Last week the writer Roxanne Gay published a piece in the New York Times (gift link) headlined “The Age of the Open Letter Should End.” The essay, which I urge you to read in its entirety, zeroes in on something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: the way the Left has embraced Separation and Declaration as its default mode of protest.
“Instead of having conversations,” Gay writes, “many people have taken to talking at their intended audiences, composing arguments as unimpeachably as possible and trusting that little more needs to be said. Or, because someone else has done the work of crafting an argument, people co-sign a letter’s sentiments without having to expend unnecessary effort or original thought — all reward, little risk.”
Like Gay, I’ve seen a lot of Open Letters in my time, and am signing fewer and fewer of them. I haven’t been able to name exactly what my discomfort is other than to wonder if Taking A Stand has become conflated with Actually Doing Something. But Gay’s piece helped me zero in on the way that that we on the Left have come to valorize protest as a good in and of itself, rather than as one tool among many in the grand construction project that is social change. Such a formulation, particularly in the social media age, allows for a kind of hollowed-out version of civic engagement, in which the gesture of Taking A Stand matters more than building a sustained movement that has the capacity and the fortitude to hammer out solutions to intractable problems.
If you refuse to engage with the people who disagree with you, who exactly are you talking to?
I’m particularly talking about the category of protest you might call Principled Withdrawal. Over the past few months, there have been a series of high-profile resignations in the world of Arts and Letters, all of them related to the war in Gaza. First came the resignation of Anne Boyer, the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine, who seemed to be mad about the paper’s coverage of the war, although her resignation letter didn’t offer much in the way of specifics other than to say that she “can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering.”
What was interesting about Boyer’s letter, aside from her near total misunderstanding of what a mainstream newspaper actually does (hint: a “reasonable tone” is part of the definition), was her rationale for responding to the perceived failures in the news-gathering arm of the paper by resigning from her position selecting poems to run in the Magazine, which is an almost wholly separate enterprise. (Full disclosure: I freelance for the New York Times Magazine.)
“Because our status quo is self-expression,” she wrote, “sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.”
Is it though? Boyer’s decision to absent herself from the largest-circulation newspaper in the country made a mild splash, as dramatic door-slamming behaviors tend to do, and then was quickly forgotten. One wonders what would have happened if she had stuck around and used her position as poetry editor to publish Palestinian poets or anti-war poems. What would have happened if she had decided to engage rather than depart?
But these days, engagement rarely seems to be the goal. Instead, the atmosphere crackles with declarations and separations. If people aren’t resigning or withdrawing themselves, they’re demanding that someone else does. In March, an Israeli writer and translator named Joanna Chen investigated her own moral and empathetic struggles in the wake of the October 7 massacre in an essay called “From the Edges of a Broken World” that was published in a literary magazine called Guernica. Chen wrote about how she put her volunteer work with Road to Recovery, an organization that drives Palestinian children in the West Bank to medical treatments in Israel, on hold after the massacre.
“My volunteer work with Road to Recovery came to a full stop. How could I continue after Hamas had massacred and kidnapped so many civilians, including Road to Recovery members, such as Vivian Silver, a longtime Canadian peace activist? And I admit, I was afraid for my own life.”
Her struggle to regain her empathy and return to volunteering is beautifully evoked in the essay. It is not the only story, or even the most important story, to come out of this conflict, but it is certainly one worth hearing, particularly if you want to understand the Israeli psyche at this defining moment. Yet many of the editors at Guernica thought otherwise and resigned from the magazine in a storm of recriminations. (The magazine then removed the essay from its website.)
One editor wrote that publishing the essay made Guernica “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness,” which is the kind of self-righteous nonsense that probably felt very satisfying to write in a resignation letter but which indicates that the writer’s capacity for literary appraisal is so poor that their resignation wasn’t much of a loss to the world of letters. (I’ve included a gift link to Phil Klay’s Atlantic essay about the whole kerfuffle here.)
And on it goes. Last week PEN America, the nation’s foremost defender of free expression, canceled its 2024 Book Award Ceremony, after the bulk of the nominated authors withdrew their books from consideration. This week, the organization was forced to cancel its 20th annual World Voices Festival, founded by Salmon Rushdie, after a series of cancelations from participating writers from around the world, among them Naomi Klein, Michelle Alexander, Hisham Matar, Lorrie Moore, and Hari Kunzru. The organization, which has been fundamental in protecting embattled writers and artists around the world, now teeters on the brink of collapse. (Gift link)
Many of the withdrawing writers have signed an aptly-named Letter of Refusal, which includes this remarkable statement: “PEN America states that "the core" of its mission is to ‘support the right to disagree.’ There is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. Israel is leading a genocide of Palestinian people.”
There’s an important difference between believing that someone is wrong and denying that their opinion exists.
The writers condemned PEN’s “platforming of Zionists,” by which they meant the actress Mayim Bialik, an outspoken supporter of Israel who was in conversation with the comedian Moshe Kashar at a PEN event in January that six protesters attempted to disrupt by shouting and playing on a loudspeaker the names of 13 Palestinian writers killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar ended up being removed by security.
“We cannot, in good faith, align with an organization that has shown such blatant disregard of our collective values,” the letter states. “We stand in solidarity with a free Palestine. We refuse to be honored by an organization that acts as a cultural front for American exceptionalism. We refuse to gild the reputation of an organization that runs interference for an administration aiding and abetting genocide with our tax dollars. And we refuse to take part in celebrations that will serve to overshadow PEN’s complicity in normalizing genocide.”
