Of all the ways to think about antisemitism—as a bigotry, as a conspiracy theory, as “the oldest hatred”—one of the most useful is as a kind of brain rot. Something about Jew hatred (sort of like Trump hatred, come to think of it) is that it infects not only the holder of the opinion but the people around her; it is also a form of stupidity that makes people stupid in other ways. It’s like the odor of skunkweed: you don’t have to be the one who smoked it, it’s enough just to have been in the room—Snoop Dogg on the radio, burrito wrappers balled up on the floor—while your besties smoked the weed, and the stench will cling to you. And so you find much-laureled opinionators M Gessen and Roxane Gay both driven to their worst takes by the topic of antisemitism. Antisemitism not only makes the antisemite stupid, it harms the thinking of others.

First, to my old Yale classmate Roxane Gay. You may have followed the minor fracas around the rapper Macklemore, who is held in wild contempt by people who actually know about hiphop but who will forever be in my heart for his unbelievably catchy 2012 novelty song “Thrift Shop,” whose awesome hooks are surpassed only by the delightful awesomeness of the video. Seriously, if you do nothing else today, watch it:

So this mofo made that, which perhaps is enough to earn him his place in the World to Come, as my people would say. But anyway, Macklemore has a history of strident anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian commentary, and he dropped some of it onstage recently in New Jersey while opening for Ed Sheeran, leading him to be dropped from the tour—which thus led other opening acts to pull out in support of Macklemore.

Here is as a good a place as any to point out that while Macklemore’s support for Palestine may be entirely sincere, if it were just a scheme to reignite his career with the new patina of social-justice warrior, it would be kind of brilliant. The same Brooklyn hipsters who would not be caught dead listening to his three hits will now never be caught dead saying they wouldn’t be caught dead listening to his three hits, because, well, No Enemies to the Left. He gave himself gender reassignment surgery: went in Vanilla Ice, came out Joan Baez.

Now, I side with my friend Jay Michaelson that what Macklemore said onstage was not actually “hate speech”; I’d add that listening to a 2-minute bloviation about the Middle East but then getting to hear “Thrift Shop” is not such a bad deal. But I also feel that pop music generally should stay away from politics, because a) I don’t go to pop concerts to think about politics, b) mass-appeal performers perform a real good by bringing together fans from across the political spectrum in apolitical events of mass joy, and c) most pop performers, like most humans, don’t know their head from their elbows when it comes to any given political issue, and it’s a huge problem with modern civilization that your average teen gets their views on geopolitics from Bella Hadid’s Insta and Dua Lipa’s TikTok. Lest you think I am picking on pop stars (and athletes—they too often make matters worse when they opine on politics), hear me now and believe me later: Poets are even worse. As are novelists. When I dive into an article that is going to mention the political views of people from my guild, writers, I steel myself for what I know is going to be a supersized helping of stupid. Writing a good sestina, play, or novel does not make you in the least bit smarter about politics. Most of us should shut up most of the time.

But don’t tell that to Roxane Gay, who feels that the Ed Sheerans of the world, and even their opening acts, should opine away. Here she is in the Times:

Macklemore made an eloquent public statement about being dropped and soon after, the other opening acts and Mr. Sheeran’s backing band left the tour in solidarity. Mr. Sheeran, for his part, said in a statement that it wasn’t his decision to remove Macklemore, but the decision of the venue owners and tour promoter: “I am not complicit. I have my personal views on this devastating conflict. Just because I choose not to speak publicly, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them, and it doesn’t mean I don’t care.”

Celebrities often demur when asked to share their political opinions. In these situations, the breadth of what is deemed political is wide-ranging: anything that might affect their brand, public image, earning potential, reputation or legacy. Celebrities will say they aren’t interested in politics or they don’t “do” politics or they don’t talk about politics. They are all about their work, nothing more. If they remain neutral (silent), they won’t offend anyone and they will, hopefully, appeal to everyone. They use the facade of neutrality as shelter, as a place to take refuge.

