On PEN America’s Craven, Hypocritical Leadership
When PEN America’s leadership finally called for an immediate — but not permanent — ceasefire on March 30, it was not because six months of livestreamed genocide had brought about a crisis of conscience. It was because over 1000 American writers, in protest of the organization’s failure to defend their colleagues in Gaza, had sworn to refuse participation in all PEN America programming, including the upcoming World Voices Festival. Now, as the hypocritical “free speech” institution tries to save face, the mask is slipping.
PEN America’s craven leadership has failed over and over again to live up to the charter which is supposed to guide its work. These transgressions are well-documented in recent press coverage of PEN America, and include:
The forcible removal of Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar from a PEN America event on January 31, for which the organization has still not apologized;
The sustained bias and one-sidedness of the organization’s coverage of the war on Gaza;
The systemic exclusion of Palestinian writers from the Writers at Risk database until April 2024;
The disparity between the organization’s support for a free Ukraine and its equivocations and bothsides-ism regarding Palestine;
The abject mismanagement of the PEN Prison Writing Contest, which has failed to pay or mentor multiple imprisoned writers who participated in the program;
The hypocrisy in claiming to “respect the right of writers to control the publication and distribution of their work” while condemning Sally Rooney for deciding not to sell translation rights of a novel to an Israeli publisher;
The sanctioning of the use of force against students engaged in protest on their university campuses;
The management’s restrictions on the free expression of its own staff members;
The ongoing failure of senior leadership to negotiate in good faith with union members in PEN America United, with whom contract negotiations have been ongoing for more than eighteen months.
“I concluded long ago that PEN America is an unreliable narrator, not committed to the things it claims to be committed to,” wrote Esther Allen — after righteously declining the PEN/Manheim award for translation—in a letter shared with us. Allen is not alone. Over 30 authors withdrew their works from consideration for the 2024 PEN America Literary Awards. “I find it shameful that this recognition should exist under the banner of PEN America,” wrote Maya Binyam in her letter of refusal. “I join [other authors] in calling for an audit of PEN America’s longstanding support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
In December, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel and President Jenny Boylan went to “the Middle East,” a.k.a. “Tel Aviv,” to — as Boylan put it in a Facebook post — “understand the current catastrophe up close.” Despite the systematic destruction of universities, libraries, and museums in Gaza by “israeli” airstrikes; the targeted assassinations of Palestinian writers and journalists by “Israeli” drones; and the constant abductions of Palestinians by zionists in the West Bank, the only thing Nossel and Boylan learned was that it might be unwise to admit to having launched “PEN Israel.”
On January 30, the Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar and other members of WAWOG disrupted a PEN America-sponsored event for a Zionist author in Los Angeles. Jarrar used a portable speaker to play the names of writers murdered by “Israel.” She also used her voice to denounce PEN America for its silence on the genocide of her people. Within minutes, she was forcibly removed by security. A week later, in February, LitHub published an open letter signed by over 600 writers demanding, inter alia, “that PEN America apologize to Jarrar and take more concrete steps to support Palestinian writers in the face of a new wave of repression, retaliation, and bigotry.” (The letter’s signatories now number over 1300.)
On March 13, over two dozen writers and academics, including Isabella Hammad and Michelle Alexander, announced their collective withdrawal from the upcoming PEN World Voices Festival, citing PEN America’s failure to call for “an immediate and unconditional ceasefire” as well as the organization’s history of condemning authors who support the cultural and academic boycott of “Israel.” A week later, PEN America released what they called a “letter to the community.” In this letter, the organization’s leaders lied about their own documented stances against boycotting “Israel.” They referred to Jarrar’s removal from their January 30 event as a “difficult experience.” (They did not say for whom it was difficult, nor did they apologize.) They belatedly called for an immediate, but not unconditional or permanent, ceasefire.
On April 22, the PEN Literary Awards Ceremony was canceled after the overwhelming majority of nominated writers (many of whom, vulnerable and under-resourced, chose to stand in solidarity with the people of Gaza and refuse PEN’s dirty money) withdrew from consideration. The estate that controls the largest award, the Jean Stein Book Award, withdrew the prize money from PEN America to give to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. Less than a week later, after a second waterfall of principled withdrawals, PEN America was forced to cancel its flagship World Voices Festival.
It has becoming overwhelmingly clear that under Nossel’s tenure, PEN America has dropped the P.E.N. The priorities of the current leadership lie not with poets, essays, or novelists, but with her “former” employer: the U.S. State Department. As a result, the organization’s commitments are no longer to free expression, but to liberalism, imperial hegemony, and exported democracy. PEN America’s motto — “the freedom to write” — is hypocritical, hollow, even deceptive.
We believe there can be no freedom to write without a free Palestine.
As Toni Morrison said in 1981, “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement — assertive, militant, pugnacious.”
