A New Landscape for Jewish Lit?

When Temim Fruchter got ready to promote her debut novel, the “flamingly Jewish” City of Laughter, in 2024, she found herself struggling with something she hadn’t expected to affect the rollout—her views on Israel. As an anti-Zionist, Fruchter questioned whether she should speak at synagogues or Jewish community centers—some of which she saw as Zionist—while the war in Gaza raged with no signs of abatement. She wondered if she’d be welcomed, or if she could speak freely. The dilemma continued for years. “Is it worth getting in the room…so that I can bring my perspective in there, or can I not stomach even going inside?” she asked at a Zoom panel held this past April with authors Rachel Edelman and Sarah Yahm about Jewish books and Zionism.

Fruchter was one of several writers who felt unsure how to promote their Jewish-themed books while criticizing Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. They also felt options for discussing this were limited. The writers had published an open letter on the website LitHub, accusing the Jewish Book Council (JBC)—perhaps the leading promoter of Jewish books—of excluding anti-Zionist voices, an accusation the JBC denied. 

It was one of several spats around or within long-established literary institutions over the proper way to manage clashing perspectives on Israel and Palestine—even while Jewish writers with more pro-Israel views are complaining of being shut out from mainstream publishing. Another flareup occurred when some officials of PEN America, the venerable institution representing authors’ free speech, published a blog post in July titled “A Silent Moratorium” that included anecdotes describing a widespread pattern of resistance by mainstream literary culture and publishing against books with pro-Israel or Jewish themes. Dinaw Mengestu, the organization’s president, resigned in protest over the post, and discussion has continued to rage over whether anti-Israel voices, pro-Israel voices, both or neither are being suppressed and by whom. (A Jewish Currents report published early this month contradicted some of the claims made in “A Silent Moratorium.”)

In the aftermath, both sides are moving on. Some writers, including Fruchter, Yahm and Edelman, are launching what they call the Jewish Diaspora Book Collective, which, Fruchter says, can be “both about Jewish literature and storytelling but also about Jewish responsibility, accountability and solidarity with Palestinians and other communities.” The authors envision their own book awards, retreats and reading groups. “We’re not necessarily beholden to the same institutional foundations,” Edelman said on the April Zoom panel. “We can do it differently. We can be a little more punk about it. We can be a little bit more DIY in the way that we build things.”

Discussion has continued to rage over whether anti-Israel voices, pro-Israel voices, both or neither are being suppressed and by whom.

Yahm was partially inspired to create the collective when she attended Boston University’s annual Conference on the Jewish Left this year, where she heard the editor-at-large of Jewish Currents, Arielle Angel, speak about her 2025 essay, “We Need New Jewish Institutions.” After she published the essay, Angel says that writers reached out to her, including ones who eventually spearheaded the letter to the JBC. She wasn’t surprised it came to fruition: “Artists have a ton of sensitivity about the Jewish environment their work is entering,” she says. “The Jewish world has closed itself to the reality of what’s going on.”

New survey data finds nearly half of American Jews under 35 want to replace Israel with a binational state. Israel’s favorability among Americans is falling, and more Jews are starting to redefine their Judaism as either separate from, or opposed to, Zionism. Big-name books with anti-Zionist perspectives have increased, like Molly Crabapple’s surprise hit Here Where We Live Is Our Country (One World), about the history of the Jewish Labour Bund of 19th-century Eastern Europe, Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser’s Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History or Asunder! An Anthology of Jewish Anti-Zionist Fiction (Baraka Books), slated for release next year.

New literary organizations to promote these titles are blossoming, too, like the Jewish Diaspora Movement, a network focusing on coalition building that currently has 59 partner organizations in their founding “minyan.” This includes Jewish Currents, which publishes fiction; Pushcart Judaica, a hub that sells books and zines; and the American Council for Judaism, which hosted the virtual panel with Fruchter, Yahm and Edelman in April. “We believe that our traditions carry liberatory values that can support us in building a more just world and refuse to allow mainstream Judaism to speak for us,” the council’s website reads.

“This is a generational sea change,” says Angel, who earlier this month co-hosted a New Jewish Institutions Bootcamp with the Jewish Diaspora Movement. All a group needs is a room, she says, whether it’s in a synagogue or someone’s apartment. Text messages can lead to letters which can lead to a movement. “When you think about who is going to have to drive cultural output and attendance at these events, that’s these people.”

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Complaints of bias and new Jewish literary groups aren’t only sprouting on the left. Along with the PEN America report, the Anti-Defamation League earlier this month released “Missing Chapter,” their report on seven “anti-Jewish trends in publishing.” The report quotes content creators, literary agents and authors who allege that they have been excluded for their pro-Israel viewpoints, and details more tangible instances, such as bookshops canceling events because of publishing backlash to hosting Zionist authors, or the 2024 proliferation of the “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?” spreadsheet, a corkboard of supposed pro-Israel engagement by authors like Emily St. John Mandel or Gabrielle Zevin. (One author was in the yellow “unclear” designation for not responding to an Instagram message about Gaza.)

