Nearly a century ago, the Nazis burned the books of Jewish authors. Today, the publishing world is attempting to resurrect the exclusion of writers because of either their faith and nationality or their refusal to conform to a new intellectual diktat.
Books deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis for being “un-German” — especially those written by Jews — were purged from bookstores and libraries for reasons of racial as well as intellectual superiority. This self-righteous effort to purify German thinking targeted such Jewish luminaries as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger and Vicky Baum, whose works were either banned outright or torched by Nazi Stormtroopers.
Nearly a century later, a new effort is afoot to compel Israeli authors into a contemporary variant of ideological submission. Last week, more than 1,000 writers, including acclaimed Irish author Sally Rooney and award-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy, signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli writers, publishers, book festival organizers and literary agents who have yet to publicly denounce the “genocide” in Gaza.
Boycotts like this are self-licking ice-cream cones, enabling the signatories to congratulate themselves for taking a stand on the “right side of history,” as Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last spring fittingly described the protestors in Western countries championing groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. That such literary boycotts are as blatantly antisemitic as they are hypocritical is of course ignored by their exponents.
The statement these writers have endorsed proudly declares that it is the “biggest cultural boycott against Israeli cultural institutions in history,” and encourages Israeli writers and literary institutions to “Denounce and distance themselves from Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime” and “Affirm the full protected rights of the Palestinian people under international law, including the right of return.”
In essence, the statement’s signatories want Israelis to publicly acknowledge that their state has no right to exist, thereby disavowing their religion, whose aspiration has for centuries been the return to Zion.
In the 1930s, German Jewish writers were just banned. Today, their Israeli counterparts are being told to denounce their own religious and national identity and cruelly distance themselves from their homeland or else risk ostracism and opprobrium.
The statement’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. The most notable of these authors have no record of similarly intervening to protest China’s treatment of its Uyghur population, an estimated million of whom are believed to be imprisoned in bona fide — not rhetorical — concentration camps.
They have not boycotted Russian writers for failing to condemn the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine or writers from Afghanistan who refuse to publicly criticize the Taliban’s barbaric rule and policies or Syrians who have not decried the Assad regime’s barbaric killing of over 200,000 of their fellow citizens since 2011.
Even more odiously, this boycott call has nothing to do with improving the lives of innocent Palestinians. Rather, it is meant to punish Israelis for being Jewish and to send a clear message to Israel and Jews elsewhere about the signers’ definition of good Jews and bad Jews. A good Jew denounces the government of the Jewish state; a bad Jew believes in the right of self-determination and nationhood for adherents of the world’s oldest practiced religion.
It is a dangerous precedent that cleverly endows hate with logic and respectability, masking a markedly more malign and malevolent intention.
Bruce Hoffman is senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University. Casey Babb is a senior fellow for the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, a senior fellow with the Macdonald Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and a special advisor to Secure Canada, in Toronto.
