Bard professor and novelist Dinaw Mengestu resigned last month as president of PEN America, seven months into a term meant to steady an organization exhausted by two years of infighting over the Israel/Gaza War. The proximate cause was an article that the American branch of the century-old NGO dedicated to promoting free expression published, called “A Silent Moratorium.” The article built on interviews with Israeli and Jewish diaspora writers and literary agents to recount what it described as an informal shutout in American publishing since the IDF’s counterattack on Gaza following Hamas’s incursion into Israel on October 7, 2023. One well-known Israeli literary agent told PEN she hasn’t placed a single literary novel with a US publisher since the full-scale war began, something that had never happened before in her career. Editors who’d worked with her for years stopped returning calls. Writers described a kind of ambient loyalty test running through magazine desks and publicity departments: certain material welcome, certain material not.
Mengestu’s objection doesn’t seem to have been to the facts presented in the piece. It was to PEN publishing it while, in his account, not giving the same treatment to writers facing consequences for promoting a cultural boycott of Israelis over Israel’s conduct in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians. PEN’s institutional position, as stated in the piece itself, is that the organization opposes cultural and academic boycotts as a matter of policy while defending the right of individual writers to support them. Mengestu told the New York Times that the article “continues this approach toward defending some rights while not defending others,” and called that combination unethical.
What follows are four observations: on the institutional responsibilities of an organization like PEN America and its leadership; on the general ethics of boycotts and the slippery slope toward antisemitism that besets a cultural boycott that aims to coerce Israel to change its course; on an unusually stark case of such antisemitism, namely the congressional race now underway in San Francisco; and finally, in closing, on the difference between promoting free speech and free expression.
Institutional duty and personal conviction
Let’s start with the institutional question, because I believe Mengestu’s reasoning inverts something basic.
I strongly agree with PEN’s institutional position – both halves of it. A free expression organization is right to oppose boycotts of writers and scholars on the basis of nationality, since that is close to the definition of the censorship PEN exists to fight. And PEN is also right to defend any individual writer or editor’s freedom to personally support BDS, because that, too, is simply speech. These two positions are not in tension or incoherent. An institution can oppose a tactic as a matter of policy while still defending the right of individuals within its ambit, or its broader constituency, to use that tactic. In fact, this is the whole point of a free expression organization: it exists to protect the capacity of people to disagree, including with the organization’s own positions, without fear of social or professional sanction.
It’s striking how often this difference is not understood. For example, Meg Keen, one of the writers profiled in the PEN piece, complained in the Wall Street Journal that, “PEN’s longstanding opposition to cultural boycotts while also attempting to defend writers’ right to advocate boycotts” is “a logically awkward position, since a boycott is a collective action and advocacy is what gives it its collective character.” This is incorrect. There is no contraction between opposing cultural and academic boycotts and supporting the constitutional right of individuals to engage in boycotts, a point that PEN America reiterated in a statement responding to the firestorm provoked by Mengestu’s resignation. PEN America’s opposition to cultural and academic boycotts is a viewpoint neutral perspective that aims to safeguard the ability of everyone to express themselves. They are committed to opposing such boycotts against anyone, not just against Israelis.
Institutions of course can take a position on substantive political questions — but not an institution whose primary commitment is to promoting free expression. Such an institution can only have one political commitment and it must be procedural rather than substantive: to free speech itself. Because the only way an institution can have credibility in promoting equally the free speech rights of all stakeholders (in this case, writers and editors worldwide) is if it itself maintains strict viewpoint neutrality. Likewise, the leaders of such institutions must themselves maintain and embody viewpoint neutrality.
n a modest way, I have experienced the need to enforce this distinction from the inside. A decade ago, I served as Associate Chancellor at UC Berkeley, an institution about as drenched in free-speech mythology as any in the country. Part of the formal job description was to protect the right of speakers across the political spectrum to express themselves on campus. This included defending the right of people to express opinions I personally found wrong, sometimes vehemently. When students or faculty pushed me to publicly condemn some visiting speaker’s views (which happened regularly) or even to ban them from speaking, the correct answer was always some version of: “While I may personally disagree with the speaker, and I empathize with how harmful you find their point of view, the institution will still protect their right to say it, and I will not use my office to tell them (or you) what to think.” Anyone who takes a leadership role in an organization built around a first-order commitment to free expression signs up for this kind of self-restraint. It’s a core part of the job.
