclusion.”
To counter these headwinds, there has been a concerted effort to create spaces for Jewish writing. Author Alison Hammer gathered writers into a group chat that eventually expanded into The Artists Against Antisemitism. New outlets for Jewish writers include Owens’ On Being Jewish Now, Wald’s Never Alone Book Club community and substacks, and Kolbrener and Eitan’s Writing on the Wall. The Jewish Book Council established marketing grants that Jewish authors can bring to publishers to help get books acquired. Singer-Freud created a digital platform, Jewishbookvillage.com, to help Jewish authors promote their books.
Celina Spiegel, publisher of Spiegel & Grau, said it’s especially important to stand up for a diversity of stories as books are being banned in the U.S. at rates not seen in our lifetimes. “It is painful sometimes to allow opinions that you don’t like hearing to get airtime. But I think that encouraging debate and conversation is the only way to move forward,” she said. “You can’t be selective in which books are okay to have available or not. And it’s a very dangerous line if you’re going to draw one.”
Chen, the writer whose Guernica piece was taken down, still sees herself, and all of literature, as a bridge. She wants to understand great authors, including those who signed on to the boycott. “I don’t have to agree with it. I think people today have these ever-widening blind spots,” she said. “I think literature requires us to stay in the room, all of us. To stay in the room and continue the discourse.”
* * *
PEN America’s president resigned over an article detailing the isolation and exclusion that many Israeli and Jewish writers feel after Octob
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[…] From their perspective, the leader of their organization was arguing that merely reporting on the stifling of one group’s free expression amounted to suppressing the rights of another.
Some PEN staffers came away feeling that his worry about the free speech of pro-Palestinian protestors and student activists foreclosed any defense of Israeli and Jewish writers—even writers, such as the Israeli novelist Etgar Keret, who have condemned the war in Gaza and have suffered consequences both outside and inside Israel. (It should go without saying, though maybe it needs to be said, that it would be meaningless to have free-speech organizations if they defended only speech they agreed with.) These staffers also expressed sadness that even a small effort to fulfill PEN’s mission by describing the experiences of writers under political stress was met with such a dramatic gesture of rejection, seemingly because of those authors’ identity.
[…] PEN does not muse that the removal of a Toni Morrison novel might be a matter of taste,” Allison Lee, the former head of PEN America’s Los Angeles office, told me, referencing the group’s many reports that have condemned book bans over the years. “Only one group of writers, it seems, must have the case for their suppression respectfully contextualized before the harm done to them can be acknowledged—and even then, only provisionally.”
Most discussion of Israel and Palestine has devolved into a zero-sum game. The simple act of drawing attention to what Israelis and Jews might be experiencing was always going to be read as a position statement for the organization. “The blog post was brave and right,” Andrew Solomon, a former PEN America president and current honorary board member, told me. He opposes the current Israeli government, but he does not see why that should preclude him from defending Israeli writers. He has also done work in Ukraine—he risked his life to deliver vehicles to Kharkiv earlier this month—and said he would still speak up against the mistreatment of Russian writers, regardless of what Vladimir Putin does.
“Why would anyone complain of acknowledging the suffering of anyone else?” he asked. “Is the lie that some people’s suffering matters more than that of others the role of an organization dedicated to free speech and truth? I don’t deny Palestinian suffering and don’t see that acknowledging and representing it means I cannot acknowledge suffering in Israel too.”
Solomon’s position is shared by others on the board, a fact reflected in the decision of the organization’s leadership to stand by the article. But Mengestu was named president in order to solve a serious problem at PEN America, one that this new crisis threatens to expose again.
In 2024, PEN America went through something like an internal revolt after a large number of prominent writers, including Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, and Lorrie Moore, issued a series of letters making escalating demands that the group take a harder line on Israel, and specifically that it characterize the war in Gaza as a genocide. (The new article uses the word—but among Mengestu’s objections is that the designation was attributed to “experts” and other organizations.) A group of writers attacked the then-CEO, Suzanne Nossel, calling for her resignation. In one of their letters, they describe Nossel as having “longstanding commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and imperial wars in the Middle East.” So many writers pulled out of the 2024 World Voices Festival and that year’s literary awards that both events were canceled, and the annual gala was nearly called off too. (Nossel, who ran the organization for more than a decade and left in October 2024 partly in response to the protests, had grown PEN America’s membership and influence as well its revenue, which increased fivefold.)
