The literary world has a problem with Israel
Amid criticism from staff members and others, a prestigious literary magazine has retracted an essay by an Israeli writer and translator wrestling with her attempts to find mutual understanding with Palestinians after October 7.
Guernica online magazine did not explain the retraction over the weekend but said it “regrets having published” the essay by Joanna Chen, titled “From The Edges Of A Broken World.”
The retraction came after multiple members of the journal’s volunteer staff resigned publicly over the essay.
Madhuri Sastry, a humanrights worker and researcher formerly of the American Red Cross, quit as co-publisher on Sunday after calling the essay “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism and the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” She also called for the resignation of the magazine’s editor-inchief, Jina Ngarambe.
As many as 15 other editors and staffers also resigned, according to a review of recent changes to the magazine’s masthead, many after making their own public statements decrying the essay and Guernica’s choice to print it. Ishita Marwah, Guernica’s departing fiction editor, for example, wrote that publishing the piece made the magazine “a pillar of eugenicist white colonialism masquerading as goodness.”
The Guernica page that used to house Chen’s essay now reads, “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.”
Chen did not immediately return a request for comment.
The retraction comes amid widespread tensions within the literary community over the Israel-Hamas war. A number of independent literary magazines like Guernica have prioritized pro-Palestinian narratives – and Jewish and pro-Israel authors have been targeted with online criticism.
The situation is so acute that the Jewish Book Council, a nonprofit that promotes Jewish writers and stories, recently launched an initiative to track antisemitism in the literary
world.
Guernica’s case stands out because Chen, and her essay, are deeply critical of Israel. Chen, a writer and translator of both Hebrew and Arabic work who moved to Israel from the United Kingdom as a teenager, wrote for Guernica in 2015 about her efforts not to build on land from which Palestinians had been displaced. In the retracted essay, she details her commitment to coexistence and frets over the ways in which Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel has challenged it.
Chen writes that she did not serve in the IDF, and describes how she worked as a volunteer for Road to Recovery, an organization in which Israelis provide transport for Palestinians who are seeking medical care, both before and after Hamas’ attack (while briefly pausing in the immediate aftermath). She also recalls an experience donating blood to Palestinians during Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza, for which she received blowback from other Israelis. But she says the bridges she had been working to build felt impossible to complete after Oct. 7.
Almost as soon as the piece appeared online, it began drawing criticism from within the Guernica staff. Founded in 2004, partly in response to the Iraq War, and named after Pablo Picasso’s famous antiwar painting, the nonprofit magazine has long married literary bona fides and leftwing politics. Having published writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, George Saunders, and Jesmyn Ward, it identifies its focus as “the intersection of art and politics.”
The publication of Chen’s
piece, Sastry said in her statement, violated the magazine’s “anti-imperialist” spirit. She wrote that she had initially pushed the magazine to support a cultural boycott of Israel but was told that the publication’s politics should be expressed “solely through our editorial choices and position.” Now, she said, an editorial process she sees as opaque had led to the publication of a piece she could not support.
“I am deeply ashamed to see this piece in Guernica’s pages, and sincerely apologize to the writers, readers and supporters who feel betrayed by this decision,” the co-publisher tweeted.
Sastry did not provide examples of what she found objectionable about the piece, except to note that it “attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide.” However, several other departing editors offered more specific critiques.
“It starts from the outside, from a place that ostensibly acknowledges the ‘shared humanity’ of Palestinians and Israelis, yet fails or refuses to trace the shape of power — in this case, a violent, imperialist, colonial power — that makes the systematic and historic dehumanization of Palestinians (the tacit precondition for why she may feel a need at all to affirm ‘shared humanity’ in the first place) a non-issue,” senior editor April Zhu wrote in a statement published Saturday.
For some Jews who have questioned their place in progressive and literary spaces since October 7, Guernica’s retraction offered new evidence of a toxic discourse in which no Israeli or Jew can pass muster.