Author Elisa Albert told The Free Press her cancellation on a literary festival panel “is a straight-up, bare-assed excuse for antisemitism.” For state funded-colleges, it also might be illegal.
For the last seven years, the New York State Writers Institute has held an annual book festival at the University at Albany. It’s where notable authors come together and discuss big ideas like climate change, feminism, and immigration. But this year, the festival, which was held on Saturday, was disrupted because two authors refused to discuss their books with the panel’s moderator. Why? Because she is a “Zionist.”
The Zionist in question was Elisa Albert, a 46-year-old progressive feminist author whose novels—she’s written three of them—are dark comedies about subjects like modern motherhood and fame. She had agreed to moderate the panel months earlier, and she was looking forward to it. “I was going to be like a game-show host,” she told me in a phone interview. “Congenial and respectful. Have some fun in the process.”
But on Thursday afternoon, just as she was preparing to read the books by her fellow panelists, she received an email out of the blue from Mark Koplik, the assistant director of the Writers Institute. “Basically, not to sugar coat this, Aisha Gawad and Lisa Ko don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist,’ ” he wrote in an email shared with The Free Press. “We’re taken by surprise, and somewhat nonplussed, and want to talk this out.”
Albert was stunned. Though she described herself to me as “a proud Jew” who has been fiercely outspoken since October 7, there had been no hint of trouble in the months leading up to the festival. And the panel’s topic—“Girls Coming of Age”—seemed utterly benign.
But Aisha Abdel Gawad, a Muslim writer in her mid-30s whose novel Between Two Moons was published last year to considerable acclaim, and Lisa Ko, whose first book, The Leavers, was nominated for a National Book Award, were no longer willing to share the stage with a Jew who supports Israel. Unsure how to proceed, Koplik and the institute’s director Paul Grondahl contacted the third writer on the panel, the crime novelist Emily Layden who, according to Albert, told them she was dropping out as well because she wanted to avoid the controversy. (Gawad and Ko did not respond to emails, sent both to them and their literary agents, requesting comment. A request for comment was also emailed to Layden’s publicist, who did not respond.)
At that point the Writers Institute and the University at Albany, which administers the program, had to make a choice: They could publicly condemn the antisemitism displayed by Gawad and Ko and make sure the festival-goers were aware of what had happened. In a series of phone calls Thursday afternoon, Albert says she tried to convince them to do just that. Or they could capitulate to the bigotry by trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug, and listing the cancellation on the festival’s website as the result of “unforeseen circumstances.”
The institute chose the latter course. During one of her calls with Koplik and Grondahl, Albert pushed them to keep the event—but with three empty chairs. “Let’s deal with the truth of what’s going on,” she said she told them. “Why cancel me when two ignorant, bigoted people made the wrong choice?”
According to Albert, Grondahl said it “didn’t seem fair to festival attendees who thought they were going to a panel about coming of age and instead had to suddenly confront bigotry.” She replied, “You’re right. It’s not fair. But it’s a lot less unfair than what my community is dealing with.”
Once the panel was canceled, Albert made the real reason for its termination public through several media outlets.
“The weaponization of the word Zionist as a permissible pejorative is a foul, hateful tactic used to dehumanize the people of Israel, wherever we reside,” Albert added, in an email last week to The Free Press. “This, it is apparently not needless to say, helps zero Palestinian civilians. And it brings zero relief to those directly impacted by this historically intractable, psychotic, gruesome, nightmarish conflict in the Middle East. . . It simply further entrenches a stale, appalling, violent status quo.”
By the time I spoke to Albert over the weekend the shock had worn off, but not the anger. “Let’s face it,” she said. “The word Zionist is a newfangled word for Jew. Refusing to participate on a panel with a Zionist is a straight-up, bare-assed excuse for antisemitism.”
