Jewish poets writing now are writing at time of grief amid destruction and the deaths of innocents, and Palestinian poets writing now are writing at a time of grief amid destruction and the deaths of innocents. The literary climate, however, is very different for these two groups of poets. Whether Jewish poets are writing about that Black Saturday of Oct. 7, 2023, penning poems about “regular” Jewish life or writing about life that has nothing to do with Jewishness at all, they are having, at best, a chilly reception in the literary sphere. In response, many Jewish poets are self-censoring, not submitting Oct. 7 poems to magazines or sharing only non-political poems at readings. The clouds of worry gather: Does one’s stance in support of Israel (no matter how conflicted it may be due to the actions of the current Israeli government), one’s Jewishness or one’s Jewish name bias editorial decisions?
The challenge of getting published is very real. Even as Jewish poets, whether they write about Oct. 7 or not, are being silenced or self-silenced, many, if not most, literary magazines and blogs — and not just the “woke” or left-wing publications — are filling their spaces with angry and heartbreaking poems about Gaza. These are necessary poems, yet they characteristically omit any mention of the casus belli. While they may exist, I have not seen any pro-Palestinian or pro-Gaza poems that mention the terrorist attack of Oct. 7 as the trigger for the Israel-Hamas war. It seems that those writers have calendars that skip from Oct. 6 to Oct. 8 and omit Oct. 7. As far as I can see, the Jewish poets who are getting Israel-Hamas war poems published tend to be the self-proclaimed anti-Zionist Jewish poets, who condemn Israel’s prosecution of the war, but whose sympathy for the victims of Oct. 7 runs thin.
In addition to being kept off the pages of many publications, Jewish and pro-Israel poets and writers are being ostracized, denigrated, intimidated and subjected to antisemitism at gatherings. At the February 2024 conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) in Kansas City, a mega-conference that attracts younger edgy writers along with more mainstream participants, many panelists elected to start their presentations with statements about Gaza, and anti-Israel protests occurred inside the conference book fair and outside the convention center. Then there was the crisis facing PEN America. Under pressure from authors critical of PEN America’s stance protecting free expression of all voices, in this case including pro-Israel voices, PEN American canceled its 2024 Literary Awards ceremony. These examples speak to the tense and hostile climate, and the spirit of exclusion, that aims to shut out voices that advocate for sympathy and a more understanding attitude towards Israel and the complex situation it faces.
A militant one-sidedness has taken over much of the literary world. For example, this statement appeared on the Nov. 21, 2023 website of the literary magazine AGNI, which comes out of Boston University. While it does acknowledge Oct. 7, it goes on to assert that Israel has no right to fight back against the terrorists that attacked it. This section is under the header “Against Silence: A Collective Statement toward Peace”:
“As we mourn the untold thousands of Palestinian civilians, more than a third of them children, killed by the Israeli military, we mourn as well the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas and grieve for the missing and murdered Israeli hostages. We refuse any response to their deaths that justifies violence with more violence.”
Thus, AGNI says that Israel should not retaliate against those who tried to destroy it. AGNI’s online blog features a “Dispatches from Palestine” section that is rich in prose and poetry, and likewise includes a “Dispatches from Ukraine” section, but one looks in vain for a “Dispatches from Israel” section.
As for journals that include one-sided statements about the war, poet Harriet Levin (no relation) put it this way in an e-mail interview with me, “The problem I’m facing is that even if a given journal did take my work, I wouldn’t feel comfortable publishing in it if it put out a statement that was anti-Israel, which is implicitly the same as being anti-Jewish.”
While Harriet Levin would not feel comfortable publishing in an anti-Israel literary journal, I purposely submitted two of my Oct. 7 poems to AGNI. I included a cover note that invited the editors to consider the poems for balance and added this would also be a good idea in accordance with principles of diversity, equity and inclusion. After a wait of five months, I received a standard rejection note. I did not expect AGNI to publish the poems, but I wanted to make a statement by submitting them.
My boldness in submitting to AGNI aside, I do feel silenced, shut out and intimidated by the pervasive anti-Israel and sometimes anti-Jewish climate in poetry publishing. As previously stated, the overwhelming majority of poems on the war have been from the Gaza perspective. As far as my own topical efforts go, those poems are still trying to find their way into a magazine, whether Jewish or mainstream. Maybe some magazines don’t want to attract flak, maybe they just don’t like my work, maybe they are anti-Israel. Whatever the reason, I do feel excluded. Even as I write this, I think of the devastation and deaths in Gaza. And then I think of how it did not have to be that way … but it was that way because Hamas unleashed its savagery on Oct. 7.
Jewish poets are facing a harsh climate, and much of this is because there is a tendency towards sweeping generalizations that categorize all Jewish and pro-Israel poets as hardline and ultranationalist. Poet Henry Israeli, in an e-mail interview, offers this observation:
There seems to be no tolerance in the literary community for those in the center. Jewish writers in the diaspora are being tacitly asked to pick a side. Not defaulting to a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli stance — in other words, not turning your back on the existence of an indigenous Jewish nation — marks you as a ‘Zionist apologist.’
