For Practicing Writers: Mid-Month(ish) Update
Warning: #Longread ahead. Because, #WritingCommunity—we have some serious problems.
Greetings, everyone:
I know that we all receive a lot of email, and I strive to limit this Substack’s presence in your inboxes to a once-monthly rate. But multiple developments over the past week have compelled me to compile and send you this update.
(There happens to have been a mini-wave of new subscribers since the March edition went out—newbies, I extend an especially warm welcome to you. That previous post is a far more “traditional” Substack missive from me, so please bear that in mind if you’re bewildered by this one!)
In This Update
Before We Dive In
L’Affaire Guernica
An(other) Open Letter to PEN America
A Questionable Friday Find
In Conclusion
Further Reading/Resources
Thank you in advance for reading this. It’s going to take some work. I hope that you’ll find it worth your time.—ERIKA
Before We Dive In
First:—some reminders and relevant background. (Trust me—the relevance will become apparent. Eventually.)
I’ve been in the habit—the practice, if you will—of sharing resources for writers for a long, long time. Thanks to our recent anniversary issue, most of you may be aware that this newsletter began (on the now-defunct Yahoo!Groups platform, as The Practicing Writer) a little more than 20 years ago.
But here’s some history I’d be shocked to discover that anyone remembers:
A few months later, in the summer of 2004, my very first website (which actually used “Practicing Writer” in the url instead of my name) launched. I was then teaching writing in a variety of community settings, and the site helped me advertise those offerings. It was also useful for me as an increasingly active freelance writer. And of course, a sign-up box for the newsletter appeared there, too.
Shortly thereafter, in 2005, I launched a companion blog. This blog, however, was not hosted on my website. Titled “Practicing Writing,” it was housed on Blogspot (do the young people even know what Blogpost is?).
Just two years later—in no small part because of subscriber pushback that was emblematic of toxic currents I was beginning to discern in literary and literary-adjacent communities—I launched a second Blogspot project, which I called “My Machberet.” There, separate from Practicing Writing, I focused on matters of specifically Jewish cultural (mainly literary) interest. As is the case for the vast majority of Jews who live in the United States, a connection to Israel has always been a core component of my Jewishness. Writing from and/or about Israel—my own or others’—was therefore key to My Machberet from the start. (Fun fact: “Machberet” itself is the Hebrew word for “notebook,” one of the very first words that I learned when I began Hebrew School as a child.)
Three years after that (we’re at 2010 now, if you’re struggling to keep up!), my debut short-story collection Quiet Americans—inspired in large part by my paternal grandparents, German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the late 1930s—was about to be published. At that point, it seemed appropriate to invest in a major website redesign and upgrade. The idea was to have the rebranded ErikaDreifus.com serve as a hub not just for my book and other publications, but also for the two blogs and the array of other resources I had been compiling and sharing over time. In other words, it marked an effort to catch up with technology and consolidate my various writing-focused offerings.
That worked well enough for a number of years. It wasn’t until 2019 that the release of a second book (Birthright: Poems, many of the poems in which are also deeply embedded in my familial/Jewish history) prompted me to invest in a slight refresh.
And then came Substack. Or at least—then came the necessity of finding a new host platform for
.
(Are you starting to feel scattered? Overwhelmed? Unable to keep track of the platforms and offerings? Now you know how I feel every day!)
Yes, I still maintain a website apart from this Substack. But as I remind you in each issue (and explained in some detail in the most recent Mid-Month Update back here in November), I’m still posting on the blogs.
(Quick digression for the newbies: This includes weekly Markets and Jobs posts on Practicing Writing. These posts, which typically publish Monday mornings, feature opportunities that don’t make it into the monthly newsletters. They also include more “hyper-local” calls, contests, and jobs that are less likely to be relevant for the global newsletter readership. If you aren’t regularly checking them out, now’s a great time to begin.)
Posts on My Machberet continue as well.
Which brings us (finally!) to the impetus for today’s update.
So much happened in the #WritingCommunity last week that deserves further comment, not least because the episodes reflect the intensification of patterns and trends that some of us have been watching (and trying to deal with) for years. For me, they also exacerbate an increasing tension that I’ve been trying to navigate between continuing to serve the broader literary community (of which I have been a part of so long but from which I feel increasingly alienated) and sensing that my time, energies, and expertise may be more appropriately and effectively directed elsewhere.