In his original statement, Mr. Sheeran added that his fans don’t come to his concerts for a “political forum,” which was simply expanding the geography of his refuge. What could he do? He is merely a servant, subject to the desires of his audience.

The statement was as tepid and indistinct as his music. He used vagueness and ambiguity so people could read into his words what they wanted to hear. Maybe, privately, he really was a passionate advocate for the Palestinians. Maybe he really did, privately, believe Israel was not committing genocide.

Mr. Sheeran had previously implied that he has a right to privacy when it comes to his political views and that, though he is one of the most famous and high-earning musicians in the world, he has no power in this situation. The venues, the promoters, anyone but him is responsible for all that has come to pass.

But in Mr. Sheeran’s case, there was a previous exception: Ukraine. In 2022, he performed at a fund-raiser for Ukraine and on more than one occasion he expressed solidarity with the war-torn country. He was political, it seemed, when he deemed it safe enough to be so. Otherwise, Mr. Sheeran used neutrality as a refuge for himself, but that refuge did not extend to his audience.

He promised good music and a good time, no politics, even though after three hours, his fans would stream out of the stadium and return to their lives where they did not get to opt out of all of the problems politics creates — the immense emotional toll of so many civilians dying senseless deaths, not to mention high gas prices because of the war in Iran, inflation and stagnant wages.

[…]

Celebrities are quite selective about acknowledging the influence they have on their audience. When it comes to politics and so many other matters of substance and urgency, they’re just actors or musicians or athletes: Why would anyone care what they think? But when they go on a press junket for a project or serve as a product’s spokesman or become a brand ambassador, they are crystal clear about their power, what it’s worth, and how they should use it.

In some ways, I can understand their reluctance to make their political opinions known. Oftentimes, when they are asked where they stand on any given issue, the people asking are merely wanting the celebrity to affirm their own stances. If the celebrity doesn’t, he or she is roundly criticized or, lately, canceled.

[…]

As for Sheeran, after days of intense public scrutiny and pressure, he reluctantly spoke about Gaza at his first concert since Macklemore was dropped from the tour. It appears he did so because the future of his tour was in question. In his remarks, Sheeran said that Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks in Israel were “horrific and compounded centuries of Jewish pain,” and that “what is happening in Gaza is catastrophic and unjustifiable and disproportionate.”

His heart is broken. He harbors so much empathy for the children. He would even go on to shed a few tears as if to punctuate his sincerity. Earlier in his preconcert speech he also noted, “I have tried in my career not to be a political commentator of any kind, because I want my music and shows to be about unity, not division; about humanity, not politics.” How unity would be possible without acknowledging politics is not something Sheeran, whose latest statement prioritizes his own feelings, resolves.

This entire debacle is a stark reminder that opting out of taking political stands is, in and of itself, a political stand: a politics of self-interest.

This all sounds felicitous and lapidary and smooth, but let’s look at what Gay is actually implying: Celebrities have an obligation to comment on politics. One might even infer from her words that we all do. To refuse to comment is a comment in itself. “Silence is violence” as the hoary expression goes. One presumes that, in commenting on Israel/Palestine, Sheeran is also expected, by Gay, to take her side: she would not be praising him if he came in on the side of Israel. In short, celebrities must be lefties, and they must be outspoken about it.

They must be like Roxane Gay.

It is hard to know where this logic ends. Must they speak up about abortion (and be pro-choice)? Must they speak up about voter fraud? My pet issue, which very few seem to care about, is the way that Amazon, with its huge market share gained through predatory pricing, has taken over America, hollowed out our Main Streets, and immiserated many of its own employees. Has Roxane Gay spoken out about the Trump-carbuncle evil that is Jeff Bezos? (Does she order from Amazon, as I guiltily do?) Whose company has, it’s safe to say, netted Gay tens, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of dollars? My other pet issue: animal cruelty. Where is Macklemore on that? Where is Roxane Gay? (I’m happy to be proven wrong; maybe Gay is a vegetarian; please send links.)