In light of this, one plausible reading of what happened at PEN America is that Mengestu decided he needed to prioritize the expression of his own personal political convictions over the responsibility to steward the institution in a viewpoint-neutral manner. Seven months in, Mengestu discovered that he could not comfortably inhabit that kind of institutional constraint, at least not on this issue, and once he reached that point, resigning was the right call. If this reading is correct, then what produced this mess is that Mengestu apparently didn’t understand, eight months ago, that the job would require this kind of restraint. If that is what happened, I respect his resignation even if it reveals that he misjudged the position before he took it. But better that he leave than that he use his presidency to attempt to bend the organization away from viewpoint neutrality and towards his own politics.
Then again, perhaps what bothered Mengestu wasn’t discovering the burdens of institutional neutrality, but a more substantive complaint: that PEN America hasn’t done enough to defend the speech rights of individual authors who support BDS, or hasn’t done enough to document the ways pro-Palestinian and Muslim voices have also faced exclusion and informal blacklisting in American publishing — a phenomenon that, if real, deserves the same kind of reporting “A Silent Moratorium” gave to the Israeli and Jewish diaspora side of the story. If that was Mengestu’s real grievance, however, it would seem to me to argue against resignation. An organization’s failure to serve one side of its own stated mandate or one of its core constituencies would have been a good reason for Mengestu to stay and fix it from within, using the presidency to commission the missing article and to make the case internally for institutional evenhandedness. Resigning in that scenario removed from the table the person best positioned to correct it.
Of boycotts and bias
Set the institutional question aside. As it happens, I also didn’t like the underlying PEN article, albeit for reasons quite different from Mengestu’s. In addition to the fact this the report is entirely anecdata-driven (a point Mengestu also underscored), a major problem with the piece is that it lumps together the experiences of Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish writers as though they belong to the same category of person facing the same kind of pressure. In the context over the debate over boycotts, the experiences of these two groups must not be conflated. Pressuring Israeli nationals is one thing; pressuring diaspora Jews is something else altogether.
To understand why, it helps to separate two things that too often in this debate get run together: economic boycotts and cultural boycotts. I am, at least sometimes, sympathetic to economic boycotts and sanctions as a legitimate, nonviolent tool of political pressure between states and against governments, the sort of thing applied against apartheid South Africa or, more recently, against Russia over its occupation of Eastern Ukraine. Economic boycotts target material interests, and in a globalized economy they are among the few nonviolent levers outside actors have.
Cultural boycotts are a different animal. Refusing to screen a filmmaker’s work, blacklisting a novelist’s book, or excluding an academic from a conference because of their nationality doesn’t just withhold material resources; it withholds recognition, forecloses dialogue, and treats the person as a representative of a state rather than as an individual with their own voice — which is what a free expression organization exists to resist.
To be sure, this distinction can be hard to uphold, given that cultural artifacts are also usually economic ones: a boycotted film or novel is simultaneously an economic product, with a market, distributors, and profits that flow back into a national economy, and a cultural artifact, a specific voice that a boycott silences. Unlike a boycott of oil and gas, agricultural exports, or financial instruments, a blacklist enforced against an Israeli writer is, at once, an economic sanction on an industry and a cultural sanction on a specific person’s work.
