Defending the Right to Keep Jewish Writers from Publishing

Earlier this month, Dinaw Mengestu, the president of PEN America, resigned after the organization’s magazine ran an article about discrimination against Jewish writers in the publishing business. Mengestu, a novelist who had been chosen to lead an institution dedicated to protecting the free speech of writers, authored a defense of his decision—focused on the right to boycott (protected, as he notes, by the U.S. Supreme Court). Of course, the boycott to which he refers consists of refusing to print the work of Israeli writers, or of Jewish writers not eagerly denouncing Israel.