An organization that had prided itself since its creation in 1922 on protecting free speech and the defense of writers—no matter who they were—was thus overtaken by a passionate and sizable contingent that demanded the group become vocal advocates on behalf of Palestinians and in opposition to Israel. One of this constituency’s central demands (they called themselves Writers Against War on Gaza, or WAWOG) was that PEN America be more accepting of BDS and not condemn writers who joined calls for a blanket cultural boycott.
When Mengestu assumed office, WAWOG announced in an Instagram postthat it had achieved “VICTORY AGAINST PEN AMERICA” (the same group today offered a “salute” to Mengestu’s “principled decision” to resign). But in one early interview, the new president promised to “mend and rebuild.” Since then, PEN America has focused considerable attention and resources on Gaza. In addition to its extensive Gaza report last fall, the organization has spent as much as $500,000 dollars, according to several insiders, on helping Palestinian writers and artists.
Besides helping Palestinians artists, PEN America has made other efforts to keep the protesters inside the tent. In January, the group released a statement condemning the cancellation of performances by the incendiary Israeli comedian Guy Hochman—in keeping with its general stance against “ideological litmus tests”—but later withdrew it in response to backlash. At this year’s World Voices Festival, which included more than 140 writers from more than 40 countries, not a single Israeli was part of the program.
In light of these shifts, last week’s article came as a genuine surprise, including perhaps to Mengestu. The PEN America board does not have any editorial control over the work of the staff. But after the release of the report on the cultural destruction of Gaza, the organization decided to share potentially controversial publications in advance with board members. They saw the article two days before it was published, and a number of them decided to meet to discuss it. I could not confirm whether Mengestu was part of these conversations. When I asked him about it, he didn’t respond to the question. Board members are held to confidentiality about their internal discussions. (Among these members is the Atlantic staff writer George Packer.) Mengestu delivered his judgement on the article and decision to resign in emails to the board.
The next president of PEN America will decide the group's course—and that course is hard for anyone to predict. The decision by Lopez and Shariyf to publish the article was described to me by many people I spoke with as an act of “courage.” (I should acknowledge that others, who declined to speak with me, might feel very differently.) And yet they expressed no desire to return to the tumult that the organization experienced in 2024. The younger members of the staff who, according to Mengestu, were upset by the article’s appearance, and the hundreds of writers who have signed petitions opposing PEN America in the past, cannot be ignored without imperiling the organization’s future.
Maybe the most revealing aspect of this eruption, though, is just how little it took to set it off. Thursday’s article nodded to the curtailed freedoms of Israeli and Jewish writers without taking any ideological side. It was far from a battle cry or a shift in priorities. It was just a way of acknowledging, in the measured but principled language common to PEN America, that the past three years of discourse have had an effect on a large group of writers. For anyone who has spoken to Israeli or Jewish artists—as I have—this is undeniable; you hear it everywhere. This reality does not neutralize the cause of pro-Palestinian writers or the suffering in Gaza and elsewhere. The fact that the article was perceived that way, and that it led to the resignation of a president, tells us all a great deal about the hair-trigger moment we live in, and about the precarity of the liberal principles on which PEN America was founded.
Wife just got called a "zio" at the grocery store by some pink-haired little shitass while wearing a magen necklace and earrings.
Leftism, clean up your fucking house.
No it's okaaaaaay, the shitass just hated her on sight and called her a slur popularized by the KKK because they assumed she was a Zionist!
It's Legitimate Criticism of Israel, not an obvious bias against Jews! Don't worrrrry about it! 🤗
The pro pallie party line is "once US aid to Israel is cut off it'll disintegrate in weeks! Months tops!"
It's stupid conceptually, but do you know who proves it wrong?