I am convinced that PEN America, an organization with whom I have worked closely on fighting book bans and which has profiled me as a banned artist, has a responsibility to speak out about the hundreds of Palestinian writers, artists, and journalists killed by Israeli forces. And, in fact, it has done so, issuing more than 40 statements since October 7 and creating a fund to aid Palestinian writers impacted by the war.
But I am also convinced that a free speech organization has a responsibility to resist efforts to restrict the conversation to people or points of view deemed acceptable by even its most prominent and powerful supporters. The formulation that “there is no disagreement” is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst, positing a totalitarian worldview in which disagreement is no longer acknowledged and diversity of thought is obliterated. There’s an important difference between believing that someone is wrong and denying that their opinion exists. The fact that some of the preeminent writers of our time would sign a statement obscuring that distinction makes me want to weep.
If there was any doubt that PEN and other free speech organizations are needed in this particular historical moment, we need look no further than the attempts to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests at university campuses, particularly the horrible decision by administrators at the University of Southern California to cancel a graduation speech by this year’s valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, who is Muslim, because of spurious “security concerns” and protests from pro-Israel organizations on campus. And as Michelle Goldberg noted in an excellent column about the farcical and disturbing Republican hearings on campus antisemitism, a far right member of the US Congress somehow got Nemat Shafik, the President of Columbia University, to agree that she didn’t want God to curse her university, as He surely would do if she wasn’t sufficiently pro-Israel:
Rick Allen, a Republican from Georgia, asked Shafik whether she knew Genesis 12:3. She didn’t recall the biblical passage offhand, so he explained it to her. “It was the covenant that God made with Abraham, and that covenant was real clear: ‘If you bless Israel I will bless you, if you curse Israel I will curse you,’” he said, explaining how this compact was confirmed in the New Testament.
“Do you consider that a serious issue?” Allen asked heatedly. “Do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?” Shafik responded, “Definitely not.”
So, to recap:
A bunch of writers and artists have decided that the best way to fight for an end to the unconscionable suffering in Gaza is to take a sledgehammer to a variety of arts and free expression organizations in the U.S. who have allegedly committed the sin of being “pro-Zionist” (that is, in favor of the continued existence of the state of Israel, a position that somewhere between 82 and 91 percent of American Jews hold, including many who oppose the war and are deeply critical of Israel’s government and policies), or are unwilling to use the word “genocide” to describe the criminal brutality of that war.
Dismantling American literary institutions, it should be obvious, will not save the life of a single Palestinian child. Nor will it protect Palestinian writers and artists from persecution and death or sway the opinions of policy makers in the U.S. or in Israel. In fact, the only clear result of all of this outrage is that a variety of important voices have retreated into their respective silos and seem deeply committed to never hearing from anyone who does not agree with them in every particularity.
Which brings me back to Boyer and her statement that the artist’s “status quo is self-expression.” I couldn’t disagree more. Self-expression is what you do when you write in a journal, dance in your underwear, or sing in the shower. It is a lovely, universal, and vital urge. But it isn’t art until it engages with an audience.
The artist’s true status quo is—or should be—communication. We make art in order to start a dialogue, to engage hearts and minds, to pose important questions.
Yet rather than use their voices to join in conversation with other voices, some of which may represent differing points of view, the artists in question have decided to take their marbles and go home. The implication is that if any other subjectivity touches theirs, their own point of view is contaminated and compromised. But if you refuse to engage with the people who disagree with you, who exactly are you talking to?
That’s not to say that resignations are never called for. If you believe that your work for any organization causes material harm, you have a duty to resign. Certainly Google Engineers concerned about aiding the Israeli military could have resigned before they were fired, as should anyone connected with the IDF’s horrifying AI targeting system. But that’s substantially different from resigning because a publication or an organization gives space to perspectives that differ from your own.
In my conversations with thoughtful people about the future of Israel, I have heard many idealists advocate a One State solution, with the state in question envisioned as diverse, multicultural, tolerant, pluralistic, and democratic: Jews and Arabs living side by side in peace and harmony. I love this idea, despite having doubts as to whether it can be achieved in the lifetime of anyone currently on earth. But it seems to me that believing in the possibility of two groups of people who hate and fear each other living peacefully together requires cultivating the ability to do the same. If advocates for a “Free Palestine” cannot tolerate sharing classrooms, festivals, and literary magazines with those who support the continued existence of the State of Israel, then how on earth is a peaceful solution possible in Gaza? If there is an outcome that is neither gladiatorial nor genocidal, shouldn’t artists, whose job it is to imagine, be the ones to show us what it looks like?
In this light, the various displays of “strength,” “principle” and “courage” at American institutions of Arts and Letters look more like weakness, selfishness, and jejune posturing. The real business of waging peace requires working with people who disagree with you and staying engaged in a struggle that will inevitably result in conflicts among allies. Perhaps those who are calling for a #ceasefirenow don’t understand how ceasefires are actually achieved: two parties who hate each other sit down in the same room and hammer out an outcome that neither one likes but that they both can live with.
With a sigh,
Dashka
It's moments like we're in now where I cannot stop thinking about horseshoe theory. Great, nuanced piece–I have found it interesting how many voices taking a stand by silencing themselves have also not spoken up about the unmitigated literary censorship happening across the country.
Great essay. I think you’re a bit too tough on Israel—considering Oct. 7 and Iran’s missile barrage—but overall fair, reasonable and passionate for the good. I’m very concerned about what seem to be totalitarian tendencies on the Left. Isn’t it bad enough that the extreme right is heading in authoritarian directions?