Wet Hot PEN America-n Summer

An effort to dispel rumors of antisemitism in publishing falls flat

I hate to take a break from writing my article about how although The Odyssey is a brilliant film, Christopher Nolan has now convinced 10 bajillion moviegoers that the Golden Rule was invented by Greek Zeus-worshippers, rather than by the Jews (in Leviticus)—one of the most brazen acts of cultural erasure since The Great British Baking Show brought us Paul Hollywood’s “plaited loaf,” known in some quarters as a “challah.”

But duty calls. So I set that piece aside, and return to the sexier topic of PEN America.

As loyal readers know, I recently wrote about how Dinaw Mengestu, the novelist who was the president of free-speech organization PEN America, recently resigned because he feared that the organization’s report on antisemitism in the publishing industry could be weaponized against a cause he believes in, boycotting Israel. Basically, he fears that attention to the travails of Jewish writers may be used by right-wingers to argue for laws looking to hamper the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel—and therefore such reports are irresponsible. Put another way (and you can decide if I am being unfair), “Don’t say true things when they hurt the cause.” That is not a responsible position for a writer, intellectual, or free-speech proponent to take, but to many in the left-leaning literary community, it seems obvious.

There have been many stupid takes in defense of Mengestu, but one take that I want to engage came from a scholar I respect, Josh Lambert, a nice and very smart man who teaches Jewish literature at Wellesley. Unfortunately, his Substack essay on the topic is dismissive of some real concerns—he calls the PEN report, which is sober and fair, “a mishmash of writers’ resentments and rumors and paranoid fantasies”—and gets some facts wrong in the process.

Lambert writes, with derision, about “Jewish-American author Lisa Barr” who, according to the PEN report, “said her novel Woman on Fire received 450 one-star reviews as a result of an organized review bombing.” Lambert then performs his takedown: “Go look at the 1-star reviews of this novel on Goodreads and Amazon. (I did; it took me maybe 10 minutes.) Every single one of them looks legitimate.”

The problem is that Lambert can only see the reviews which have a comment attached; review-bombers, who swoop in to leave a 1-star rating (which is not a review), do not write a comment to go with it (not least because they haven’t read the book). As of today, there are 37,820 ratings on Goodreads, but only 3,114 reviews/comments—

—and there are 550 reviews of one star—

—but only 86 of them have written comments, making them reviews, and those are the ones Lambert could see—

—so what this means is that Lambert read through the subset of reviews, 86 of them, that are most likely to be legit (because they come with actual comments, most of which reference the plot of the book) but did not see the 440+ ratings of one star with no comments attached—precisely those most likely to be the result of a “review-bomb” targeting a Jewish writer. In fact, her numbers add up: she said she got “450” negative reviews (more precisely, ratings) from the antisemites. That would be about the total of the anonymous ratings, the ones without comments. While it’s possible they came in organically, she would know if they tended to all appear in a matter of a couple weeks.

Bottom line: I think Barr was telling the truth, and Lambert adduces no evidence that she isn’t.

Now let’s turn to Lambert’s other attempt at a takedown, in which he tries to refute the claim that fewer Jewish-themed or Israeli books are being published by pointing to reviews in Kirkus, an industry trade magazine. He writes:

Here’s another way to do a quick reality check on the general claims in the PEN article. Search “Israel” in Kirkus Reviews, the pre-publication book review magazine that critics use to find books to review. In 2004 and 2005, which I selected somewhat haphazardly as a control period, “Israel” came up in 66 articles. In 2024 and 2025, “Israel” came up much more: 127 articles. “Hebrew” went from 29 to 73 mentions; “Israeli” from 49 up to 71. To be fair, “Gaza” also went from two mentions in 2004-2005 to 52 mentions in 2024-2025, but that’s probably because of, you know, the genocide?

The problem here, which will be immediately apparent to anyone involved in trade publishing, is that books under review—books being published this season—were signed up, i.e., the authors were given their contracts, years earlier. While it’s possible for books to go from contract to the bookshelf in a year, two years is more common, and three-years-and-up is the plurality of cases. In my own publishing history, the contract I signed in 2018 was for a book that came out in 2021 (about the Tree of Life synagogue shooting); the contract I signed in 2022 was for a book that came out in 2026 (my Judy Blume biography). And I write fast, and meet my deadlines!

What’s more, for Kirkus to review a book, they need the galleys (advance copies, or proofs) about six months before the publication date. So to review a book in, say, December 2024, there would have to be a near-publication draft of the book by, say, May 2024—which means the book would have been signed up (except in very rare circumstances) by the spring of 2023, and most likely would have been signed up in 2022 or earlier.

I can’t emphasize this enough: books coming out in 2024, and even 2025, were mostly signed up in 2022 or earlier—maybe 2023, but in that case probably before the October 7 attacks and the resulting war, which came when the year was 3/4 over. The real question, then, is what is being published now—in 2026 and 2027, and into 2028. That is the period when books put under contract in the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks would actually be getting reviewed in Kirkus.

This all sounds like inside-baseball gematria, but it’s really quite damning: Lambert’s “gotcha” stats drawn from Kirkus don’t prove his point at all. At least not yet. It’s entirely possible that in 2027 we’ll see more Israeli or Jewy books than ever being reviewed in Kirkus, and that would be evidence that the anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish bias was overblown. As it happens, it wouldn’t be very good evidence, since Kirkus reviews only a minuscule percentage of books published, so the final selection reviewed is not much of a reflection of the industry—it’s too small a sample size. One editor on Kirkus’s small staff could have an affection for books in translation, and choose books coming from Israel (and other countries), and that could queer the whole result. But in any case, we don’t know yet. Let’s check back in another year.

