On the exclusion of Jews from cultural spaces
Such a dumb move in so many ways
A migraine kept me away from the screen yesterday, but the barometric pressure and I have recovered.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the increasing exclusion of Jewish people from shared cultural spaces. A society that wants to keep Jews out of its literary life, its arts life, its elite universities, and its social justice movements is cruel and prejudiced, yes, but it is also deeply, deeply stupid. I can’t say it enough: the sheer breadth and quantity and quality of work that Jewish people have devoted to our cultural and other institutions is astonishing, given their small numbers in the general population and the history of their exclusion from those spaces—yes, even in the U.S.
With regard to increasing exclusion from literary spaces, I began to write a post early this week about the backlash Jewish writers are facing since October 7. The most egregious instances are well covered by the author James Kirchick in his NYT opinion piece of May 27, 2024. I’m not sure I have much to add to what he concisely reports. The writer Elissa Wald wrote about the near-collapse of PEN America at her Substack, Never Alone, on April 19, 2024.
There are a couple of things worth noting.
Kirchick says the use of “Zionist” a as a slur emerged from, and until recently has been confined to, Soviet and Arab-imperialist propaganda. It’s important to know who one is sharing a bed with. It’s the Soviets and the Islamists who have worked for years to make “Zionist” equivalent to “Nazi.” Progressives, generally speaking, fail to distinguish between (a) those Zionists who support the state of Israel but support peace and a two-state solution and (b) those Zionists, more politically conservative and much smaller in number, who support a Greater Israel that includes Gaza and the West Bank.
Salman Rushdie—who my husband actually got to chat with on his own for like 10 minutes when he (spouse) was staffing an event and Rushdie arrived earlier than the public for the reception—is a mensch. He is the best of us: generous, cosmopolitan, broad-minded, brave. He knows first-hand the material danger of Islamism. A former president of PEN, who founded PEN’s World Voices Festival in the years after 9/11, Rushdie is devoted to free speech and protecting writers at risk from their governments or larger entities. After many writers withdrew from the World Voices Festival, which was to be held in May, because they wanted PEN to issue a blanket condemnation of Israel, PEN decided to cancel this year’s event. PEN’s current CEO, Suzanne Nossell, who is Jewish, and who is facing calls to step down, issued this statement (emphasis is mine):
PEN America exists to unite writers in defense of free expression. The premise of World Voices is to engage across wide chasms of worldview and belief, including fostering direct conversation between and among those who disagree profoundly. . . . We now face a campaign that casts our struggle to reflect complexity, uphold our identity as a big tent organization, and show fealty to our principles as a moral abdication. The perspective that engaging with those who hold a different point of view constitutes an impermissible act of legitimization negates the very possibility of dialogue. It also betrays the essence of PEN’s charter and mission to dispel hatreds and engage writers and literature as a catalyst for empathy and a bridge toward common ground.
One material consequence of the festival’s cancellation is that the Palestinian writers who were to attend, to read from their work and talk about their experiences, were silenced. Read the whole thing at PEN’s website. See LitHub’s report here.
Rushdie, who has just published Knife, his account of the brutal assassination attempt he suffered at the hands of a radicalized Islamist in sleepy Western New York in 2022, has also had his name placed on a spreadsheet that is making the rounds, “Is Your Fav Author A Zionist?.” Posted on X (formerly Twitter) by a very small account called moyurireads, it garnered over one million views in just a matter of days. Moyurireads wants to warn readers against Zionist authors, ranking writers with a green (anti-Zionist), yellow (unsure), and red (danger! Zionist!) alerts. To be fair (ha!), moyurireads doesn’t target Jewish writers per se. Anyone can be a Zionist! You just have to express an iota of concern for Israelis. A very, very low bar for having your work boycotted.
My whole point is this: if you come for Salman Rushdie, of all people, you might want to reconsider your life choices.
Better news:
I met the photographer and writer Marisa Scheinfeld when I had the honor of doing some editorial work on her first book, The Borscht Belt. Marisa grew up in Sullivan County, in the Catskills, in a family with ties to many of the hotels and colonies in the Borscht Belt. When she was a girl in the 1980s, she would visit the Concord and Kutsher’s Hotel with her family. (The designer who worked on the book, who grew up in the Bronx, visited Kutsher’s with his grandparents in the early 1980s. That history is still very close to us.) As an adult, Marisa has photographed what remains of the abandoned buildings that housed this vibrant part of American history and written an essay about the cultural importance of the Borscht Belt. She is also heading a successful project to have official historical markers placed on the sites of the former Borscht Belt resorts.
If you mention the Borscht Belt to a gentile my age or older, and they don’t know what you’re talking about, just say, “You know in the movie ‘Dirty Dancing’ . . . ?” Instant recognition. I love that movie.
One thing I learned when I worked on The Borscht Belt—which makes so much sense but I hadn’t known it—is that the Borscht Belt arose and flourished (500 resorts, 50,000 bungalows, and 1,000 rooming houses in two counties) because Jewish people were excluded from other resorts and hotels. The 1920s saw a rise in antisemitism, and this is when the Borscht Belt began. Out of racist exclusion and a desire on the part of Jewish Americans, including recent immigrants, to vacation in a comfortable and accepting place with those who shared their culture, there arose these vibrant, supportive social and cultural spaces that have influenced the wider American culture. Do I need to say it? There would be no American comedy—and much diminished American entertainment and music—without the Borscht Belt. Henny Youngman, Mel Brooks, Danny Kaye, Red Buttons, Woody Allen, Milton Berle, Joey Bishop, Jack Benny, Jerry Lewis, Jackie Mason, Lenny Bruce, and Joan Rivers all got their start in these resorts dotting Sullivan and Ulster counties in the twentieth century.
More better news:
In good Jewish writing-and-publishing news, Elissa Wald, Howard Lovy, and Sarah Einstein are starting a publishing house! In Elissa’s words,
We are founding this press as a direct response to what’s happening to Jews in publishing at this time. In a world where lists of Zionist authors to boycott are circulating among millions of readers (and by “Zionist” they literally mean any Jew and even many a non-Jew who has ever visited or mentioned Israel in a non-hateful-way) and a staggering number of lit mags now have submission guidelines that say things like: No racism, homophobia or Zionism, we will be explicitly and unapologetically Zionist-friendly and we will promote our writers to the hilt. We will also do everything in our power to promote as wide a range of Jewish voices as possible.
I’ve no doubt that this talented, formidable, and determined trio will do an amazing job. If the creative ferment that arose from the Borscht Belt—born in part of Jewish exclusion—is any indication, this publishing house will be a force to be reckoned with. I could not be more excited and supportive.
I have a working theory to explain why Jews are now getting shoved out of the literary space. Just a theory, though...
https://outofbabel.substack.com/p/id-prefer-that-you-talk-about-me