Sinwar's Gift

Anti-Zionism is systemic racism. The institutions adopting it are doomed. Someone stands to benefit as Jewish talent flees them.

Something just happened at PEN America that ran so contrary to my moral instincts that I had to read several reports to understand it.¹ Three writers, including Lisa Tolin, Interim Chief Communications Officer at PEN America and author of a recent picture book about Yoko Ono, wrote a report for the organization titled “‘A Silent Moratorium’,” which appeared on the PEN website on July 9. Its title was taken from an unnamed author who told them, regarding the publishing industry, “There’s basically a silent moratorium, or at least it seems like that, about Jewish material that’s not explicitly anti-Israel.” They gather numerous examples of ideological and identitarian litmus tests to which Jewish authors have been subjected, as well as cultural boycotts that would be viewed as troglodytic if they affected another ethnic cohort. “No organized boycott has called for targeting writers solely because they are Jewish,” notes the report. “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 tone of the report is careful. “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.”

The article prompted PEN America president Dinaw Mengestu to resign in protest after only seven months in the role. Gal Beckerman, author of How to Be a Dissident,² reported on the situation for The Atlantic. Mengestu responded in an Instagram post claiming that Beckerman’s reporting “fails to meet even the lowest possible journalistic standards, but then I remembered that the distortions and inaccuracies in the piece were part of the point.” He claimed further that “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech.”³

“‘A Silent Moratorium’” contains a sidebar reiterating PEN’s policy on cultural boycotts: “We believe that such boycotts threaten the free expression rights not only of those associated with the boycotted institutions but also of those in the countries where the boycott is practiced. PEN America also recognizes that participating in or advocating for boycotts is an exercise of free expression, and we defend the rights of writers to do so without facing retaliation.” Pace Mengestu, this sounds eminently fair. Nothing in that article or Beckerman’s suggests an attempt to suppress speech, particularly in defiance of the Constitution. Mengestu’s chief concern regarding free speech in this instance is the continuing legal and moral viability of the BDS movement. “What PEN America fails to understand is that a boycott is a form of dialogue,” said Mengestu in his statement.

Criticisms of Israel, per se, are in no legal danger. But institutions had punished supposedly racist or otherwise indefensible speech in various ways in myriad instances for a decade leading up to 2023.⁴ Condemnations of Israel’s supporters—who in spite of everything include most Jews—and slogans historically associated with a demand for Israel’s annihilation, which were heard all over the arts after 10/7, would seem to be subject to the same punishments if there were any principle at stake. On a related note, three dozen states have passed anti-BDS legislation. It may be the case that such laws are not, at base, constitutional. But they are founded on prior anti-discrimination legislation. It’s not clear how one might argue that the former are unconstitutional but the latter is not. Too, by the standards that Israel is supposedly guilty of genocide, so are many other nations not accused thus. Lawmakers have generally seen through the effort to single out Israel for censure as overtargeted. In 2023, the Supreme Court declined to adjudicate a lower court ruling that such boycotts are not “expressive” in a way that merits First Amendment protection.

Nevertheless, it requires some imagination to connect these concerns to “‘A Silent Moratorium’.” Describing the plight of American Jews affected by express or de facto cultural boycotts lends credence to the idea that such boycotts are entangled with antisemitism. In theory, one could admit the complication and try to rescue the substantive portion of the argument. But remember that a couple of years ago, a display by the Washington State Jewish Historical Society noted that “antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism” and that “pro-Palestinian groups have voiced support for Hamas,” both of which are true statements, and the resulting outrage temporarily shut down the Wing Luke Museum. “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism” has joined the “slogans that can be recited but not questioned,” as Michael Lind put it, among the contemporary left. Such collocations—see also “Black Lives Matter” and “Trans Women Are Women”—are barriers against any genuinely curious or critical analysis of the related issues. So let’s hop the barrier and explore.

Anti-Zionism’s entanglement with antisemitism, hence racism, leaves the possibility that some arguments against Zionism are not racist. But Mengestu seems to have resigned in exasperation at not being able to bend PEN into a position of institutionalized anti-Zionism, through the unconvincing argument that the organization’s dim view of cultural boycotts and its willingness to acknowledge Jewish victims of prejudice are insufficiently defensive of pro-Palestinian speech. That institutionalization of anti-Zionism, at which others at the organization continue to labor, fits the plain definition of systemic racism.

I’m not the first to note this. “Just as structural racism denies marginalized groups equal access to power, safety, and self-definition,” wrote Daniel Friedman last year in The Jerusalem Post, “anti-Zionism denies the Jewish people the mechanisms of collective security and political agency. Whatever its rhetoric, the outcome is exclusion, vulnerability, and continued Jewish precariousness.” This was the natural conclusion of the ideas of Ibram X. Kendi when applied to the Jews. “If racism is the historical condition that marginalizes a group, then antisemitism is one of its oldest and most enduring forms. And if anti-racism requires not only opposition to hatred but active efforts to repair historical harm, then anti-racism with respect to Jews must involve support for the Jewish return to sovereignty, safety, and rootedness in their land. Anything less is complacency in Jewish persecution and, ergo, anti-Jewish racism.”