Ukraine 🇺🇦
Since the turd got back in office aid to Ukraine has been slashed
And in the last few months Ukraine has made russia its bitch
Ukraine did not collapse as trump his cronies and putin bet it would, they adapted, they found new partners, relied on their own know how, embraced the fact that no US aid means less leverage and more freedom to strike russia as they please
This is exactly what would happen with Israel if aid were cut off, except Israel is starting out wealthier, better equipped, and with weaker enemies
The most likely scenario is that without iron dome help or American easily targeted smartbombs for cheap, Israel starts attacking threats even more proactively with even less care for civilian casualties on the other side, and such becomes the new status quo for decades. Far more innocent Palestinians and Lebanese who committed no crime or violence and heck probably other neighbors too once they get the war bug again die and Israel stays exactly where it is.
But human lives never entered into the equation, only Keeping Our Souls Pure, so the ones advocating for more Palestinians being killed "in the name of Palestine" don't care.
Prev got it exactly. Israel is so small geographically that they have no choice but to be proactive, and the iron dome allows them to be more measured in their strikes. Get rid of the iron dome, and suddenly Israel can’t afford to be as careful.
Thinking about the kid I was in upper primary school with (so a 12 year old), who truly believed that Jews came from Mars and had a war with Atlantis. Not a cool sci-fi/fantasy story he was writing, he believed it was world history.
Also that there is a spaceship buried beneath the Great Sphynx in Egypt.
He also had shuriken in his pencil case.
CW: femicide, murder, drug use/abuse, murder with a bladed weapon
Hey, so... That conspiracy theory obsessed kid from my childhood ended up being a Conspiracy Theorist Podcaster and was just convicted of murdering his girlfriend. The podcast is still running just without him. This is all horrific and I honestly don't know how to feel right now.
IMO the deciding factor is that she was leaving him.
There are a lot of people out there abusing methyl amphetamines, and they don't murder anyone. He created a scenario for himself in his mind where murder was a justifiable response to his Fiancée breaking off the engagement. This is femicide, with notes of conspiracy theory justification, where the murderer was high.
There's a lot of focus on how this murder was "meth fuelled", but I really think there should be more focus on how conspiratorial thinking warps the mind.
I want to write my condolences to the family but I don't know how to contact them.
Tobias Nuttall is sentenced to at least 18 years behind bars for murdering his girlfriend with a 25-centimetre dagger in a "vicious" attack
i have started just treating all anti zionists as conspiracy theorists and its made it significantly easier to deal with them. them saying "zios" are running the country, controlling everything, pedophiles, monsters etc becomes a lot less headache inducing when you realize these people are on the same level (if not worse than) flat earthers or antivaxxers...
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flat earthers and antivaxxers tend to also be fervently antisemitic, so that’s appropriate.
Vetting: he has a nazi tattoo
Appropriate Outcome: disqualified
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Women shouldn't have had to have their personal unpleasant and traumatic experiences with him paraded and judged publicly for him to be considered an inappropriate candidate. Because, HE HAD A NAZI TATTOO! and that should have been enough.
Where's the "holocaust was about gay people first" when it comes to nazi tattoos? Fucking nowhere, because it was never about defending gays, it was about dehumanizing jews.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/magazine/goy-antisemitic-youth-slang.html
Last week I interviewed a teenager about his use of the word “goyslop.” That’s a term for cruddy, low-quality food — as coined, or at least popularized, by far-right antisemites. This teenager was absolutely not a far-right antisemite; he just happened to attend a New Jersey high school where students, Jewish and Christian and otherwise, said “goyslop” all the time. “If your friend goes and gets McDonald’s, and gets two burgers and a shake,” he explained, “like, ‘Oh, my god, that’s so goyslop, that’s goy.’”
If you enjoy Philip Roth, you might be interested to hear that this school sits not far from where Alexander Portnoy, of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” was chastised by his mother for eating hamburgers and other chazerai — junk — while his constipated father drank “not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of magnesia.” That’s one typical use of “goy,” or the plural “goyim”: to refer to those who aren’t Jewish. The Hebrew “goy” just means a people; Bibles routinely translate it as “nation.” But it also came, in Hebrew and Yiddish, to describe the peoples that Jews lived among — say, the ones Portnoy calls “goyim with golden hair and silver tongues,” the ones whose company will never actually promote his father, only treat him to the occasional weekend away in a “fancy goyischehotel.”