For better or worse, BDS as a cultural tactic has a coherent internal logic, at least on paper: pressure Israeli artists, academics, and intellectuals, to encourage these Israelis to pressure their own government to change its policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians. A cultural boycott aimed at Israelis qua Israelis is, in this framing, a form of political pressure directed at the national government through its citizens. Indeed, what the PEN article documents is the human experience of being on the receiving end of an informal version of such a cultural boycott. If anything, boycott supporters ought to be cheering the article’s findings, since it is evidence that the pain they hope to inflict is in fact being felt by Israeli writers.
With that said, I’m unsure boycotts are wise even on their own terms. For one thing, they amount to a form of collective punishment for the actions of a government: I certainly wouldn’t want to be held personally responsible, or punished professionally, for the actions of Donald Trump merely because I am an American; nor, for that matter, do I think ordinary Gazans should be punished for the actions of Hamas. For another, and more empirically, there’s good evidence that boycotts and sanctions typically harden the positions of the people they target rather than shifting them. A 2018 study by the political scientists Guy Grossman, Devorah Manekin, and Yotam Margalit, published in Comparative Political Studies, used a survey experiment built around the European Union’s 2015 decision to label goods produced in Israeli settlements. They found that exposure to news of the labeling decision produced a measurable backlash among Israelis: reduced support for renewing negotiations with the Palestinians, increased solidarity with settlers, and increased support for more hawkish leadership. This pattern held not just on the Israeli right but extended into the political center and center-left opposition as well. Grossman and his colleagues found that Israelis were likely to support real concessions “only in the most extreme and unlikely of circumstances,” namely a comprehensive boycott led by the United States government, a country widely seen as Israel’s closest strategic ally. It’s notable, in this light, that the PEN article doesn’t document any Israeli writer changing their own political views, or lobbying the Netanyahu government to change course in Gaza, as a result of experiencing this soft cultural boycott. The empirical record thus backs up the intuition: boycotts of this kind tend to entrench rather than persuade.
Finally, while I think the blanket claim that BDS is antisemitic on its face overstates the matter, the tactics associated with the movement are also a textbook example of a slippery slope. The trouble starts when the target of exclusion expands beyond Israelis themselves: first to non-Israelis, mostly Jews, who “support Israel” in some unspecified way (perhaps simply by calling themselves Zionists), then further to non-Israeli Jews who haven’t sufficiently and publicly denounced either the Israeli government’s actions or Zionism as such. That second move is where the critique of the actions of Israel turns into something darker. Demanding that anyone publicly recite a political position as the price of professional or social acceptance is illiberal on its face, whatever the position being demanded. And demanding it specifically and only of Jews is antisemitic.
Not maybe. Just is.
The ugliness in San Francisco
San Francisco is currently running a live demonstration of this move. California State Senator Scott Wiener, who is running for Nancy Pelosi’s old congressional seat, has spent months getting harassed by pro-Palestinian activists demanding that he denounce Israel, including that he adopt the word genocide to describe Israel’s conduct in Gaza.
In late June, for example, Wiener was accosted at a Mission District bar during a World Cup match, cornered in front of his own young staffers by a man who screamed abuse at him before being ejected. That followed an earlier incident in which he was surrounded and driven out of Dolores Park at the city’s Trans March, an event he had attended without fail every year since it began in 2004. A crowd of protesters called him genocidal, accused him of having “Israeli handlers,” and followed him filming as he tried to leave the park; the video, which circulated widely on social media, is ugly. Wiener says he and his staff were touched multiple times and that he left because he judged it unsafe to remain in the park.
Wiener’s opponent in the race, Connie Chan, who is Chinese-American, has faced nothing comparable, despite holding, according to a side-by-side comparison of the candidates’ positions, nearly identical views on Israel and the Gaza War, and despite carrying the endorsement of Nancy Pelosi, who has herself long been a staunch supporter of Israel’s conduct, a record pro-Palestinian activists have specifically flagged as dismal. If proximity to pro-Israel politics were what triggered this kind of targeting, Chan should have been receiving just as much opprobrium as Wiener. But she has not. The only discernible difference between the two candidates is that Wiener is Jewish, and that appears to have made him “unreliable” in the eyes of some pro-Palestinian activists, in a way that no comparable presumption attaches to Chan. Wiener has made this point himself: other, non-Jewish local officials who hold positions on Israel and Gaza identical to his own were left alone at the march. He was the only one singled out.