Let’s proceed chronologically.
L’Affaire Guernica
I’m not going to delve deeply into this one here, since it’s the incident that already seems to have sparked the most—and the most prominent—headlines.
Here’s what I wrote about it within both Thursday’s Jewish Literary Links post on My Machberet and the next day’s “Finds for Writers” on Practicing Writing:
To catch up [on this story], you might consult “After a Writer Expressed Sympathy for Israelis in an Essay, All Hell Broke Loose at a Literary Journal” (Los Angeles Times) and/or “Guernica Magazine Retracts Israeli Writer’s Coexistence Essay That Co-Publisher Called an ‘Apologia for Zionism’” (JTA). Related opinion pieces have appeared in both the mainstream and Jewish press, with Phil Klay’s “The Cowardice of Guernica“ (The Atlantic; temporary gift link) and Nora Berman’s “An Elite Literary Journal Imploded over an Essay About the War — Because It Dared to Humanize Israelis as Well as Palestinians” (Forward) again offering just two examples. (Don’t neglect to read the actual essay at the heart of this, by Joanna Chen1; you’ll find it linked in the other pieces, and you can also find it archived here.2)
It’s not always the case that you can safely glean my overall take on a matter by reading the items that I’ve chosen to amplify. But in this instance, you can.
So let’s move on.
An(other) Open Letter to PEN America
At some point Thursday morning, I became aware of an item published on Literary Hub, a major literary website (“created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature”) with a massive social-media imprint.3
After reading the rest of Literary Hub’s article and the text of the open letter itself (it’s included within the piece), I had some things to say. Which I did—again, on Twitter.
(Ancillary, digressive questions: Why do I remain on that platform? Why do I continue to call it by its “old” name?” None of this is clear. What is clear is that my reach there since The Takeover has declined dramatically, which I suspect is due to a variety of factors, including my refusal to pay for my account and the departure of many erstwhile followers.)
Here, before restating and expanding on my thoughts, I’m going to veer from the approach I used on Twitter.
I’m asking you stop reading this Substack post right now.
Scroll back up to the screenshot of the Literary Hub piece. Click it. Read it (including the text of the open letter within).
And then come back here to continue reading my response.
Ready to continue?
There is a lot that I could say about the problems with that article and the open letter within. Some of that would repeat what I’ve already written in the introduction to my “Writers, Beware” document.
Here’s what I want to emphasize today: I can’t help thinking that it’s precisely PEN America’s adherence to its principles and commitments—including its willingness (à la Joanna Chen, the writer whose essay ignited what I’ve called L’Affaire Guernica above) to acknowledge suffering among both Palestinians AND Israelis—that’s what’s driving this anti-PEN animus.
I can’t help thinking that it’s precisely PEN America’s adherence to its principles and commitments—including its willingness (à la Joanna Chen, the writer whose essay ignited what I’ve called L’Affaire Guernica above) to acknowledge suffering among both Palestinians AND Israelis—that’s what’s driving this anti-PEN animus.
Why do I think this? Because it’s simply impossible to read the record (receipts in a moment) and claim that PEN has “betrayed the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all.”
Impossible—unless you exclude Israelis (who happen to include just about half of the world’s current Jewish population) from “all.”
At this point, some of you may be thinking: “Why should we believe you, Erika? You’re just one person. And you’re biased! You’re one of ‘those Jews’ who sees antisemitism everywhere! You’re just trying to shut down all criticism of Israel! Why should we trust you over Literary Hub and So Many Important Writers?”
Here’s one response: I’m the fortunate beneficiary of an excellent education, through which I’ve learned at least a few highly relevant skills, including how to: conduct research; read texts; analyze sources; and write nonfiction of various sorts (from a 338-page doctoral dissertation right down to a 280-character tweet) that is, in fact, nonfiction.
Which brings us to the “receipts” that I promised a moment ago.
Let’s begin with the opening section of this February 21 PEN America newsletter. Please take a moment to read it.
Then, spend some time, as PEN America invites you to do, reading more.