Macklemore gave himself gender reassignment surgery: went in Vanilla Ice, came out Joan Baez.

My point is not that anybody who does not speak out on every issue loses the right to speak out about Palestine. That would be silly. My point is that we should respect the freedom of every human in a free society to talk when they want and not talk when they want. If Ed Sheeran thinks he is good at pop music and bad at Middle East commentary, he is allowed to act accordingly. (Just as Edward Luttwak and Peter Beinart may refrain from singing in public.) Does that make Sheeran complicit in “genocide”? Only in the sense that we all are complicit if we are not speaking up about multiple genocides around the world.

Gay’s view can rightly be called totalitarian, in that it leaves no space for private life. We are all being inspected—we all should be inspected—all the time, for what we say and what we do not say. What a cruel, mirthless vision of the world. And also what a stupid, constricted view of the world: as if Ed Sheeran can cure what ails the Middle East, as if he has the responsibility to try. Plenty of good people are on the case; maybe Ed Sheeran doesn’t have to be one of them.

We should respect the freedom of every human in a free society to talk when they want and not talk when they want.

But just when I was ready to go to bed murmuring to myself about the cruel dystopian view of Roxane Gay, I went down a rabbit hole and found myself reading her fellow Times columnist M Gessen’s Facebook post, from a couple months ago, about the PEN America imbroglio. Long story short: the authors’ organization PEN published a report alleging discrimination against Israeli and Jewish authors, and the president of PEN resigned. This issue became a big one for the literary left, for to even have noted anti-Jewish sentiment was seen as giving cover for anti-BDS legislation (which I generally oppose as limiting free speech). Got that? Anyway, you can learn more here, but for now I want to focus on Gessen’s take on the issue. Here are the relevant Facebook screen shots:

Masha Gessen

July 16 ·

The coverage of the PEN America debacle has skirted around one very important point: the strikingly poor quality of the article in question. The writing, the research, and the argument are just so bad. To call it misleading would be an understatement. Let’s take one particular incident that has gotten a lot of traction, presumably not only because the people involved are well-known and beloved (count me among their fans and friends) but also because it is one of the few if not the only fully specific and therefore checkable case in the entire report. I am talking about the story of Etgar Keret (Official) and Ira Glass canceling their planned event in Australia over security concerns expressed by the organizers. Let’s look at a little bit of context.

Among other high-profile cultural cancellations that occurred around the same time in Australia: the Adelaide Writers Week, which collapsed entirely following the dis-invitation of Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah; the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s cancellation of a performance by pianist Jayson Gillham for publicly dedicating a new piece to journalists killed in Gaza (Gillham sued for discrimination and lost). The Palestinian and pro-Palestinian performers, that is, were canceled by the actual organizers -- unlike Keret and Glass, who, it seems, were felled by the organizers’ lack of confidence and/or competence.

Further important context: Keret’s new book was published by Penguin in May 2025; this and numerous other examples undermine the article’s central claim, that Israeli and Jewish writers have been de-published in the United States. After the book was published, Glass and Keret went on tour to promote it, performing to large and enthusiastic audiences in New York and San Francisco. Which is why the article’s authors had to go all the way to Australia for an example of what they perceive as discrimination.

To state the obvious, it sucks to have to cancel an event over security concerns. But it seems to me, it also sucks to have your good name and the crappy thing that happened to you used to make misleading, decontextualized claims.

[…]

