Day 391: Book Exchange

Why "well-intentioned" calls for boycotts of cultural institutions undermine the causes they claim to support

There are only so many crises one can deal with simultaneously.

It’s been the bloodiest month for Israel since October 2023, with 85 soldiers and civilians killed in a war whose objectives are more unclear than ever, and no indication that our PM prefers the welfare of the country to his own political survival. And countless others killed every day on the “other side” (not mourning the terrorists, but one cannot possibly be complacent about civilians killed as a result of the fighting.)

Iran is threatening (again) to attack Israel— likely before the US elections next week.

Hundreds of rockets, missiles and drones are launched into Israel on a daily basis, including one that killed four foreign workers and an Israeli farmer this morning in Metula.

Next year’s budget, which includes including serious cuts to welfare, health and support for small and medium businesses— precisely the areas suffering the most after October 7— is about to pass in the Knesset.

And of course, there are 101 hostages in Gaza — including an unknown number of them still alive— and a country that is doing everything to keep them in the headlines, even if it’s inconvenient for some of the politicians currently in charge.

So it might seem petty to spend time and energy on the recent letter by literary and entertainment figures calling to boycott Israeli cultural institutions that, according to its organizers, the members of the Palestinian festival of literature , “have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and art-washing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians.” But it’s imperative that we call this for what it is: the latest in a series of coordinated attempts to silence and scapegoat Jewish authors from around the world and demolish any hope for nuance, for discussion— and for coexistence.

Two excellent responses from the last couple of days:

1. Today’s OpEd in the New York Times by the Deborah Harris and Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs entitled “Stop the Boycott of Israeli Culture.”

   This attack on culture divides the very people who should be in direct dialogue, reading one another’s books. It cannot be that the solution to the conflict is to read less, and not more. For authors who would in any other case denounce book bans and library purges, what do they hope to accomplish with this?

   And it ends with the chilling assertion, and one that, sadly, rings very true:

   You can lead a cultural boycott of Israeli literary institutions only if you believe that we don’t deserve to be there in the first place. And if that is your position, you are not looking to solve this conflict and alleviate suffering and death and herald an independent Palestine. You are advocating the expulsion of the other indigenous people of this place, the people about whom you apparently read very little.

2. The open letter by the Creative Community for Peace denouncing the boycott, and signed by more than 1000 authors and members of the arts, including Nobel, Booker and Pulitzer prize winning authors.

Both are worth reading in full.

A rainbow of voices from my bookshelf— including some of the authors that called for the boycott, some that protest it, and others who haven’t signed either letter.

And my own small contribution— an email to one of the authors (not featured in the photo above) who signed the boycott letter.

My name is Vivian. I'm a CW student and emerging writer based in Israel. 

I'm also a Latina. A mother of four. A Jew. A protester against Netanyahu’s government. A volunteer in the “Road to Recovery” organization that drives Palestinians from the West Bank to hospitals in Israel. An Israeli citizen demanding the release of the hostages and the end to the war. And a reader of your work dismayed at your decision to sign the letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions.

I will not go into why so many of the claims in the letter are false or misleading. And although tempting, I won’t try to guess the motivations of the organizers of the initiative, and choose to hold on to the belief that those who signed the letter did so with good intentions.

Instead, I want to point out two small examples that, according to the petition, "deserve" to be boycotted:  

The Jerusalem Writers Festival, which takes place every May. This year’s participants included novelists and essayist David Grossman, poet and activist Almog Behar and illustrator and social critic Zev (“Shoshke”) Engelmayer. They are part of the cultural mainstream of Israeli society, and are harsh critics of the government, particularly the current one. How would robbing artists like these of a platform contribute to advance the causes that the letter claims to support? How can de-platforming voices help in any constructive way?

The Creative Writing program at Bar-Ilan University.  Bar-Ilan, and particularly its Department of English Literature and Linguistics, boasts one of the largest Palestinian-Israeli student bodies of all the institutions of higher learning in the country. The Creative Writing program is the “neutral oasis” where all of us, Palestinian (Christian or Muslim) Arabs, and Jews of all stripes, get to meet, forge friendships, and share our personal narratives in an environment of openness and trust. This is the program where I first encountered your work and the work of Palestinian writers, including memoirists from Gaza and the West Bank.  

I urge you to consider what such blanket statements and calls for boycotts are targeting: the shared spaces we worked so hard to create.  If anything, we need significantly more opportunities to see each other, and to listen to one another. 

Call me naïve, but this is precisely what artists, and art, should strive to defend.

(I have not yet heard back from them, but hey, one can still hope…)

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A year ago today, Lavi Lipshitz was killed in battle.

The “official” yahrzeit, which follows the Hebrew calendar, will fall this year in November. So while October 31 is “only” a day in the calendar, he is very much in our minds today. B went to Har Herzl this afternoon. And I couldn’t resist buying a box of the candy that Lavi liked.

Lavi’s parents are busy planning the commemoration ceremony. Besides a visit to his gravesite, there will be a gathering at his old high school. How appropriate that, following Lavi’s love of literature, they are asking all those planning to attend to bring used books for a book exchange.

Yes, any books. With no strings attached.