With Holocaust Memorial Day just behind us, I’ve been reflecting on the health of my industry: publishing. I’m an award-winning author of some 22 published novels, you see. You could say that storytelling is my forte. I’m also Jewish. So, let me tell you a tale of high drama and tragedy, still unfolding and full of unbelievable twists and turns…
Once upon a time, several decades ago, American academia invented the concept of identity politics. This included critical race theory and gender ideology, with a generous side-order of Marxism.
Around 2015, publishing, which was feeling very guilty about being terribly white, middle-class and Christian, bought an off-the-shelf ideological glow-up in the form of identity politics, and the “Great Awokening” took place.
Suddenly, the white working class, sex-realist lesbians and gays, and Zionist Jews (so, 94 per cent of Jews) were “out”, recast as malign manifestations of privilege, transphobia, colonial oppression and apartheid.
Transness, “People of Colour”, the “Global South” and Palestine were “in”. A purge took place in publishing, the likes of which nobody had seen since the Inquisition. Twitter was the new kangaroo court of justice for the self-appointed Grand Inquisitors, and heretics, who vocally refused to subscribe to the new pseudo-religion, were tortured and then cast out. I started to have many an argument with colleagues, I can tell you.
Even before October 7, things had got bad for Jews in the industry. By 2023, critical race theory had already cast us as the world-controlling, child-gobbling bogeyman in the reframed history of the unjust West.
Through the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), Israel had been blacklisted by literary fiction’s best millionaire Zio-loathing miserablist, Sally Rooney, and even much revered author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker.
Unsurprisingly then, after October 7, the pro-Palestine movement gripped the collective imagination of publishing like nothing else. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis were embraced by progressive writers as plucky freedom fighters, with their cool keffiyehs and watermelon and inverted-triangle iconography.
Publishing’s trade press, The Bookseller, distributed the Jhalak Review, seemingly uncritical of its grotesquely anti-Zionist content that demonises the Jewish state.
Book Workers for a Free Palestine and Fossil Free Books tried to influence the Society of Authors (and were partly successful).
Criticism of Israel’s “genocide” was spewed liberally on bookish social media and in painstakingly crafted open letters, where more and more authors called for sanctions against the world’s only Jewish state, parroting Hamas statistics, talking points and propaganda without challenge. Among authors and artists, it has become an article of faith that Israel is a genocidal, colonial, oppressive, apartheid regime – one routinely portrayed as deliberately killing children, bombing hospitals and starving innocent Palestinians.
If only our literary greats spent more time criticising Hamas’ penchant for throwing gay men off rooftops. Even now as a ceasefire is in place, there is rarely bookish acknowledgement of Hamas’s barbarism, its role in Gazan suffering or Israel’s right to defend itself. Even with the killings of Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby in the recent Manchester terror attack and the slaughter of Jews at Bondi, the industry largely remains shtum about antisemitism.
We also hear mainly deafening silence over the uprising in Iran against the Ayatollah’s oppressive theocracy. No, our literary greats save their opprobrium for the “apartheid” state, Israel. But boy, have these guys been at pains to decry antisemitism! They really love Jews, guys – presumably just not the 94 per cent of British Jewry who believe in Israel’s right to exist.
If Jews are smeared as genocidal vermin in anti-Zionist inversions of the truth, resulting in vandalism, beatings and murder, from north Manchester to Bondi? Well, that’s just collateral damage in championing of the “right side of history” and calls to “globalise the intifada”, I guess.
I blame the leftwards shift of the Overton Window for the situation where Jews in publishing have been made to feel like far-right pariahs. Our hard-left “literati” were destined to fall for the “kind” claptrap of identity politics, with its baked-in Marxism.
Add a dash of antisemitism learnt at the knee, and you have the recipe for a divisive, contagious cult.
Publishing, like music, film and TV, is a super-spreader industry, manufacturing thought as entertainment for the masses. As such, society must inoculate itself against an antisemitic contagion. We must stop the rot in all of the culture industries and media.
Does this story have a happy ending? It seems clear that if publishing and academia continue to poison their own wells of diversity with Jew-hate, more of us will make aliyah to escape a life of persecution.
Conversely, Jewish culture will prevail. Jewish artists are uniting and pushing back. Only last week, I launched an arts policy think-tank, Culture Together, to offer political solutions to this dysfunction.
Of course, the writing of Jews, read for millennia, will outlast this mad time. So, ask me in a year if we’ll all live happily ever after. Perhaps by then, I’ll have an idea of how this chapter ends, if not the whole sorry story.
Marnie Riches is an award-winning bestselling author and founder of the new centrist arts-policy think tank Culture Together, offering solutions for renewal in the currently dysfunctional culture industries and media
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