Mikhal Dekel: Masha, the picture for Israeli writers or even for Israeli-born writers whose material is Israeli society or history and have not denounced Zionism publicly is more nuanced than both the article or you suggest. Yes, Etgar Keret and Yuval Noah Harari still operate relatively freely in the world, but they are outliers whose high popularity transcends politics. For the rest, the situation is more complicated. One of the challenges of writing about this issue solidly and responsibly is that the evidence is mostly off record. Debórah Harris, who represents many Israeli writers, says she doesn’t necessarily get rejections; it’s just that publishing houses with whom she previously worked have stopped answering her emails. I (an Israeli born writer who has lived in New York for over thirty years and writes in English) have been told by a senior editor of a big publishing house that they would not touch issues related to israel or even Judaism with a two foot pole. I’ve been told by the French publisher of Tehran Children that it’s pretty much impossible to promote the book at this time. I’ve been told a by rep of the Guadalajara Book Fair (off record) that they cannot guarantee my safety if I presented the Spanish edition of the book. I’ve been told by a popular Hebrew novelist that unlike in the past, she can only do events in front of Jewish audiences and is no longer invited to any general audience panels. Her books or books like Eli Sharabi’s *Hostage* are still supported by Jewish cultural venues and Jewish readers in the US, but there’s a sad ghettoization as well as subtle censorship in these worlds as well. So the publishing problem isn’t for books on either radical side of the ideological spectrum (say those by Omer Bartov or Eli Sharabi) but for those who don’t necessarily fall neatly in an ideological box and present complexity, either narratively or ideologically.

Masha Gessen [to] Mikhal Dekel: I have no doubt that this is true. And I have no doubt that it deserves to be a topic of discussion. But it is disingenuous and plain dumb to frame it as censorship. What are the responsibilities of a writer who happens to be a citizen of a state that’s waging a genocidal war? This is something I’ve thought a lot about in the context of Russia. Is it fair to ask a writer to take a position on their country’s actions? Is it fair to deny them the right to keep writing about their society as though the genocide weren’t happening? I happen to think that it is, in fact, fair. But even if you think it’s not fair, it’s a mistake to frame such requirements, or such requests, as censorship or antisemitism. To continue the parallel with Russian writers: many of them have been de-published, and this includes some writers who have gone into exile and even those who have been denounced and tried in absentia by the Russian state. More than that: Elizabeth Gilbert, who is not Russian at all, withdrew a completed novel about a Russian subject because of how it would be received in light of the war in Ukraine (the book had nothing to do with the war or even present-day Russia). That strikes me as excessive but also understandable: speaking broadly, the reading public probably does not want a book that talks about Russia outside the context of its war of aggression in Ukraine. The difference between the ways Russian and Israeli writers have reacted to fairly similar predicaments is remarkable and worth thinking about. The former -- even those who live in exile and have been declared enemies of the Russian state -- accept that this is a penalty they are paying, albeit not entirely fairly, for having failed to prevent the war, even if they were powerless to do so. The latter, many of whom continue to live in Israel, pay taxes there, and enjoy the daily spoils of apartheid, even if they personally do not support it, cry foul.

Masha Gessen [to] Mikhal Dekel: And one more thing. I want to focus in for a second on this expression: writers “who do not fall neatly in an ideological box.” Let’s imagine saying that about a Russian writer who says that maybe there are “two sides” to the war in Ukraine, like maybe it’s not all on Putin. Hell, let’s imagine saying that about a German writer in, say, 1944, as the destruction of European Jewry nears completion. Or am I misinterpreting your comment, and you mean simply those writers who want to write about something other than October 7 and its aftermath? In that case the use of the expression “ideological box” troubles me. Responding to the most pressing moral issues of the day is not an ideological position; it is the actual duty of people who claim the write to speak publicly and creatively.

Mikhal Dekel [to] Masha Gessen As you saw, I have not called it censorship or antisemitism. I haven’t even written about my own experiences because truly, I’m not the real victim today. I don’t think a cultural boycott against Israeli culture works, but I’m happy to be boycotted if it would help. I’m not saying that Israeli writers who justify war crimes in Gaza or the violence and displacement in the West Bank should be supported in the same way as those who oppose them. But there is a lot of writing in Israel - including by Palestinian writers- that isn’t about these issues. There are writers, say Orly Castel Bloom, whose style is more ironic than direct. There are writers/ academics, who are activists in the most dangerous ways but don’t publicly denounce the IDF - say because they have kids in the military. These people won’t be published or heard outside Israel, and this is what I mean by “people who don’t fall neatly into an ideological box.”

