Zionists on X. Or: Writing While Jewish. "A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing” | James Kirchick

Isn’t it true that in the 1930s Germany, Jews were boycotted then banned from their workplaces? I don’t recall who was first, perhaps authors, but we do know -- it’s history -- that it spread to professionals, to the doctors and lawyers, then to the university professors and teachers, then to the shopkeepers, systematically denied work then forcibly removed from society. For the sin of being Jewish. 

And now, in America, we have the sin of “Writing While Jewish”. Oh, they may say, these neo-illiberals, these neo-repressers, it’s because they’re “Zionists” and they’re committing “genocide” in Gaza! Which is either ignorance or duplicity. Now, I’m not a Jew, but I’m a Zionist. It’s the right of people to have a state. Which should extend to all people. 

James Kirchick deals with the “Zionism” word and the “Genocide” word in his excellent article. 

Sam Harris also tackled it in “The Myth of Genocide”. 

At the beginning of Kirkcick's article there’s a link to the “Black List” of Zionist authors. That we are supposed to Boycott, Divest and Sanction -- taking the cue from the movement over the last few decades to do exactly that to Israel, a policy clearly anti-semitic, because not another single state, other than Israel, is held to the same standard to require BDS. And now BDS infects the writers’ world.

Of course, we could always read this horrid “Black List” in the the opposite way of what the collator of the spreadsheet intends, and support all those Zionist authors....

Worth noting, by the way, that only around 13% of writers  on the list are classified as “Zionist”, or pro-Israel. Thus, the big majority of writers, from this sample of 200, who also post on X, are pro-Hamas. But I’m pretty sure the majority of Americans are still pro Israel: I believe around 70%, a bi-partisan view. Just that on X it’s the “influencers”, and they’re the ones banging on about Israel being a “colonialist” state, horrid “Zionists” and committing “genocide”. 

Snips from "A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing” by James Kirchick

This month, an account on X with the handle @moyurireads and 360 followers published a link to a color-coded spreadsheetclassifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. Titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?,” it reads like a cross between Tiger Beat and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”...

The spreadsheet is but the crudest example of the virulently anti-Israel — and increasingly antisemitic — sentiment that has been coursing through the literary world since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. Much of it revolves around the charge of genocide and seeks to punish Zionists and anyone else who refuses to explicitly denounce the Jewish state for allegedly committing said crime. Since a large majority of American Jews (80 percent of whom, according to a 2020 poll, said that caring about Israel is an important or essential part of their Judaism) are Zionists, to accuse all Zionists of complicity in genocide is to anathematize a core component of Jewish identity....

Again with the “Genocide” myth: Kirchick calls it a “mass delusion” 

One of the greatest mass delusions of the 21st century is the belief that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. This grotesque moral inversion — in which a genocidal terrorist organization that instigated a war with Israel by committing the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is absolved of responsibility while the victim of Hamas’s attack is charged with perpetrating the worst crime known to man — began taking shapebefore Israel even launched its ground invasion of Gaza....

A charitable description of those imputing genocidal motivations to Israel is that they are ignorant, essentially believing the word to mean “large numbers of civilian casualties.” (Here it’s worth noting that the United Nations, to little notice, has significantly lowered its estimate of the number of women and children killed in Gaza.) For others, accusing Israel of genocide is an emotional outlet for expressing outrage at such a horrific loss of life. A third, more pessimistic, characterization of the ubiquitous genocide canard is that it is only the latest iteration of the ancient antisemitic blood libel, which held that Jews murdered gentile children in order to use their blood for religious rituals....

The corruption of the words “genocide” and “Zionist” lies at the root of the controversy threatening to unravel PEN America, the storied writers’ organization...

PEN’s detractors aren’t helping the Palestinian people with their whitewashing of Hamas. They’re engaged in a hostile takeover of a noble organization committed to the defense of free expression in order to advance a sectarian and bigoted political agenda....

For a growing set of writers, declaring one’s belief that the world’s only Jewish state is a genocidal entity whose dismantlement is necessary for the advancement of humankind is a political fashion statement, a bauble one parades around in order to signify being on the right team. As was Stalinism for an earlier generation of left-wing literary intellectuals, so is antisemitism becoming the avant-garde.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/opinion/publishing-literary-antisemitism.html