What makes the episode especially telling is that Wiener has for years consistently criticized the Netanyahu government, at one point calling Netanyahu a “cancer” on Israeli politics. He takes no AIPAC money, opposes further offensive arms sales to Israel, and supports Palestinian statehood. He also did, eventually, adopt the word genocide to describe Israel’s conduct in Gaza, albeit under political duress, in January, after weeks of pressure following a candidate debate in which his two rivals held up signs reading yes in a yes-or-no lightning round on the question, while Wiener left his own sign resting in his lap. None of that record has mattered much to his critics. His earlier reticence about one specific word has been read as proof of covert sympathy for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, evidence that he was secretly still “one of them.” That reading, to my mind, can only be explained by antisemitism, a term I do not use promiscuously. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors president Rafael Mandelman, who is himself also gay and Jewish, put it bluntly, calling the episode an expression of old-fashioned Jew hatred.
Someone who defends this general approach of targeting Jewish-American politicians — a pro-Palestinian activist, who happens themselves to be Jewish — recently explained to me the underlying strategy. As they put it, the most effective available way to pressure Israel at this point in the conflict is to “drive a wedge” between American Jews and Israeli Jews, on the theory that a diaspora less reflexively supportive of Israeli government policy will translate, eventually, into a less permissive American foreign policy toward Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, which in turn will force change from the Israeli government. From this vantage, singling out Wiener is not cruelty but strategy, because forcing a Jewish official through a public loyalty test helps split the broader Jewish community in a way that pressuring non-Jewish allies of Israel won’t.
The political assumptions behind this “wedge issue” logic are many and dubious, it’s not clear how much Jewish Americans in fact drive America’s policy towards Israel; the dispensationalist evangelical Christian commitment to Zionism is also very important, as is the U.S. military-industrial complex’s appreciation for Israel as a customer and testing ground. At the same time, we must note that it is the widespread revulsion toward the policies of the Netanyahu government that are creating the opportunity for this wedge strategy. According to AP-NORC data from last month, 37% of American Jews under 45 believe that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A Jewish Voter Resource Center poll last year found that 51% of non-Orthodox American Jews under 35 now support a single, binational state where Israelis and Palestinians share a single government with equal voting rights – previously considered an anti-Zionist heresy. Then again, and to be fair to the person who made this case to me, they weren’t claiming that driving a wedge between the diaspora and Israel is the only lever available for pressuring Israeli policy, or even that it’s sufficient on its own to shift American foreign policy. Their claim was narrower and more specific: that of the political tools currently available to pro-Palestinian activists, applying pressure to diaspora Jews is the most effective.
To repeat, I’m not sure that’s true, even as a matter of amoral political strategy; the backlash research on sanctions cited above suggests this kind of pressure is likely to harden both Israeli and Jewish-American opinion, and more tactically, Wiener’s election odds don’t appear to have suffered. But even stipulating that the tactic works as its defenders claim, that it really is the single most effective lever currently available, effectiveness isn’t the same thing as legitimacy. A tactic can be the most efficient available means to a defensible end and still be wrong. Coercing speech from someone because of the ethnic or religious group they happened to be born into is prejudicial and illiberal. Dressing it in the vocabulary of solidarity with Gaza doesn’t make it any less so.