Mikhal Dekel [to] Masha Gessen Yes, people who write about other things, in other ways, or about, say, their own grief experience- as David Grossmann wrote about his son. Some of the most leftist people I know in israel have children in the army - they both die of fear for them and die of fear of what they’ll end up doing. Some of the most interesting thinkers - say Hillel Cohen - live and write about the reality on the ground from all sides. Orly Castel Bloom wrote on violence - living in it, fearing it, harming oneself and others. I am researching a book on a mixed Arab-Jewish Haifa building in which some Palestinian residents tell me they’d love their boys to serve in the IDF. Not sure such stories have a place in American publishing today. Again: though I do think there is some hypocrisy in the treatment of Israeli writers (American writers are allowed to publish on non political subjects, American academics aren’t boycotted, there is certainly no demand that Belle Burden denounce the evils of Trumpist America as a precondition for publishing her marriage memoir) - it is not a fight I’m invested in even if it harms me. It’s a small issue in comparison to others.

Anya Geish [to] Masha Gessen While I agree with most of what you are saying (and I am very glad someone is actually saying it), unfortunately many Russian public “opposition” figures, even in exile, are far from accepting “that this is a penalty they are paying”, and most of them are pushing the narrative that this is “Putin’s war”, and that the Russian people are victims of Putin as much as Ukrainian people are. This is a source of a lot of frustration for the Ukrainian intellectual public.

[…]

Masha Gessen [to] Mikhal Dekel: It wasn’t you who framed it as censorship, it was PEN. And it seems entirely right and fair to me that a writer or “activist” whose kid serves in an army that’s committing genocide should be de-published. Again, imagine we are talking about a Russian writer who continues to live in Russia and whose kid is serving in Ukraine but who writes beautiful prose. It is actually unimaginable that such a person would expect to even be allowed to travel to the West, much less be published there. While I know of, for example, Haaretz journalists whose kids are serving in Gaza and who are pontificating at conferences as ostensible opposition figure.

Anya Geish [to] Masha Gessen Although there is obligatory draft in Israel (so it’s either exile or prison to avoid it) while in Russia most of their friends and relatives are voluntarily electing to go kill Ukrainians for money. I am not trying to whitewash anything, but there are nuances. (I am sorry, this is obviously my own pet peeve about the Russian opposition).

Masha Gessen [to] Anya Geish I don’t think this is accurate. There is a draft in Russia, and escaping it can be extremely difficult. In Israel, on the other hand, a significant percentage of those serving are reservists who, at least for now, are not punished for refusing to show up. In addition, while it is difficult, it is possible to legally refuse to serve in Israel. Not to mention that exile means very different things for Russians and Israelis: the former often have to find ways to go into hiding and cross borders illegally. On the whole, I think the comparison is actually valid

[…]

Masha Gessen [to} Mikhal Dekel: “Some of the most leftist people... in Israel have children in the army.” Exactly. I know such people too. On my last visit to Israel, one such person -- a journalist, who has more than one child in Gaza -- was telling me that atrocities there are carried out by “rogue groups” of soldiers. I understand that kind of defense mechanism. And I understand your description of people who “both die of fear for their children and fear of what their children may commit.” But this tells me more about what a misnomer “left” has become in the Israeli context. As a society, Israel not only accepts but supports apartheid, the settlements, the genocide. As Yuli Novak (someone I would describe as actually left, but she belongs to a vanishingly small group) has said, Israel has become a genocidal society. And the reason service in the IDF is perceived as inevitable is that it is the sine qua non of belonging in this genocidal society. People who support or even accept their children’s paying this price of belonging should absolutely be called to account. Put another way, people who are willing to sacrifice their children to/for the state of Israel should be held to account.

I wouldn’t mind at all if the world started demanding that American writers account for their own relationship to the Trump administration and its crimes at home and abroad. But the comparison is flawed in a key way. American society is deeply divided and almost evenly split. Israeli society, on the other hand, has achieved near-total consensus on the fundamentals: the occupation, apartheid, and genocide denial. What passes for the “left” is a movement for a democracy for Jews, preceded by the movement for the release of the hostages in which opponents of the genocide as such were relegated to the literal physical margins where they stood in literal silence every Saturday as many of the more-mainstream protesters mocked and taunted them (a scene I witnessed more than once).