You might begin with this page, which is where you’ll land if you click the link in their newsletter.
If I truly sought to “shut down all criticism of Israel,” I wouldn’t be highlighting these statements. Because, as any of us who can read should be able discern, plenty of them aren’t exactly models of Israeli hasbara.
But, true to its commitments, PEN America has been doing much more beyond issuing statements. Again, I encourage you to take the time to examine the range of their activities. Here, I’m highlighting just one more part of their post-October 7 response.
When I clicked “Read more” that February day when I first read the PEN America newsletter, I nearly wept. I was simply overwhelmed to find acknowledged alongside Palestinian casualties—for the first time in a mainstream literary venue—the names and photographs of Israeli/Jewish writers and creators who have been murdered and/or are still being held hostage in Gaza.
Updates have been promised. I hope to soon find there profiles for poet and children’s author Amiram Cooper (still being held hostage) & poet Judih Weinstein Haggai, z”l (murdered; her body remains in Gaza). Both of them, along with retired journalist Oded Lifshitz and historian Alex Dancyg (both of whom are included on the PEN America page), hail from Kibbutz Nir Oz, one of the several communities in southern Israel that Hamas attacked on October 7.
Again: I encourage you to read that most recent open letter that Literary Hub amplified. Look at the evidence—I’ve tried to lay out a chunk of it for you here.
And then make your own decision about who is truly invested in “peace and equality for all.”
I repeat:
I can’t help thinking that it’s precisely PEN America’s adherence to its principles and commitments—including its willingness (à la Joanna Chen, the writer whose essay ignited what I’ve called L’Affaire Guernica above) to acknowledge suffering among both Palestinians AND Israelis—that’s what’s driving this anti-PEN animus.
A Questionable Friday Find
If all of us in the #WritingCommunity can agree on anything right now, perhaps it is this: For many writers, of varying backgrounds, Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7; Israel’s subsequent response; and the ways in which each of those components have (or have not) been dealt with in literary spaces (virtual and otherwise) are matters of deep, personal pain. Many of us have literal skin in the game, whether because we ourselves live in the region or because we have family and friends who do. Emotions are running high. And as writers, many evidently feel compelled to “use our words”—not only to express our own grief and anger, but to take action and, to invoke a phrase that my own Jewish community uses (although the essential motivation is hardly unique to Judaism) to “repair the world.”
This wouldn’t be such a problem, or even a problem at all, if we could manage to meet the requirements that both the moment and our professional training demand. Which is not to suggest that such a bar is easy to meet or that we (imperfect humans) get it right in each and very instance. Despite my own best efforts, even I may fail at one time or another.
But we must at least try to choose our words carefully and meet our obligations—especially in nonfiction prose (including articles, open letters, editor’s notes, and even, yes, tweets)—to honesty, clarity, accuracy, and fairness. And it’s incumbent on our literary editors and leaders to step in if/when the work that we do for/with them falls short.
Which brings me to the episode that concluded my week:
I noticed the tag late Friday afternoon. Although I am not shomer Shabbat, I do routinely log off social media shortly before the Jewish Sabbath (which begins at sundown Friday) and normally, I don’t return before Havdalah (about an hour after sunset Saturday). As my notifications increased—@amylynnuws’s comment inspired a string of responses—I saw immediately that I was going to need time to review this situation if I was going to comment on it at all. For starters, if I was going to comment responsibly, I was going to have to locate and read the full poem for myself.
(Another digression! I acknowledged a moment ago that, like everyone else, I am imperfect. So I don’t always manage to remember U.S. Senator Cory Booker’s sage advice: “You don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.” I beg of you: Please do not invite me to all of your arguments. There are simply too many.)
It’s important to note that what prompted @amylynnuws to tag me wasn’t the published poem. It was the tweet from
, publicly reprinting a private email from a Jewish subscriber —albeit removing the subscriber’s name—and (ostensibly) enlisting Twitter readers to help craft a response.If you’ve managed to stay with me this far, maybe you paused as you read that last sentence and wondered, “Why did she write ‘(ostensibly)’ there?”