Meanwhile, Lambert never says what he makes of the strong anecdotal evidence from Deborah Harris, who is Israel’s leading literary agent (at least for Anglophone authors). Here is what PEN writes:

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.”

That’s some pretty damning stuff. Does Lambert think she is inventing this? Is she just being a hysterical Jew, crying antisemitism where there is none? Is she just paranoid?

Not according to a better data set, which was written up in JTA just a couple days after the PEN report. The author Meg Keene, suspicious that her own career had been hurt by anti-Israel or anti-Jewish sentiment (she would surely be dismissed by Lambert et al. as just a disgruntled author), went looking for data. Here is what she found:

I turned to Publishers Marketplace, the leading industry database where many book deals are announced, and reviewed fiction deals for books by Jewish authors that publicly signaled Jewish or Israeli content. What I found was grim. Between 2023 and 2024, there was a 76% decline in fiction deal announcements to large presses that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel. The numbers improved somewhat in 2025, but they did not recover. Compared with 2023, announced sales of Jewish books were still down 47% at large presses.

And the early 2026 numbers are worse: Looking at what has been announced so far this year and annualizing the comparison, fiction deals mentioning Jewish content are down 82% at large presses compared with 2023.

Like all data sets, this one is imperfect. Not every book deal is announced on Publishers Marketplace, and not every announcement mentions Jewish content when a book contains it. It may be that agents and publishers are less willing than they once were to mention Jewish themes in deal announcements, despite the content of the books themselves.

For those who don’t know, Publishers Marketplace is a website and newsletter that, among other things, tries to aggregate book deals, relying on information sent to them by agents (when an agent closes a deal for her client, she will often announce the deal by sending news of it to Publishers Marketplace, which then puts a notice in its daily newsletter; one reason to do this, especially for nonfiction books, is that it scares off other authors—if the world knows you just signed a deal with Random House to write a biography of Nancy Pelosi, then authors considering such a project will know about it and back off). Publishers Marketplace is better data than Kirkus, for at least two reasons: it reports deals made, rather than books published, which is a more accurate measure of industry interest (or prejudice), since plenty of books with contracts are never finished and don’t make it to market; and it reports way more books or deals—it’s just a bigger data set.

Still, despite the robustness of her findings, Keene is modest:

But the data is the best we have for now. And if the problem is that Jewish content is something the industry feels that it needs to obscure when announcing deals, that is also a major problem.

Unless, of course, one wants Israeli cultural production to be shut out of the marketplace, which is, I think it’s fair to say, the goal of the boycott-Israel camp! And hundreds, perhaps thousands, of writers, artists, and industry people have made clear this is exactly what they want. (See this open letter, among others.) And I can think of several editors who would never sign a pro-boycott letter, because their bosses in their conglomerates wouldn’t want them to, but who certainly support the boycott movement. So isn’t it perhaps the case that BDS is, for better or worse, working?

This all reminds me of those who said (I know one such person), with regard to the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, “They were innocent, but if they were guilty, they did the right thing.” Now it’s something like, “BDS isn’t affecting Israeli writers’ chances of getting published—but if it is, that’s good.”

What’s sad is that we can’t have an honest conversation about this. The people I know who have expressed the most skepticism to me about the PEN report are precisely those who in other contexts will express joy that there is a growing movement to boycott Israel, and who will defend cultural boycotts, despite their impact on individual artists who may have any kind of politics. It’s a community of people who are somewhat, sorta interested in truth, but also very interested in achieving certain political aims. The latter goal affects the former goal—because they are human, and we are all fallible. The tells are everywhere, like when Lambert writes, at the end, “I would certainly be embarrassed to be associated with such a sloppy piece of work [the PEN report], especially one that is guaranteed to feed the pernicious weaponization of antisemitism.” (Bold added by me.) As I have written elsewhere, it’s not our job to worry about how our work is “weaponized” by bad people—they’ll do what they’ll do. Our job is to get stuff right.

This all gives us some insight into a certain pathology on the left: their fear of saying anything that can be “weaponized” really does blind them to real facts on the ground. There is a kind of person who sees a headline about antisemitism and a) assumes it comes from someone on the right, and b) wants the article to be wrong. This is perfectly human—we all have feelings—but the mistake comes when we think that, in our own work, we can somehow foolproof it against such uses. We can’t. If we report on antisemitism, no matter how responsibly, with as little alarmism as possible, it will still be used by someone to bash universities, call for their defunding, etc. We should always be careful, but we should never delude ourselves that any amount of care in our research and writing will keep it form being swept up in political debates, often by the side we oppose. To think that being more precise, by hedging more, by being less alarmist, you can ensure that your writing never ends up in a footnote by a Republican is madness. It’s also wrong.

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Were you ever in analysis?

Me neither. But Andrew Sullivan ‘s interview with psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, author of the new Love’s Labor: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love, is one of the most engrossing interviews I have heard in a while, and near the end it basically turns into a sofa session with Sullivan—about his upbringing, his gayness, coming out to his parents, his workaholism, and more. It gains speed as it goes along—listen to the whole thing.

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Best of the year SO FAR??

I sure better make the year-end list, New Yorker! No, seriously, thanks for the compliment of being named one of the best books of the year so far.

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And now, to end on a delightful note…

Enjoy these identical twins from New England, covering Bob Dylan: