Purging Jews From the Arts by Seth Mandel
https://www.commentary.org/seth-mandel/purging-jews-from-the-arts/
Sally Rooney is a clarifying figure in the literary world. She does not go for complexity or nuance, and she doesn’t like to leave herself open to interpretation. Rooney has now written the same novel four times, likely to avoid any possible confusion over what it is she wants to say. And rather than hide behind some disingenuous claim of “just anti-Zionism,” she does things like oppose her last novel’s translation into Hebrew, an act of overt hostility to Jews and only Jews.
So it’s no surprise to find Rooney’s name atop a McCarthyite attempt to purge the arts of the People of the Book. What’s more interesting is to see who else jumps on Rooney’s straight-talk express and whether the wider societal reaction reaches a fraction of what it ought to be.
Hundreds of writers have joined what is framed as a boycott but is actually the institution of a global loyalty oath for Jews. The novelist Rachel Kushner, whose new book contains a rather creepy rant aimed at French Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, is one of the more famous of Rooney’s inquisitors. Junot Diaz, like a once-famous emo act reuniting for a Gen X nostalgia tour, is on there as well.
Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher novels, is not on there. He objected to the purge, as did Lionel Shriver and Howard Jacobson. The crux of the loyalty test is as follows:
“We will not cooperate with Israeli institutions including publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications that:
“A) Are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, including through discriminatory policies and practices or by whitewashing and justifying Israel’s occupation, apartheid or genocide, or
“B) Have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.”
You are to be unpersoned, that is, if you write about Israel without denouncing the Jewish state—a rule that is intended to disqualify Jewish writers of any and every nationality—or if you are Israeli and have not renounced your country and your people, like any Good Jew apparently would. Israelis are currently under fire from seven fronts in a war that began with an explicitly genocidal invasion by Iranian proxies, and if you do not do something to help the cause of exterminating your own people, you are heretofore banished from the arts.
I’m not sure it’s possible to top the reaction from the poet Gillian Lazarus, who said:
“The likes of Sally Rooney would boycott the likes of Amos Oz, David Grossman and Yehuda Amichai. It’s as if a composer of advertising jingles boycotted Mozart.”
Look, if Sally Rooney could write like Howard Jacobson she would probably not be trying to purge her competition.
But she can’t, and so we all must suffer.
As I said, what’s interesting about Rooney is seeing who else joins her fatwas—especially if they don’t have to. Arundhati Roy is on the list calling for a loyalty oath for Jews in the arts, sadly. Jonathan Lethem, too. Other fellow listers: Jasbir Puar, an academic who invented a blood libel about Jewish organ harvesting; Naomi Klein, professor of “climate justice”; Mohammed El-Kurd, who accused the Jewish state of having an “unquenchable thirst for Palestinian blood”; and other such literary luminaries.
The loyalty oath has made something of a comeback among Western institutions, especially in the academic world, where Jews are occasionally permitted to participate in campus activities as long as they publicly call for the ethnic cleansing of their fellow Jews from whichever part of the world is currently trying to expel them.
Then there is the other angle to the purge: In addition to being irredeemably immoral, it’s also very stupid. Fania Oz-Salzberger, daughter of the late Israeli writer Amos Oz, responded on social media: “My late father, Amos Oz, would have been sad, disgusted, but proud to be banned by these 1000 writers and literati. And ban him they would. Not because he didn’t care for the Palestinians, of course he did, but because he’d be the first to tell these virtue signallers that they are historically and politically ignorant.”
I would go further and point out that Amos Oz, simply by being both an Israeli cultural giant and an advocate for Palestinian self-determination, did more for peace every moment he was alive than Rooney and Kushner will do in a lifetime—not least because a cultural boycott of influential left-leaning figures can only sabotage the Palestinians who want statehood and isolate them from likeminded Israelis.
But that point is only relevant if you believe Sally Rooney and Rachel Kushner and the other inquisitors are interested in helping Palestinians. If they only care about harming Jews, then this purge makes perfect sense.
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