The consequentialist turn
Let me return, finally, to Mengestu’s own account of his reasons for resigning. Explaining his objection to the piece, he told the Times that PEN America has “the responsibility to be conscious and aware of how our work can impact and influence those debates,” and that it needed to weigh whether its own journalism might end up helping to “restrict or limit or suppress” speech that groups like BDS activists are trying to protect. That is a very different justification from the one in PEN America’s own institutional statement, the one that I said at the outset I agree with. It isn’t a claim about whose speech is protected. It’s a claim about which facts an organization should publish, based on a judgment of how those facts might be used by one side of an ongoing political argument. This is not a principled defense of free expression but rather a logic of political consequentialism.
Defenders of free speech have long insisted that all speech has to be defended, consequences be damned. The ACLU’s foundational free-speech victory, Brandenburg v. Ohio, was won in 1969 on behalf of a Ku Klux Klan leader convicted for a speech at a Klan rally; a few years later, in 1977, the organization’s defense of the National Socialist Party’s right to march through Skokie, Illinois, a town home to thousands of Holocaust survivors, cost it a substantial share of its membership, on the theory that free speech has to be defended especially when the speaker is odious. Noam Chomsky, in 1979, wrote a notorious piece defending the publishing rights of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, over the furious objections of people who considered Faurisson’s claims both false and antisemitic, on the theory that the right to publish falsehoods cannot depend on a case-by-case judgment about how dangerous a given falsehood is. PEN International has its own version of the same instinct within living memory: in 2015 the organization gave its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the staff of Charlie Hebdo over the objection of some 242 of its own members, who argued the magazine’s cartoons were gratuitously offensive toward Muslims. PEN’s leadership held the line, on the ground that the content of the speech being honored was beside the point; what mattered was that the speakers had been murdered for it.
But a further point is worth making explicit, namely the subtle but crucial difference between free speech and free expression. “Free speech,” narrowly understood, concerns whether the government is formally censoring or otherwise repressing a person’s ability to speak. Almost nobody disputes that the state has no business policing what anyone says about Israel or Gaza. “Free expression,” as PEN understands the term, is a more demanding standard, well beyond that legal floor: it represents a mandate to cultivate a culture in which people can state deep disagreements without fear of social or professional sanction.
Here is where the Israel-Palestine conflict presents a problem for PEN America. If someone believes that Israel is committing a genocide, isn’t it reasonable for them to conclude that defenses of Israel’s conduct, or even of the underlying claim to Jewish self-determination (which the Israeli state uses to justify its conduct), deserve social opprobrium, even though such opprobrium would chill the broader culture of expression PEN is trying to protect? Conversely, if someone believes that advocacy for Palestinian self-determination has functioned, in practice, as an apology for murdering Israelis, or Jews more broadly, can’t they reasonably conclude that such advocacy deserves social sanction too? From inside their respective premises, both positions are intelligible and morally serious.
This is where PEN’s identity as a free expression organization sets a higher bar than the ACLU’s narrower commitment to free speech. For the ACLU the only thing that matters with respect to the dilemma above is that the government should be kept out of the argument. PEN’s self-appointed job is broader and harder: to defend a culture in which people can say things that others find odious, without fear not just of government sanction but also of professional or social annihilation. That’s a much more demanding thing to defend than the mere absence of government censorship.
Mengestu’s consequential reasoning is at odds with this latter standard of free expression promotion. He wasn’t denying the right of authors to report facts, only questioning how PEN publishing those facts would affect the underlying political fight. While the impact of one’s words is something every individual writer has a duty to consider, such consequences are not something an organization dedicated to free expression should consider. Anyone who cannot carry the moral burden of such a content-agnostic defense of free expression should not be leading an organization dedicated to that mission.
Whoever succeeds Mengestu will inherit a difficult moment for PEN America, one in which pressure to take political sides is coming from multiple directions and in which staying institutionally viewpoint-neutral will satisfy few. But institutional neutrality is still the right answer. PEN America exists to defend the expressive rights of Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, and Muslim writers alike, without regard to whether any particular piece of writing is useful to one side of the argument. Let the writers themselves argue it out in print.