On the topic of being pigeonholed, mislabeled or generally subjected to simplistic and biased rhetoric, poet Olga Livshin, as quoted in Maxim D. Shrayer’s essay, “The Silencing of the Jewish Poet,” has this to say:
I have a position that, I hope, is a bit nuanced, but right now there is no space for such a position; people compel each other to commit to one side, and to choose the extreme of it.
Unfortunately, it appears that intolerance and name calling are trending.
Powerful and meticulously researched essays have been coming out that detail the hostile rejection of voices sympathetic to Israel. Among these are Maxim D. Shrayer’s essays in Tablet, “The Silencing of the Jewish Poet,” which was based on responses gleaned from formal questionnaires received from 70 Jewish poets and translators, and his essay, “Poetry after October 7th.” Also outstanding and sobering is James Kirchick’s guest essay in The New York Times, “A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing.” The poet, academically trained historian and educator Erika Dreifus is developing a document-in-progress “After October 7: Readings, Recordings, and More,” which lists an ever-growing number of essays that document the status of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel voices. The list includes a section that focuses on the literary community. Dreifus writes that she seeks to amplify “Jewish perspectives — including writers’ perspectives — from Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.” Seeing the threats and harassment of Jewish writers, the Jewish Book Council “has launched an initiative for authors, publishers, publicists, agents, editors and readers to report antisemitic literary-related incidents.”
One of the few magazines brave enough to include work directly addressing Oct. 7 from an Israeli perspective is Scoundrel Time, which published poet Marcela Sulak’s hybrid epistolary essay, “Letters from Missile Alert Area, Ramat-Gan West.” While not a poem, this on-the-ground, real-time work captures, along with political observations, the scene in Sulak’s neighborhood, which was under rocket attack on Oct. 7. Nashim: A Journal of Women’s Studies and Gender Issues will be publishing a special supplement of poems directly responding to the events of Oct. 7. University of Pennsylvania professor of Yiddish Kathryn Hellerstein, who along with poet and translator Lisa Katz is co-editing the supplement, states, “We hope that the poetry supplement in Nashim will help to challenge the global silence or lies about the violence perpetrated by the terrorists against Israeli women and girls.”
Powerful and meticulously researched essays detail the hostile rejection of voices sympathetic to Israel.
I am seeing that some of the daily poetry newsletters, such as Rattle and Poem-a-Day, are not completely silencing Jewish voices and voices sympathetic to Jews (though I have yet to see any poems in those publications directly addressing the Israeli side of Oct. 7). Along with powerful poems about the civilian deaths in Gaza, Rattle published a poem by Bob Hicok decrying antisemitism called “This Again” and a poem by Amit Majmudar called “Shovels” about a classmate’s grandfather who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Polish forest. Poem-a-day, a publication of the American Academy of Poets, has published a poem of Palestinian grief by Fady Joudah and also a Jewish poem from the tradition, “Night-Piece” by Solomon ibn Gabirol, translated from the Hebrew by Emma Lazarus. In terms of Jewish-oriented poems, these are “safe” editorial choices as they do not address Oct. 7. They do, however, perform the important job of keeping Jewish voices and the Jewish story in the world of poetry. Also on the positive side, Yetzirah, a literary organization dedicated to fostering and supporting a community space for Jewish poets, continues to forge ahead enriching the life of Jewish poetry. Ritualwell’s ADVOT: Online Creative Community of Jewish Writers provides an outstanding range of opportunities for Jewish poets and spiritual writers in which to develop and share their work.
Where else can Jewish poets be heard? In addition to the above-mentioned publications, Jewish poems, though not necessarily political poems, are still published in Moment, Lilith, Minyan, The Ilanot Review, The Green Golem, various Ritualwell sites and other places. Jewish poets can certainly find a warm reception when they read their work aloud at synagogue poetry evenings and synagogue Sisterhood and book-club meetings. At those venues, listeners are very encouraged and grateful to hear poets who understand their fears and the threats Jews face at this sorrowful and painful time.
The state of Jewish poetry post-Oct. 7 and the state of the Israel-Hamas war includes many if only’s, and here are but a few: If only Hamas did not rampage across Israel’s southern border to torture, murder and kidnap on Oct. 7, 2023; if only Hamas did not cynically place their fighters, command centers and weaponry in crowded civilian population centers; if only the war were not so hard to end, and leaders on both sides could agree on a ceasefire deal without further haggling; if only more mainstream literary magazines were open to publishing poems about the Israeli and Jewish side of the disaster. Finally, I add one more if only: If only by the time you are reading this piece, the war will be over and poets can go back to writing about love and lost love, the self and the soul, and every other human and non-human thing that inspires awe.
3 Responses
Very thoughtful, true and touching. How sad it is that the “what if” list doesn’t get any shorter.
Nevertheless, Shana Tovah.
Thanks, Lynn.
Great article Lynn. Very accurate I think. New Verse Bews dud publish one of mine that was about October 7, but for the most part poems I’ve tried to publish with Oct 7 in them are rejected. But I’ll keep writing them. Thank you for your words! Julie
Great and accurate article, Lynn.