Matti Friedman walked into a Washington bookstore this spring and found the Middle East shelf captured. He gave the occupying genre a name, Gazology: books about Gaza by writers who have never worked in the region, in which Hamas vanishes, Israeli civilians vanish, and the word “genocide" does the work that evidence declined to do. He’s right. But I’m not here to admire the diagnosis.
I’m here to indict the patient.
That’s us.
Why books?
A quick word about the obvious objection, which is that nobody reads full books anymore. Partly true, but entirely beside the point. The book carries a strange, almost sacred authority in our culture whether or not it gets read. Nobody puts a viral thread on a course syllabus, and the weekend papers don't review Instagram posts. A book announces that a serious person sat with a subject for years and that a serious institution agreed it mattered, and people who haven't opened a book since university still believe this. Books are how a civilization signals what it takes seriously, and the shelf Matti Friedman found in Washington is what it looks like when that signal gets jammed. Look how many people put books on shelves and coffee tables in their houses even if they don’t read them, to signal a sign of higher intellect, class, or simple curiosity. It’s real.
Publishers
So let’s start with the big publishers. The big houses have spent two years telling Jewish writers that a pro-Israel manuscript is “not the right fit for our list" or that an October 7 memoir is “commercially challenging." Many rejections are disguised as a market judgment.
Just last week, JTA reported on novelist Meg Keene, who shopped a romance with Israeli characters through an enthusiastic agent with a strong sales record and heard, over and over, that the book was too Jewish to publish while Gaza made anything pro-Israel radioactive. That isn’t a market judgment but a confession: you make us uncomfortable, and, we just don’t like you.
Yesterday’s Commentary Magazine podcast dismantled that fiction in about five minutes, and the discussion is worth listening to. Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, is republishing two Susan Abulhawa novels this September, in a press release gushing about her “lyrical" voice. This is a writer whose social media record, as the Washington Free Beacon has documented, includes calling Jews cockroaches, demons, and ghouls, and calling October 7 “a spectacular moment."
The Commentary podcast noted that Abulhawa’s breakout novel, Mornings in Jenin, began life under a different title - The Scar of David - and only found its audience after publishers renamed it and edited it into readability. So the industry isn’t merely tolerating this despicable person, but carrying her. Meanwhile, Jewish writers are hearing outright that Jewish content invites controversies that publishing houses would rather not touch. So the bar was never quality, and it obviously isn’t decency.
The bar is fear, running in just one direction.
It goes all the way down to the shop too. Days ago, a Nashville bookstore cancelled the launch event for Alyssa Rosenheck’s White. Blonde. Jew. after an online pressure campaign, citing security concerns (though Rosenheck had, you know, already hired private security at her own expense and says the store told her it had no worries at all). Then it obviously cancelled anyway.
Rosenheck isn’t an outlier, but just the newest example in a recent pattern. In August 2024, Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arena cancelled Joshua Leifer’s launch for Tablets Shattered less than an hour before it was supposed to start because the moderator, Rabbi Andy Bachman, is a Zionist, and a staffer told Leifer to his face that they wouldn’t have one (a Zionist) on their stage. Brett Gelman had a Los Angeles signing scrapped after antisemitic threats. And in March 2025, Chuck Schumer, then the most powerful (and arguably most useless) Jewish elected official in America, had his entire tour postponed for a book called Antisemitism in America after activists promised protests at every stop. Yep, the tour for a book about antisemitism was chased off the road by antisemitism (again, no love lost for Schumer I must say).
And here’s the greatest insult that Commentary’s John Podhoretz pointed out in his podcast: for most of the 20th century, Jews were American publishing’s best customers! 4% of the American population buying 20% or more of the books. Simon & Schuster itself was (obviously) founded by two Jews: Richard L. Simon and Max Schuster. The publishing industry we helped build has now decided that we’re the liability.
These institutions are terrified of a hashtag campaign and a letter signed by two hundred writers nobody has heard of. They aren’t scared of us. Because unlike our books, we haven’t shown our spine.
So what’s our excuse?
We have money.
We have family foundations that can build a hospital wing in a fiscal quarter.
We have presses of our own, imprints, institutes, a Diaspora full of writers and editors and agents and publicists who know exactly how this industry works because plenty of them built it.