All of this is really normal. The world is full of names for “not us”: haole, gaijin, Englischer, allochtoon. They can be totally neutral, or deeply unkind, or just about anywhere in between. Many Jews would tell you “goy” is like, say, “foreigner” — neutral, but certainly capable of becoming an insult if the speaker wants it to.
The abnormal part, in this case, begins with the distressing number of people who imagine that the world is controlled by secretive Jewish cabals, and that the very existence of “goy” is airtight proof of their supremacist plot. For years now, antisemitic extremists have engaged in a trollish embrace of the word — creating, among other things, a neo-Nazi group called the Goyim Defense League and a fringe crowdfunding platform called GoyFundMe.
Some of these people felt vindicated by the release of documents concerning Jeffrey Epstein. Never mind the exploitation of children: Here in his inbox were wealthy Jewish men, writing one another sardonic emails about the goyim! The way Epstein used “goy” was often pretty similar to how gentiles might joke about WASPs, and his sourer uses just feel like a famously loathsome guy being loathsome, but still: Soon we had the far-right pundit Candace Owens treating this as proof of a bigotry fundamental to the faith. “This is, for them, a religious philosophy, a racist perspective that we are goyim, meaning cattle, that are meant to be herded and ruled over,” she told podcast listeners. That “cattle” idea traces back through literal Nazi propaganda to antisemitic sources like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; if Owens really believes it to be true, she differs from other Catholics in her understanding of Scripture, which would have God promising Abraham that “I will make of you a great cow.”
“Goyslop” has its roots in people who think this way starting to agree with Portnoy’s mother about the chazerai. But they imagine sinister Jewish elites purposefully feeding the masses cheap, enfeebling swill — a notion they express, for the most part, not on podcasts but in flippant internet postings about the pliant “goycattle” being herded to their troughs. And it’s that version of “goy” that ended up leaching into high school.
My source — 15, Jewish, a colleague’s son, resident of a racially and religiously diverse suburb — estimates that at least 70 percent of the students in his school would be familiar with “goyslop.” (Another student, who feels less firm on the exact meaning, puts the number at just under half.) He is fully aware that it arose via an “antisemitic thing about Jews trying to kind of poison the minds of the people through food and stuff.” But this is not, in his experience, remotely how it operates among his peers, who see it as criticizing, if anything, corporations. “It’s not really a thing like that anymore,” he says. “Like, everyone says it.”
This may be a wild journey for a word to take, but it’s not an unusual one. The internet is full of fringe jargon that breaks containment and seeps, mostly shorn of its original politics, into the way ordinary young people talk. How? One analogy might be the way that, in conversation, you can use a silly voice to playact as another type of speaker — say, pushing up your glasses and doing a “nerd” voice when correcting somebody. Online, people do this by parodying other posters’ vocabulary or typing habits — including, sometimes, the language the fringes are constantly bombarding everyone else with. It gets toyed with at an amused and dismissive arm’s length, then passes from arm’s length to arm’s length until it is miles from where it began, operating as a kind of 6-7ish in-joke that many young people will tell you is not nearly as deep or serious as whatever alarming origins you’re worried about.
For them, it simply means something else. Does that make “goy” an epic failure for antisemites, who feared the eye-rolling of a few million Jews and now have even gentiles using the word? There are times when a trip through this pipeline does seem to deflate extremist thinking; there are others when it feels as if incredibly unpleasant ideas are worming into the mainstream via glib, uninterrogated jokes. I cannot tell you which cases are which. Most everyone who says “goyslop” is, on some level, kidding. But given the history of the ideas behind it, you might be forgiven for worrying that the joke had spun out of control.
@slyandthefamilybook's tags: #we're so fucked#innocent usage of a dogwhistle is just as bad as malicious usage because it provides cover for bad actors#that's kind of the whole point of a dogwhistle and why it pisses me off when people say “okay but not everyone who says that is a Nazi!”#I know that. that's why it works in the first place#if “SS Officer” became the hit new Halloween costume it would become impossible to tell who was a real Nazi very fast#(and more than a few people who did it “as a joke” would start to fall down the pipeline as a result)#you can't let shit like this propagate. you have to nip it in the bud
^^^
directly related to what was happening here:
'Goyslop' only lasted four days online—but other, equally harmful games remain.
normalizing this unfortunately doesn’t reduce its danger, it just provides it cover.