Initially, as I said on Twitter, I was willing to give Only Poems (or whichever staff member was behind the tweet) the benefit of the doubt. Yes, I thought it less than ideal that they’d published a private message. And yes, the language in the tweet suggested that they held a perspective about the conflict with which I disagree. But was this an instance of antisemitism? I wasn’t prepared to say so in that initial moment.
My view changed once I read not just the poem, but also the contributor’s and editor’s notes.4 At best, whichever editor/staff member wrote the “would you please help us compose a response for this” tweet is ignorant of the larger problem here.
Put simply, despite what the language in the poem, the contributor’s note, the editor’s note, and the tweet would have readers believe, what Hamas unleashed on October 7—and its consequences—cannot be neatly framed within conventional/prevalent “oppressor/oppressed” frameworks. And invoking those frameworks in the context of the current conflict—not to mention within the longer history that surrounds it—too often leads to rhetoric and tropes (evident in what Only Poems published) that are antisemitic in effect, if not always in intent.
As I say, this is a best-case scenario.5
Thus, Only Poems has earned a place on my “Writers, Beware” document. Not because they published a poem that my own Jewish experience, education, and emotions lead me to find distasteful. I’ve added the journal to the list—and will no longer amplify it in
as a paying journal that offers fee-free submissions windows—because the journal itself is trafficking in antisemitic language and tropes and evincing the same lack of knowledge, nuance, and editorial integrity that, more and more, are poisoning our literary and literary-adjacent communities. And the last thing I want is for more Jewish writers to experience what the unnamed correspondent to Only Poems has now encountered, perhaps (for me, this is a worst-case scenario!) because they were led to a journal or conference or other literary space through a resource that I have curated.For more than 20 years, I’ve been trying to help other writers and our shared and overlapping spaces. I’ve considered the newsletter and other efforts to be forms of literary citizenship and service. Although much of that work has addressed the full universe of (English-language) poets, fictionists, and writers of creative nonfiction, some of my efforts have focused on the particular needs of and opportunities for the Jewish writing community in which I am rooted.
At the outset of this dispatch, I explained why I began to keep those two strands of work separate. And I suggested that as the general literary universe becomes increasingly hostile to Jewish writers like me,6 the considerable time, effort, and energy that I devote to it seems increasingly misplaced. Perhaps I should invest more of those resources elsewhere. Perhaps I should be doing more for (or with?) other Jewish writers who share my concerns. Because I know that I am not alone.7
In Conclusion
Let’s be clear: I haven’t suffered anything approaching what my actual and spiritual family in Israel have endured since the early hours of October 7, or what innocent Gazans have experienced thanks not only to Hamas’s attack on Israel, but also to its refusal to 1) release and return all the Israeli hostages; 2) cease combat/rocket fire; 3) stop hiding behind civilian infrastructure and civilians themselves.
But even as we’ve seen mainstream literary spaces (hello again, Literary Hub!) spotlight writers—mainly writers of Palestinian background—as they share grief and anger borne of their keen identification with “one side” of this conflict, there’s been a lot of grief and anger over what has befallen “our people” among Jewish writers, too. Even if that’s not what Literary Hub or the other publications listed on the “Writers, Beware” document are publishing. Even if many Jewish writers—in Israel and across the global diaspora—are expressing themselves only privately, in closed Facebook groups, or private emails (that I am not going to post without permission), or actual conversations. After all, we have witnessed responses to those who dare to express it—even alongside anguish for Palestinian suffering, as Joanna Chen did. Or as PEN America has.8
After this post goes out, you may find some Jewish writers disagreeing, vehemently, with much (if not all) that I’ve pointed out here. Perhaps they’ll preface their remarks with this lofty three-word introduction: As a Jew. (Here’s another fun fact: Like every other demographic group, Jews are not a monolith! We’re individuals! Maybe even more so—ever heard the saying, “two Jews, three opinions”?) The Jewish people are, in fact, much more diverse than most people realize. But despite the impression you may have gleaned from a certain outsized, vocal, and social-media-savvy segment of Jewish writers, my perspective is much closer to prevailing communal sentiments than theirs.
For those who can stand it, I’ll append some “Further Reading/Resources” below. For those who haven’t yet unsubscribed—but are about to—that’s fine. There’s no need to send me a message explaining why. (If you value anything that I may have contributed to your writing practice over the past 20+ years, please do me the courtesy of sparing me such a message. Thank you.)