The cancellation of Albert’s panel highlights a worrying recent trend in the realm of literature, where authors who believe that the world’s only Jewish state should not be singled out for elimination are finding themselves increasingly facing calls for their work to be boycotted and their voices silenced. What’s more, this tendency to cast anyone who is “Zionist”—a.k.a. Jewish—as an oppressor, and thus canceled for the common good, is escalating in elite, educated circles, sources told The Free Press.
Zibby Owens, founder of her own publishing house Zibby Books and the editor of a forthcoming volume of essays by Jewish writers reflecting on antisemitism after October 7, told The Free Press, “A lot of Jewish authors are feeling that many publishers don’t want to go there. This is not for books just about Israel, this is about fiction books involving Jewish life.”
Owens said the pressure on Jewish authors has taken a few different forms. Sometimes there are “review bombs,” she said, where a book is torpedoed on the reader website Goodreads even before its publishing date. There has also been an epidemic of progressive-leaning bookstores that have canceled events with Jewish authors, she said. (Joshua Leifer, the progressive Jewish author of new book Tablets Shattered, saw his book launch abruptly called off in Brooklyn in August, once again for that woolly reason: “unforeseen circumstances.”)
“There are bookstores that won’t carry books by Jewish authors with Free Palestine stickers on the doors,” Owens said. “You go in and there are no Jewish books inside.”
Ken Marcus, the founder of the Brandeis Center, a legal think tank that has sued and won antisemitism cases against universities for the last 12 years, agreed with Owens’ take. “There’s more and more pressure to deplatform Jewish writers who are viewed as being pro-Israel or Zionist,” said Marcus, adding that the progressive attitudes of higher education are infecting the publishing landscape. “Whether their books aren’t promoted at a bookstore, or whether social media is used to try to blacklist them. All of this is happening at an accelerated pace. And it’s getting worse.”
For literary agent Deborah Harris, who runs a Jerusalem-based agency that represents most of the big publishers in the Israeli market, part of her job is selling the Hebrew-language rights to American books. In recent years, she told me, a “shocking” number of American writers “don’t want to be published in the Hebrew language.”
She added: “I have authors who have been asked to make public statements in favor of the Palestinian state.”
The writer James Kirchick sounded the alarm bells on this trend back in May with an opinion column for The New York Times entitled “A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing.” Kirchick wrote: “Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” He went on to list numerous examples:
In March, a commentator on X, with the handle @moyurireads, posted a color-coded spreadsheet classifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. The list included Emily St. John Mandel, the author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, because she “travels to Israel frequently”; the novelist Kristin Hannah, because she had posted a link to Israel’s Red Cross; and the author Gabrielle Zevin, who has never made her views about Israel known but once delivered a book talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization. “Needless to say,” wrote Kirchick, “the creator of the list. . . encourages readers to boycott any works produced by ‘Zionists’.”
Also in March, the literary magazine Guernica withdrew a personal essay by an Israeli woman about her experience volunteering to drive Palestinian children to Israel for medical treatment, after its staff members resigned in protest. In her resignation letter, one of the magazine’s co-publishers denounced the piece as “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine’,” Kirchick wrote.
Ever since Hamas’s invasion on October 7, Kirchick noted, popular website Literary Hub has published “a torrent of agitprop invective” against Israel, which it “routinely accuses of committing genocide.”
Meanwhile, hundreds of writers have attacked free expression nonprofit PEN America for refusing to call the war in Gaza “a genocide.” In April, PEN America was forced to cancel several of its awards ceremonies after more than two dozen nominees withdrew in protest. In an open letter, the dissenters called for the resignation of PEN America’s executive committee, starting with its longtime CEO Suzanne Nossel for her “longstanding commitment to Zionism.” (She has remained in her post.)
Four months after he wrote that piece for the Times, Kirchick told The Free Press, “the problem has gotten worse.” He pointed to the cancellation of Joshua Leifer’s event as an example of “increasing intolerance for hearing pro-Israel views inside literary circles.” He added, “Our literature will be impoverished beyond recognition if this bigotry is allowed to fester.”