Mikhal Dekel [to] Masha Gessen I have enormous admiration for Yuli and I was one of the people holding the photos of Palestinian children at last year’s demonstrations. Tomorrow I’ll be in the Jordan Valley with the defensive action group. I spend every summer in Haifa taking care of my very sick mother, against my will am forced to clock in countless hours of infuriating Israeli nightly news, my 79 year old(extreme left) relative Alex Danzig was kidnapped from Nir Oz and murdered in Gaza, I know personally many of the people you mentioned in your article. I am very intimately and deeply acquainted with everything that’s going on in this country. Still I’m less interested in the definitions people give, or in my own moral hygiene. But our exchange makes me realize that the American parallel is indeed wrong - not, in my mind, because it’s a divided county - after all our half pays taxes and benefits from the privilege of American citizenship as much as the other half, if not more - but because a schism lays between the region and the pressures in Israel/ Palestine and the comfort of the US and the West. I think it is interesting and important to understand the world of the former - in part through literature in translation- and that’s probably impossible at this point.

Think of Coetzee. Reluctant to become a public political activist or to issue frequent political statements, criticized for being too indirect and insufficiently engaged in anti-apartheid politics, did not join the anti-apartheid movement in the way that Nadine Gordimer or André Brink did, rarely signed petitions, deliberately avoided the role of “public intellectual,” but nonetheless gave us the best and most complex depiction of the moral and psychological structures that apartheid creates.

Masha Gessen [to] Mikhal Dekel: thank you for such a detailed response, which does reflect the complexity of any one individual’s predicament in Israel. And your point about the relative comfort of (some of us in) the US is well taken. I do see what you are saying about the ultimate value of literature that allows us to see how intricate interdependencies can be, how tenuous the loyalties (among other things). But now may not be the time for such literature. Not while the genocide is continuing and while the majority of people with those complex predicaments support it and tolerate it. Let me try a parallel again. Heinrich Boel wrote some of the best work about the inner life of ordinary Germans. His books still have a lot to teach us about the ways conscience works (and doesn’t). But can you imagine those books being published while he was still serving in the Wehrmacht (into which he was conscripted against his will)? I can’t. Now, I think, is a time for laying down basic moral coordinates. The time when readers outside of Israel are ready to start filling in the many shades and colors of the grid will come later.

Readers can make of this exchange what they will. Gessen’s point of view terrifies me. I think it’s totalitarian and cruel. Let me focus on three specific points where I think the mask slips and we can see how thin their commitment to free speech and expression is.

First, they (Gessen uses “they”) write: “And it seems entirely right and fair to me that a writer or ‘activist’ whose kid serves in an army that’s committing genocide should be de-published.” This kind of slides by, as if it’s obvious. But this strikes me as insane. If a writer’s kid is in an army, and that army is doing bad things (as pronounced by M Gessen), even committing genocide, then the parent shouldn’t get published?? What is the possible logic for that? Visiting the sins of the son on the mother? The only possible explanation for that point of view is as a form of social control. May as well say that if your neighbor owns a copy of the Declaration of Independence, you should lose your job. Welcome to East Germany, circa 1985.

Gessen’s defense of this point of view seems to be, “[P]eople who are willing to sacrifice their children to/for the state of Israel,” as she puts it, should be called to account. It’s hard to believe a parent, which Gessen is, would write that line. An adult child enters the army; the parent is blamed for “sacrific[ing] the child”; and if the parent is a writer, the parent should be unable to find a publisher. Hard to tell which Gessen hates more, free speech or literature.