Kendi, of course, is an intellectual flyweight, and there’s a problem with applying his conception of anti-racism to Jews when it arguably should never have been applied to the American blacks with whom he is primarily concerned. But he provided the paradigm that dominated institutional life from 2020 to 2023 and in many respects continues to do so. In any case, it has been a longstanding tenet of Critical Race Theory that systems that disproportionately immiserate a particular race are racist in character even without racists to perpetrate them. Institutional anti-Zionism disproportionately impacts Jews even without targeting them; ergo, it is systemically racist.

Point in fact, after October 7, progressives accelerated a project to reify Jewish whiteness—a concept that would have baffled both Jews and whites as recently as six decades ago—to avoid this rather self-evident conclusion.⁵

There’s a related CRT argument that the central issue in such discussion is power, and the germane power dynamic in anti-Zionism is between the IDF and the civilian population of Gaza. This too flattens reality to reinforce an oppression narrative. Gaza’s political and military representative, unfortunately, is Hamas, which is a beneficiary of Iranian and Qatari support and harbors a supremacist and genocidal conception of Islam. The progressive will to narrative flatness is such that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an entire book on the plight of the Palestinians that does not once mention Hamas.⁶ No individual American Jew is responsible for the actions of the IDF, and pressure upon them to denounce Israel indicates that we are at the screaming at diners phase of progressive umbrage about the Gaza War.

Anti-Zionism as systemic racism accommodates the involvement of anti-Israel Jews. JTA found one of them opining on Facebook about the PEN report, “Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows.” Again, the legal record contradicts the claim about the First Amendment, and “fake victim propaganda” doesn’t evince the kind of insight I require of an author whose books I will read.⁷ That said, calling her a racist would be ridiculous. Accusing her of complicity in systemic racism is closer to the mark. If it’s plausible that PEN’s statement supports anti-BDS legislation, then it’s plausible that her statements support the politically motivated erasure of Jewish suffering and disdain for considering the circumstances that caused it. Reified whiteness aside, this view and the ability to express it openly are the products of immense privilege.

Despite Mengestu’s departure, no one in the reports on this flap expresses sanguinity about the future of PEN. Its travails have been going on for years. Both the content of “‘A Silent Moratorium’” and the response to it may indicate the state of cultural legitimation more broadly: Artforum’s infamous October 19 letter, the MoMA occupation, ongoing Judenhass at the Venice Biennale, the Film Workers for Palestine pledge, the refusal of the International Documentary Film Festival to accredit Israeli cultural institutions for spuriously claimed complicity in genocide, and so on. Some Jews may renounce Israel for the sake of conscience, however misled, or good standing in the cultural systems. But those inclined to “pushing back against any force that threatens to dehumanize and flatten us,” as per Beckerman’s image of the dissident, will defect as policy or revealed preferences indicate organizational complicity in systemic racism—confessed cynically in 2020, exposed in actuality in 2023 in ways to which they will never admit.

In the short term, this is painfully unjust. But there’s a precedent worth considering: what Jean Medawar and David Pyke called “Hitler’s gift” in a 2000 book of that title. Nazi Germany’s immiseration of the Jews caused some of the most brilliant scientists of the century to leave for more tolerant nations, which halted German scientific advancement and delivered the intellectual power responsible for the atomic bomb to the United States. Consider the possibility that the sympathetic response by Western cultural institutions to Yahya Sinwar’s brainchild, the October 7 attacks, might deliver Jewish talent to more deserving operations. This is, after all, the phenomenon to which we owe Hollywood, as described in Neal Gabler’s 1988 An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Jews may never have instituted modern movie-making if Americans had considered them white.

But it’s too early to celebrate. There will be no upside to the effort to make the institutions Judenrein if the outgoing talent isn’t harnessed. Jewish artists have a lot of thankless work ahead of them to establish viable cultural projects in the current environment. But they’re in a position to create vital art that isn’t possible under conditions of institutional breakdown, of which antisemitism is a symptom. The message from Genesis 1:28 pertains to contemporary Jewish creators: “Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it.”