And what have we produced against the flood? A very polite trickle. Carefully vetted. Only seeking the highest of intellectual standards. Waiting, always, for the perfect book, the unimpeachable author, the volume so airtight nobody can dismiss it, something only from an already well-known individual, while the other side ships garbage by the pallet and sells them in our stores.
Grow a spine
The pro-Israel and Jewish publishing houses that have the ability should be running their presses at capacity, not curating a boutique.
There are some positive moves in the US and Keene (mentioned above) is one of them: she now runs her own fiction imprint at Wicked Son, a Jewish press, part of a small new wave of Jewish publishing houses and grants built by people who got tired of asking permission. We need ten times more of this, and in Canada, where the infrastructure barely exists, and where we continue to lament in tweet after tweet the issues we have with this country, we need it most of all.
Some of the books published by Wicked Son
Foundations should be blasting grants into the world for good books about Jews and Jewish life and Israel and the Jewish connection to it: the soldier’s memoir, the kibbutznik’s diary, the historian’s monograph, the Diaspora experience, the grandmother’s cookbook blended with the story of Aleppo or Rabat or Kiev or Montreal folded in between the recipes. In this respect, the Azrieli Foundation gets 10 points. Be like them.
There should be an easily accessible bench of Jewish editors on call for any writer with a story, publishers whose doors a first-time author can actually find, a manuscript-to-shelf pipeline so simple that a local teacher with an idea knows exactly whom to phone. None of this is exotic. It’s infrastructure, and we are historically pretty pretty pretty good at infrastructure.
Some of what we publish will be flawed. Sentimental, angry, mediocre even. Some people may even use AI to edit their stuff. So what? The other shelf certainly isn’t built on excellence. It’s built on volume, and volume manufactures consensus in the mind of a browsing reader before s/he has read a single page.
Let me be clear: I am not advocating to lower standards for the sake of it. I’m simply arguing that we need to change our focus and priorities. We need plenty of accessible, readable, and thoughtful material.
The other side has taken our industry and is now using it against us. Just like they’ve inverted the genocide label from something Jews experienced to what they’re now falsely alleging the Palestinian Arabs are experiencing, they’re inverting publishing too. It’s insane that we are not yet effectively fighting back.
Too complicated? Here are some more ideas:
Did a Jewish author get blacklisted or have his/her book launch cancelled? All the North American UJA Federations should buy thousands of copies of the book, and give it away for free to people in the local communities. Support Jewish authors!
Why wait for someone to be cancelled? We should be organizing more book launches, more book clubs, sending Indigo gift cards throughout the community to encourage people to buy and read more books, incentivize reading, and dig into our whole “People of the Book" schtick.
Is there someone in the community who you would love to read more of? Commission them. Give them a grant to write a book, and help them get it published. If it can’t get published, help them self-publish it and then give them publicity grants to get the word out there. We have enough sub-par TikTok influencers. Let’s elevate writers and thinkers and intellectuals and make them thought-influencers too.
Are you a Jewish publishing house or a Canadian/American publishing house with a spine? Get off your high horses about what you’re looking for. The self-publishing industry is leaving you in the dust, so rather than sitting around waiting for the perfect, intellectually-balanced-and-nuanced manuscript to land in your lap, pick up some of the stuff you think could be marketable, interesting, useful in this generational battle for hearts and minds, and give it 10 more seconds of time than you’d usually give.
Are you a Jewish and/or Zionist writer? WRITE, WRITE, WRITE, and then WRITE SOME MORE.
We have the resources, we have the brains, we have the need, and there’s no time to waste. Our philanthropy is unmatched, but whereas a hospital needs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to be built, this initiative needs far less to be impactful. We can have better representation in book stores, at book fairs, at community events, in a way that is proportionate to our voice and our ability. I sadly just don’t see it here, at a time when it’s needed most.
Here’s the Catch:
We call ourselves the people of the book and behave like the people of the strongly worded tweet. Matti Friedman discovered Gazology, but we need an inverse movement that is actually substantive, and true, and robust. A shelf is an argument, and empty space on it concedes.
Stand in any bookstore and look at what the argument is made of: spines. Row upon row of them, turned outward, every one facing us down. The publishers showed us their spine. It bends. So grow one, dear Jews. Grow a thousand, cloth-bound, stamped in gold, packed in so tight the lies have to fight for shelf space.
On a book, the spine is the part that holds everything together. It’s also the part that faces the world.