Sally Rooney’s Literary Mob

Although some say we’ve passed peak woke, the modern left’s authoritarian impulse to push other people around is alive and well. It’s just that a memo must have gone out to the faithful that the agenda has switched, and now instead of black lives mattering or the climate changing, they’re all to lose their wits over Israel and stick it to the Jews. These are very obedient disciples.

Last week, some 400 writers, including Sally Rooney and Arundhati Roy, signed a letter calling for a mass boycott of the Israeli publishing industry, excepting those who have denounced the “genocide” in Gaza. Now, Rooney, Roy, and their colleagues are certainly well within their rights to get exercised about the gravel pit that used to be Gaza. Because these are writers, you’d think their best route to making their feelings known would be, um, to write. After all, the impulse to form a mob is surely antithetical to the impulse to record your thoughts in text in private and to have your unique voice broadly heard. Me, I’ve never been a joiner, and I used to think my literary brethren weren’t joiners either, much less bullies. But even for writers, this is an age of aggressive groupsterism.

In addition to boycotting Israeli book festivals, literary agents, and publishers, Rooney et al. also refuse to allow their own work to be translated into Hebrew and published in Israel. Ironically, like most Western literary subcultures these days, Israel’s is predominantly left wing, so the Rooney brigade is seeking to punish its natural political allies.

But the intention is not only aimed at punishing Israel’s tiny cultural institutions. The boycott seeks to go well beyond the signatories and intimidate all authors into withdrawing their work for consideration at Israeli publishing houses and refusing to participate in Israeli festivals. That includes writers who disagree with the organizers and do not believe that the IDF’s effort to root out Hamas qualifies as genocide as well as a range of Jewish writers in and outside of Israel whose views on this war may be tortured or finely nuanced. Because we must all speak as one. As ever, a single perspective is permissible. Writers used to enjoy conflict, complexity, contradiction—duking it out on paper or raucously talking over each other on a festival panel. Now we chant in a unified chorus.

I’m not so vain as to imagine that my refusal to have my novels translated into Hebrew would be crushing for the Israeli publishing industry or cripplingly disappointing for the country’s reading public. I’m delighted to learn whenever I’ve secured a translation deal, so in case any Israeli editors are reading this, allow me to go on the record: The Hebrew translation rights to my last novel are still available. And in case you might be reading this, Sally, whether I sell Hebrew translation rights is none of your business. Besides, to the degree that my fiction is the best expression of my own larger political outlook, disseminating my novels as far and widely as possible constitutes the optimal method of promoting that outlook. Publishing in translation sure beats prissily refusing to allow my precious sentences to be corrupted by the language of Jews.

Publishing isn’t a very profitable enterprise. Literary festivals depend on fragile funding. Writers depend on both publishing and book festivals, and most writers do not make much money either. For authors, this latest fad for demanding that the industry and its promotional institutions conform to a specific political perspective—either by expressly endorsing that viewpoint or by puristically vetting financial supporters and writers for wrongthink—is self-destructive. Strict doctrinal conditions on supporters and performers make festivals in particular in danger of simply vanishing from the cultural landscape.

Even if, in this instance, you happen to side with Sally Rooney and you decry Israel’s pursuit of the war against Hamas and Hezbollah, it is not in the larger interest of any writer for publishers, agents, and festivals to be the preserve of a narrow ideological position on any issue. If you actually are an independent thinker, which we might imagine would be a criterion for your job, you are bound to fall out with the orthodoxy at such institutions at some point down the line.

Boycotts are about withholding, and for writers, boycotts are about silence as well as about silencing. It would be more in keeping with Rooney’s and Roy’s profession for these authors to put their anguish about Israel into words rather than to mutely withdraw their work and pressure other authors to shut up. Writing is a positive expression of faith in language to compel and persuade. I do not wish for other authors’ silence to speak for me. I do not wish for other authors’ collective silence to destroy avenues through which I might speak for myself, whether via translation or my personal appearances.

Thus, while I find the whole “open letter” format a little obnoxious, I did just sign one sent to me by Creative Community for Peace in opposition to “members of the literary community” who “harass and ostracize their colleagues because they don’t share a one-sided narrative” about Israel. I do believe that literature should “bring people together, transcend boundaries,” and “broaden awareness” rather than enforce a monolithic dogma. Hey, Israeli festival organizers, if you’re short of speakers? Send me an invitation and I’ll show.

Lionel Shriver is an author, journalist, and columnist for The Spectator. Her new book, Mania, is published by The Borough Press.

For more on this subject, read “Ad for Israel Book Canceled Because ‘Customers Might Complain’ ” and “Magazine that Rejected ‘Israel’ Ad Promoted ‘Antisemitic’ Book” by Francesca Block.

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