On Suzanne Nossel’s Departure from PEN America
After nine months of organized protest, awards withdrawals, mass staff defections, and sustained boycotts in solidarity with Palestinian writers, PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel resigned today.
When we called for a boycott of the organization this past summer, we did so to help bring about systemic change, beginning first with the removal of Suzanne Nossel from the position as CEO — a position she had held for over a decade. Suzanne Nossel did not lose her job simply because she was an abusive boss, nor because she actively disdained writers and literature. She did not lose her job for her gross mismanagement of PEN America’s prizes, nor for her defense of transphobes and white nationalists, though perhaps she should have. The evidence is clear: Nossel lost her job because her commitment to Zionism made her a liability to PEN America.
Even before her time at PEN America, Nossel had made a career of, as she put it, “defending Israel.” From the moment she was hired at PEN America in 2013, Suzanne Nossel’s warmongering commitments to Zionism, Islamophobia, and American empire roiled the organization, leading to resignations by concerned staff and board members. Her decision to award the Press Freedom Award to Charlie Hebdo in the wake of their Islamophobic cartoons in 2015 led to boycotts of the organization. The organization’s partnership with the Israeli government for its World Voices Festival likewise sparked outrage, and in 2016–17 over 200 writers joined Adalah-NY in a campaign that culminated in the suspension of Israeli state funding for the festival.
Over the past year, as Israel has waged genocide on Gaza, Suzanne Nossel chose to weaponize the resources and reputation of PEN America to parrot “Israeli” propaganda and defend genocidaires in the United States, instead of protecting Palestinian writers and journalists. She attempted to “chill the free expression” of her employees, all while doubling down on her own free speech absolutism, championing the speech of Zionists and denigrating the speech of Palestinians and their allies. A few short weeks after she made a trip to Israel in her official capacity, PEN America hosted the vocally genocidal Zionist Mayim Bialik, and forcibly dragged Palestinian writer Randa Jarrar out of the event, an act for which the organization has still not apologized.
Faced with a self-inflicted organizational crisis this past year, Nossel chose not to engage with the critiques from thousands of writers. Instead, she continued to use PEN America’s once-respected platform to uplift slanderous, bad-faith attacks on her critics in an apparent hope that we would all just shut up. Even when writers forced the cancellation of PEN America’s flagship events and protested the PEN America Gala, Nossel doubled down, using the organization as a mouthpiece for her both-sidesism, her normalization of apartheid, and her baseless accusations of antisemitism.
While we welcome the end of Nossel’s tenure, we will continue our work until PEN America lives up to its mission statement and steps up to meaningfully and materially support Palestinian writers. Of all the PEN chapters, it is PEN America that bears the most responsibility to call for an end to the genocide that its own government is funding, supporting, and encouraging.
And so, while we applaud this critical change at PEN America — a turn away from a period marked by vapid, toxic leadership and an utter disregard for the humanity of Palestinians — we remain steadfast in our demands that the organization move into this new era with a commitment to protecting Palestinian writers and journalists.
Nossel’s resignation is a victory for the Palestine solidarity movement. There is no place for Zionism in our cultural institutions.
