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. 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.
Writer Elissa Wald
“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.
I held (my writing) back for the past year and a half because nobody wants to hear my voice.”
Ronit Eitan, creative writing student at Bar-Ilan University
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.”
There’s basically a silent moratorium, or at least it seems like that, about Jewish material that’s not explicitly anti-Israel.
Author interviewed by PEN America
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 letter organized 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.
Author interviewed by PEN America
“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.”
