PEN America’s “Silent Moratorium” Prompts Very Loud Criticism
Defector
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PEN America president Dinaw Mengestu resigned from his position this past Thursday after the troubled free-expression organization published a https://pen.org/a-silent-moratorium-interviews-with-israeli-and-jewish-writers/">report reaffirming its opposition to cultural boycotts.
The report, titled "A Silent Moratorium," recounts anecdotes from editors, agents, and writers who describe "rising isolation and exclusion" faced by Israeli and Jewish authors.
Mengestu saw the report as dangerously and falsely categorizing the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement—which seeks to impose financial and cultural costs on Israeli occupation and genocide—as discrimination. "What PEN America fails to understand is that a boycott is a form of dialogue," Mengestu wrote https://www.instagram.com/p/Das2SpiIACB/?hl=en&img_index=5">in a statement posted to Instagram on Monday.
"A Silent Moratorium" https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/07/why-pen-americas-president-dinaw-mengestu-resigned/687891/">took unusually long to produce because of the scrutiny PEN America knew it would face.
The report relies heavily on secondhand anecdotes; of the handful of writers who speak directly about their own experiences, one is an English professor at an Israeli university who says his creative writing students are wondering, "What am I going to do with my manuscript?" Another is a creative writing PhD student at the same university, who hasn't submitted her finished novel to publishers because she's afraid it will be rejected.
When it turns to data, "A Silent Moratorium" refers to 350 self-reports to a hotline for "antisemitic literary-related incidents." We are not given specifics about any of these incidents.
One major piece of evidence in the report is the existence of a spreadsheet titled "Is your fav author a zionist???" that went viral on Twitter in May 2024 and targets writers of all races; the report tuts its tongue at chilling epithets in the spreadsheet like "also zionist lowkey."