“We are experts in building entire parallel infrastructures of success, culture, and mutual support,” writer Paige Wolf explains in her recent article “The Jewish Renaissance,” which aggregated new Jewish spaces born after October 7 out of feelings of exclusion or targeting, from arts, health, politics, community and more. Author and publisher Jacky Klein started Odessa, an imprint of High Line Publishing that strives to be “a new global home for Jewish and Israeli voices in all their breadth, originality, and vitality.” Of The Book Press republishes classic Jewish texts, like a series from 19th-century British author Israel Zangwill, and BALAGAN, a quarterly magazine of culture, is a new initiative of Writing on the Wall, a global platform about fighting antisemitism through art.

“With nowhere else to go, Jewish writers and readers started building their own places,” Howard Lovy said in a Substack interview. His nonprofit publishing company, Canary Press, seeks to promote books by “Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist writers, including many whose work was dropped, sidelined, or turned away by mainstream publishing.”

Meg Keene, a wedding blogger quoted in PEN America’s “A Silent Moratorium,” was one such author who felt excluded. In 2024, her agent failed to sell her romance novel, and one even told her to remove all Jewish themes from it, including changing a character’s name from Yael to something less Israeli. The novel never sold, but this summer, Wicked Son, a right-leaning publisher focusing on Jewish issues, tapped her to helm a new imprint, Meg Keene Books, which aims to publish five great Jewish novels a year.

Keene’s “mandate” to publish Zionist books, as written in an Instagram comment announcing her imprint launch and confirmed to me, doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll only publish authors she agrees with. “I don’t think moral purity tests have a place in fiction,” she says. Her first acquisition is Howard Jacobson’s Howl, a “tragicomic portrait of one man’s unraveling” post-October 7, which was published to British acclaim but hadn’t been picked up in the United States. Keene separates the art from the artist in her personal taste, noting that The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of her favorite novels despite Michael Chabon’s Israel-critical stance. For anti-Zionists, “I have an issue with them politically, but that doesn’t mean their work isn’t good.”

She’ll still support any publishing endeavor they create on their own, though. “The Jewish community has historically been very good about starting our own institutions and doing so in a way that doesn’t ghettoize us, but leads to powerful institutions being built,” she says. “I lean toward being a free speech absolutist. I always believe the answer is in more books and more stories.”

Yardena Schwartz, author of Ghosts of a Holy War: The 1929 Massacre in Palestine that Ignited the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2024), was “elated” to hear of Keene’s imprint: “It’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s necessary.” Schwartz had to part ways with her agent, who she said was uncomfortable championing her work in the current literary climate. “In all of our worlds—philanthropy, arts, literature—we have a tendency to be siloed and not aware of what different people and programs do,” she says. It’s “key for everybody working together as much as possible.”

Nevertheless, she doesn’t believe niche publishing houses popping up will further divide the Jewish literary community. “It’s a symptom of a division that already exists,” she says, pointing to polls that still show strong sentiment in favor of a Jewish state, despite increasing numbers of Jews becoming critical of the government. “The voices of anti-Zionists are elevated and platformed and given much more value than the voices of Zionist Jews,” she says.

Keene feels similarly. “Every time I go into a bookstore there’s an entire wall of Gaza and Israel books,” she says. “They’re getting a lot of book deals and exposure. Anti-Zionist authors are doing well for themselves. And they have every right to go and promote their point of view in their own work.” Her priority, she stresses, is Jews who have felt exclusion in publishing due to their beliefs.

In a follow-up conversation, Keene says the imprint is open to Jewish authors on any side. “I am 100% publishing books from anti-Zionists,” she tells me over email, “we have no political purity tests.” She just requested a full manuscript from a querying anti-Zionist writer this week. “Criticism of Israeli governments, Israeli policy, Zionism, Jewish institutions, or Jewish communal politics is not disqualifying,” her website reads. “A literary culture in which every book agrees with its publisher would be an exceptionally dull one.”

“Silos are never good,” says Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs, an agent and founder of Blueprint, a Tel Aviv-based literary agency founded this June. Blueprint is “open to all backgrounds” and specializes in diasporic Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian and Arab-Israeli writing. “I would be sad if the literature or the writing of one perspective remained inside its own space and preached to its own choir, and the same for the other side. Nothing is stronger than the power of a story. If we’re not listening to each other, then what’s the point?”

Nevertheless, she welcomes the proliferation of new Jewish groups, noting that “the conduits for Jewish writing to meet the world have slimmed down over the last few years.” She seeks out Palestinian nonfiction and Jewish diasporic novels, noting that if you have an opinion about the conflict, “you have the ultimate responsibility to read on both sides of it…The hardest thing in the world is to provoke your own confirmation bias, and I try to do that every day.”

Instead of seeding a division, maybe the new Jewish literary landscape will forge a coexistence of new ideas, themes and books. Some writers believe change happens outside of the doors they’ve been acquainted with. It’s not a one-size-fits-all, either—certainly a subscription to Jewish Currents isn’t mutually exclusive with one to BALAGAN. Almost every writer I spoke to noted that Jews, famously, have a lot of separate opinions.

Next month, November third through December third, is the 101st Jewish Book Month, which evolved out of one librarian setting up an exhibit of Judaic books as a focus of “Jewish Book Week” in 1925. The idea Fanny Goldstein had over a century ago set in motion the organizations and foundations we rely on today—who says it’s not time to do it again?