And for those of you who have read all the way through this and plan to stick around for April’s newsletter, expect it to land in your mailbox at the end of March. And I thank you, too. More than I can say.
I’ll sign off by wishing everyone the best—and wishing, truly, for peace and justice for all.
Further Reading/Resources
In reverse-chronological order.
This week also brought a highly-discussed “literary-adjacent” episode: Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, which I opted not to feature in this post. But I don’t want to omit it altogether. Commentaries that I found particularly resonant, in part for their applicability to the literary community, include contributions from: Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson; Times of Israel editor-in-chief David Horovitz; Oscar-winner Richard Trank; British editor/journalist Josh Glancy; and Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
Jewish Book Council’s “Reporting Antisemitism in the Literary World” initiative
The January 2024 issue of The Practicing Writer 2.0 (editor’s note)
“18 Ways to Address Antisemitism in Your Literary Life”: original conference handout and subsequent presentation (video) for Literary Modiin (queued up to my remarks)
The November 2023 issue of The Practicing Writer 2.0 (editor’s note)
“Avoiding Antisemitic and Islamophobic Tropes in Discussing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”
We value our subscribers, and we protect their privacy. We keep our subscriber list confidential.
About Erika Dreifus: Erika is a writer, teacher, and literary consultant whose books include Birthright: Poems and Quiet Americans: Stories. A Fellow in the Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute and an adjunct associate professor at Baruch College/CUNY, she lives in New York. Please visit ErikaDreifus.com to learn more about her work and follow her right here on Substack, on Facebook, and/or on Twitter, where she tweets (mostly) “on matters bookish and/or Jewish.”
Full disclosure: Although I’ve never met Joanna Chen, our paths have crossed “virtually” a number of times, not least when she wrote an exceedingly generous review of Birthright: Poems for an Israel-based publication.
Update: The morning after this post went out, Chen’s essay was re-published by Washington Monthly.
Another disclosure: Literary Hub has twice published my own work; in a past role working for a publishing company I pitched and placed other material there on the company’s behalf, too. All of that occurred before 2017. For some years now, I’ve found Literary Hub’s coverage on Israel/Palestine to be highly problematic, and I unsubscribed from their emails long ago.
Another post-publication update: In the initial post that went out to Substack subscribers, I inadvertently omitted the hyperlink to this material (although it had been included in the corresponding listing that I’d entered into the “Writers, Beware” document). I apologize for this proofreading oversight, especially because reading the linked material is essential to understanding how I reached my conclusions.
In a “best-case” scenario such as that, I hold out hope for the impact of education. To that end, I support calls such as the one
issued to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) after the organization’s most recent conference. In a post-conference edition of her Substack , Einstein sought engagement “to help the staff, board, and conference organizers understand the complexities of the issues at hand and learn to recognize the language that moves beyond legitimate protest and into antisemitism.” On my recommendation, she cited a specific organization, Project Shema, as a resource to consult. (I’d recently attended a training for faculty and staff at the college where I teach that I found exceedingly thoughtful and instructive). But I believe that similar to the ways in which many Jewish-communal organizations have developed educational initiatives to bring to other settings—workplaces, governmental bodies, schools, colleges and universities—those same organizations need to start devoting attention to tailoring outreach to literary and other cultural communities.Self-described “anti-Zionist Jewish writers,” however, seem to encounter little difficulty navigating the wider literary community. For now, anyway.
I’ll take this opportunity to recommend (strongly!)
, an absolutely outstanding new Substack from . (If you’re a regular reader of My Machberet, you may have caught my earlier recommendation!)Publishing spaces for the writers I’m referencing here may be limited, but some do exist. There are, of course, a number of explicitly Jewish outlets (some of them newly launched, in response to October 7 and its aftermath). Unfortunately, not all of these meet the “fee-free and paying” criteria necessary for regular inclusion in The Practicing Writer 2.0, but you’ll find a resource list (that’s in desperate need of a full update!) over on my website. And anyone who takes a close look at the materials included in “After October 7: Readings, Recordings, and More” will notice that among the source publications are at least a few that are secular/mainstream. For which I am most definitely grateful.