Welcome to the literary intifada

(RNS) — “Literary intifada? Isn’t that a little strong?”

Perhaps. But, pay attention to what is going on in the literary world.

Recently, an employee at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn cancelled a book event with Joshua Leifer and Rabbi Andy Bachman, because “we don’t want a Zionist onstage.” The bookstore apologized for its employee’s unauthorized action and rescheduled the event.

And now, it’s about the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of the preeminent thinkers of our time —  affectionately known by his initials, BHL.

“Shelf Awareness,” a prominent trade publication for publishing professionals, including bookstores and librarians, refused to advertise BHL’s new book.

Why? Because the book is “Israel Alone.” They feared the word “Israel” in its title might upset its audience.

In the words of Matt Baldacci, the publisher of “Shelf Awareness:”

We have a responsibility to our 250 independent bookstore partners, and it’s our feeling that running that ad in their publications, for some of those partners, is going to cause them trouble that they haven’t asked for and don’t wish to have.

For certain stores, an ad for Israel Alone will cause the employees to go to the management and say, ‘We don’t support this. Why are you doing this?’ Now we can debate, you know, whether they’re right or they’re wrong, but the point is, it will happen … Customers will complain, too.

Melanie Notkin, the author and communications consultant who had tried to place the advertisement, was shocked.

If the word Israel is too hot a potato to have on the pages of your newsletter as a paid ad, when does it become the word Jew? When does it become a Jewish author? When does it become anything to do with anybody Jewish in America? When students say “We don’t want Zionists on our campus,” when a publication says “We don’t want an ad that says Israel on its title in our publication,” what does this say about the direction we’re headed in America?

But, wait: there’s more. Last week, 400 writers signed a letter calling for a mass boycott of the Israeli publishing industry, except for those who have denounced the “genocide” in Gaza.

Authors have also been refusing to have their works translated into Hebrew and published in Israel.

Authors are being pressured to withdraw their work from consideration by Israeli publishers and refusing to participate in Israeli literary festivals.

Ever since last Oct. 7, Erika Dreifus has been paying attention to “sites that are vilifying the Jewish state, or Jewish writers… Even before Israel went into Gaza, literary sites and magazines began putting out statements that were so egregious, so bigoted, so antisemitic.”

It is the Jew-hatred of the intellectual class.

So, yes: “Literary intifada” works.

All of which illuminates the message of “Israel Alone” in a way that even the author could not have predicted.

The book is absolutely riveting. It tells the story of Oct. 7 — but beyond that, it chronicles the world’s response to that horror.

BHL writes:

Nowhere in the world where Jews are safe; that is the message.

And whether we are secular or mystic, modern or observant, whether we are Yiddish-speaking Hasidim from Williamsburg, freshmen at MIT or the Sorbonne, Californians or New Yorkers, we all find ourselves thrown into the situation of our elders. We had hoped to escape it. But here it is.

In fact, there had been moments, long before this, that should have sounded alarms for the world, but we ignored them:

…What we had refused to see in Syria when a dictator ordered his opponents dissolved in acid baths, their wives raped in front of their parents, and their children exposed to banned chemical weapons; what I had filmed in Nigeria, where Boko Haram and Fulani militants were hacking up Christians with machetes — we had all of that recorded right before our eyes in Israel.

BHL writes that Israel’s need to defend itself against Hamas was always self-apparent. The world has refused to accept this, especially the left:

We watched as New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman publicly called into question whether Israeli women were really raped and then doubled down, calling the accusations “propaganda.”

“The Squad” describe themselves as progressives despite having long ago said goodbye to the universalist humanism of the Enlightenment.

As for the 240 hostages who had seen their loved ones raped, beheaded, and gutted before being led like cattle into the wet tunnels of Khan Younis, there to be humiliated, beaten, starved, drugged, and raped — the so-called “progressives” of the Democratic Party quickly came to act as if they did not exist.

The title, “Israel Alone,” more than adequately sums up the Jewish condition in the world today. Yes, Israel is alone. In an earlier book (“The Genius of Judaism”), BHL wrote:

The truth is that one can now be antisemitic only by being anti-Zionist; anti-Zionism is the required path for any antisemitism that wishes to expand its recruiting pool beyond those still nostalgic for the discredited brotherhoods.

Israel and Zionism are being cancelled. As Yossi Klein Halevi has said about the cancellation of Lévy’s ad:

It is yet another example of a totalitarian form of censorship. There is an atmosphere of intimidation which is self-perpetuating because someone fears that intimidation will be applied. Then that opens the way to self-intimidation, and we know from totalitarian societies that the most powerful form of censorship is self-censorship … We’re being pushed back in the ghetto.

Israel is alone, and increasingly, Jews are alone — in spaces wherein we have not been accustomed to being alone.

I search within BHL’s words for a note of hope. I found that note of hope in his earlier book, “The Genius of Judaism”:

The Jews are strong. I do not mean in the sense of the brute force that is usually conveyed by the word “strength.” They are strong through study and spirit. They are strong through their memory and through their effort to know … Strong in knowing that the sage is greater even than the prophet. They are strong when, through intense effort, through unrelenting struggle with the self, through an asceticism of spirit that does not deny the body or its knowledge, they dedicate themselves to the astonishing discovery that God is a writer whose Book must never become an unclaimed inheritance.

Read BHL’s new book.

And, this year, let us all resolve to make Jews and Israel a little less alone.