In addition to failing to uphold its moral responsibility in the face of antisemitism, legal experts told me that the New York State Writers Institute may well have violated the law.
David Schizer, the dean emeritus of Columbia Law School—and the co-head of Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism—told me that because the Writers Institute is part of the University at Albany, which is state-funded, it must adhere to laws that outlaw discrimination. And the Department of Education has been clear that boycotting someone because of their religion is in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “If a university that takes government money says it will not have panels with Jews, that is clearly a problem,” he told me. “That is clearly illegal.”
He added, “If an institution formally condemns the antisemitism and the exclusion of Jews from a panel, that could have gone a long way to mitigate the issue.” The institute could also have let Albert go on by herself, he said. Both options are precisely what Albert said she had asked the directors of the Writers Institute to do, but they refused.
John King—the chancellor of the State University of New York system, which oversees all 64 public colleges and universities in the state, including the University at Albany—agrees with Schizer’s sentiment.
On Saturday, as the festival was taking place, King sent an angry email to Albany’s president, Havidán Rodríguez, which Albert obtained and showed to The Free Press. Expressing shock at learning “from media coverage” about the canceled panel, he said the festival should have issued “an unequivocal statement that bigotry and antisemitism are absolutely unacceptable and the panel would proceed with or without these people participating.”
He added: “SUNY’s content-neutral commitment to free expression and our fidelity to the protections guaranteed by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would have led to a response along the lines the author suggested. As I wrote in a recent public letter and have emphasized to all SUNY campus presidents: Antisemitism is antisemitism whatever ‘code words’ are used, including if ‘Zionist’ is intended to mean the same thing as ‘Jewish.’ ”
King concluded: “I believe the only appropriate response at this point is to ensure that Ms. Albert is afforded the opportunity to have her views expressed to the greatest extent possible, whether that is during the remaining hours of the festival or at a subsequent event held by the Institute.”
When I asked Paul Grondahl, the institute’s director, for an interview, he instead sent a statement saying the institute was “disappointed that the Girls Coming of Age event at the festival this weekend couldn’t take place.” He continued: “We are proud to provide the community with a diverse range of programs and voices that inform and educate the public about the experiences of those around us. Sharing the differences between us can be an exceptional opportunity for conversations that raise awareness and empathy. But we also understand that such discussions can be difficult and support everyone’s right to advocate for themselves.”
He made no mention of antisemitism.
I also asked the assistant director, Mark Koplik, for an interview. His response, which came in the form of a personal statement rather than on behalf of the institute or the university, was very different.
“We unequivocally condemn antisemitism,” he wrote. “We fully support Elisa’s expression of outrage and disappointment. We believe in civil dialogue, and we condemn intolerance of any kind.” He concluded: “I can’t tell you how sad and upsetting this is for me personally.”
Albert told me she isn’t sure whether she would be involved in another Writers Institute event. But she imagined a different way this could have played out—one in which Gawad and Ko had stayed on the panel instead of walking away.
“Had they been even slightly more evolved thinkers, I can easily imagine a scenario in which they might have chosen to come to Albany with open minds and hearts,” she said. “Perhaps they might have hopped that train to Albany with some awareness that, while the moderator of their panel is a fellow novelist whose lived experience and history and inheritance and education and understanding and fear and trauma and grief and shame are profoundly different from their own, there might still be something—no matter how minor, or how seemingly banal—to learn from me. Perhaps, in my wishful scenario, they might even have found it within themselves to hold space for difference, and to maybe, just maybe, grow ever so slightly in the process. Perhaps, were they just that smallest bit more open-minded, they would have managed to teach me something in turn.
“Anyway,” she concluded, “I’m sorry we won’t have the chance to meet and talk, because it would have been super cool to understand them better. And, dare to dream, I could have offered them some understanding of myself in turn.”