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1. Malia Mendez, “PEN America’s President Resigns After 7 Months in Role: The novelist Dinaw Mengestu was leading a literary group that has been divided by its response to the war in Gaza,” The New York Times, July 10, 2026; Gal Beckerman, “A Free-Speech Meltdown: PEN America’s president resigned over an article detailing the isolation and exclusion that many Israeli and Jewish writers feel after October 7,” The Atlantic, July 11, 2026; Rebecca Kurson, “PEN President Resigns To Protest the Uncovering of Antisemitism: How did an organization designed to protect writers end up abandoning Jews to persecution?”, Book and Film Globe, July 12, 2026; Andrew Lapin, “PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors: Dinaw Mengestu criticized the literary free-speech group for failing to defend supporters of the boycott targeting Israel,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 13, 2026; Gary Baum, “PEN America’s Report on Jewish Writers Divides Literary World as President Resigns In Protest: The tumult at the non-profit over Israel and Palestine mirrors the debates flaring up across the entertainment industry,” The Hollywood Reporter, July 13, 2026; Sam Spratford, “PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu Resigns,” Publishers Weekly, July 13, 2026; Luke Tress, “PEN America president’s resignation marks latest anti-Zionist uproar in literature: Dinaw Mengestu quits free-expression group over article that highlighted post-October 7 prejudice against Jewish and Israeli writers and expressed opposition to cultural boycotts,” The Times of Israel, July 14, 2026; Michael Schaub, “PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu Resigns,” Kirkus, July 14, 2026.

2. This title would be of keen interest to Dissident Muse Journal for obvious reasons if not for the fact that, according to the author, “This book emerged out of a feeling of shock in the first months of the current Trump administration when one powerful institution after another seemed to fold in the face of unprecedented exercises of executive power. I wondered if Americans had lost a certain kind of moral instinct to say no when they felt some fundamental principle of theirs was being violated.” Welcome to the club, friend! I’ve been wondering that since the Biden administration tried to force-vaccinate all federal employees and contractors in 2021.

3. Here is Mengestu’s statement, scraped out of Instagram for the record:

Response

Last night I spent a considerable amount of time cataloging all the ways in which The Atlantic’s most recent piece defending PEN America fails to meet even the lowest possible journalistic standards, but then I remembered that the distortions and inaccuracies in the piece were part of the point. The staff and board members who spoke to The Atlantic for this article want to reduce this issue into something small and personal; they want to make it about anecdotes and different opinions. It is not about different opinions. It is not about anyone’s experiences. It is about PEN America’s ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably, and about its production of work that supports suppression through bigotry and indifference.

Here are the facts. This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech. That is why PEN America changed its position on boycotts shortly before the piece was published. PEN America wants to try to retroactively justify both this report and its decade-long failure to defend a constitutionally protected right from government censorship. This is not the first time, however, that PEN America has produced this kind of work. It has done so time and again. Let’s start at the beginning, looking just at BDS.

Anti-BDS legislation depends in part on the claim that BDS is discriminatory. Proof of discrimination, particularly when it comes to campus speech, depends on documenting speech that targets identity and that is severe and pervasive. In 2016, as anti-BDS legislation was becoming law, PEN America published a report based in part on interviews with students on opposing sides of the BDS movement at UCLA. The report presents BDS as an assault on the identity of Jewish students—one that is relentless, causing emotional and psychological harm to specific individuals whose identity cannot be separated from their political beliefs. The Palestinian experience, on the other hand, is diminished almost to the point of erasure.

Across the report’s seven pages, terminology related to Jewish and Israeli identity appears more than a hundred times, while the word Palestinian is used six times—three times in reference to an anonymous Palestinian student quoted at the outset, and once in an extended quote from a Jewish student that concludes with, “I would never say Palestinians are terrorists.”

Israel appears in the case study 52 times. Palestine does not appear once outside the context of Students for Justice in Palestine.

That report claims to be neutral and objective. It is not neutral. What PEN America fails to understand is that a boycott is a form of dialogue. The writers who boycotted the organization in 2024 wanted change, and they returned when they believed that such change was possible. I insisted and believed that it was, and I argued that the organization would defend free expression equitably and equally. This report makes clear that will not happen.

I am not boycotting PEN America. Like many other writers who have reached out to me, I am walking away from it permanently, and I will do everything I can now to help make something better.

I have to note: this is terribly written, stylistically clunky, emotionally splenetic, and sourced to a ten-year-old report that does not establish that the alleged wrongdoing has occurred “time and again.” It does not speak well of anyone involved that Mengestu was directing an organization that advocates for authors.

4. The Scholars Under Fire Database has the related citations.

5. Pamela Paresky, “Critical Race Theory and the ‘Hyper-White’ Jew,” May 6, 2021; Linda Maizels, “Antisemitism in the Aftermath of October 7: How did we get here?,” March 4, 2024.

6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Message (2024), all but admits that will to flatness. “This elevation of complexity over justice is part and parcel of the effort to forge a story of Palestine told solely by the colonizer, an effort that extends to the proscribing of boycotts by American states, the revocation of articles by journals, the expulsion of students from universities, the dismissal of news anchors by skittish networks, the shooting of journalists by army snipers, and the car-bombing of novelists by spy agencies. No other story, save one that enables theft, can be tolerated.” And to defeat it, one gathers, no breadth of perspective can be tolerated. Proponents of justice must elide major factors of the regional geopolitics to pursue it, apparently. And indeed they do.

7. The author in question is Sarah Schulman.