Gessen also writes, “Again, imagine we are talking about a Russian writer who continues to live in Russia and whose kid is serving in Ukraine but who writes beautiful prose. It is actually unimaginable that such a person would expect to even be allowed to travel to the West, much less be published there.” That is just wrong. I don’t think any American publishers would consider it germane, if deciding whether to publish a Russian author in translation, what the writer’s children are doing with their time. The more of this one reads, the more bizarre it gets. If Gessen deigns to reply to this post, will they first Google my children and find out what they are doing, so as to hang it around my neck? (I’ll make it easy: two are in college, one in high school, one in junior high, one in third grade. None serving in an army.)

Second, they write: “I wouldn’t mind at all if the world started demanding that American writers account for their own relationship to the Trump administration and its crimes at home and abroad. But the comparison is flawed in a key way. American society is deeply divided and almost evenly split. Israeli society, on the other hand, has achieved near-total consensus on the fundamentals: the occupation, apartheid, and genocide denial.” This is not quite accurate, but even if it were, why does it follow that if a writer comes from a society with uniformly bad politics, that writer should get discriminated against? Who is served by the cancellation of the writer? And how is it liberal or humane to penalize the writer for the politics of the society from which she comes? Gessen might have written, “If a writer believes in apartheid and genocide, she should go unpublished,” but they didn’t—they want to reserve the right to cancel all Israelis, because of some sort of (I guess?) genocidal strain in the Israeli character. They know that many Americans can’t be blamed for Trump, but apparently all Israelis can be blamed for Smotrich.

Finally, they write: “Heinrich Boel wrote some of the best work about the inner life of ordinary Germans. His books still have a lot to teach us about the ways conscience works (and doesn’t). But can you imagine those books being published while he was still serving in the Wehrmacht (into which he was conscripted against his will)? I can’t. Now, I think, is a time for laying down basic moral coordinates. The time when readers outside of Israel are ready to start filling in the many shades and colors of the grid will come later.”

Again, make of this what you will. I, for one, have no problem reading about the inner lives of anybody, regardless of what actions the country’s army is committing. In fact, one could argue that if one really believes that Israelis are dehumanizing Palestinians, now is precisely the time we need literature—probably written by Jewish Israelis—about how Israelis dehumanize Palestinians.

In fact, if Gessen wrote words to that effect—something like, ”Publishers, now more than ever, need to be finding important voices within Israel to help us understand, through fiction and nonfiction, what Israelis could possibly be thinking as they commit this genocide [to use Gessen’s word]”—nobody would bat an eye. That would seem entirely in keeping with a left-wing, anti-Israel position. Gessen, because they are so widely followed, could even make that seem like the obvious position, the normative one. A people committing atrocities are the people we most need to understand (to draw a rough analogy, I, for one, am way more curious about Donald Trump’s psyche than about, say, Hakeem Jeffries’s).

But again, Gessen isn’t really interested in literature, with its capacity to see inside people’s souls. At least not now: “Now … is a time for laying down basic moral coordinates,” whatever that means. “The time when readers outside of Israel are ready to start filling in the many shades and colors of the grid will come later.” Right now, it’s important we all hate Israel, in black and white. No shades of gray. And God help us, no literature by Jews from Israel.

I wrote earlier, “Hard to tell which Gessen hates more, free speech or literature.” I have rethought this. The answer is that they may love free speech and literature, but they hate Israel more than they love either. That’s all that matters.

Come hang with me in DC

On October 5, the Danforth Center at WashU, for which I work, will host a DC event on the topic, “Is religion good for AI?” We have an all-star Protestant/Catholic/Jew lineup of speakers. And free drinks. Come!

A Little Free Library for magazines.

More on this timely innovation here. New Haven: we’ve got more than pizza.

Speaking of that “got” in my “got more than pizza”: my grandmother Rebekah objected to the “have got” in place of “have,” to the point that she once wrote to her state legislator to complain about the Pennsylvania license plate legend, which back then read, “You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania.” She complained that it should have read, “You Have a Friend in Pennsylvania.” I loved her so much.

Also, there seems to be a local movement afoot to really own the spelling “apizza,” pronounced “ah-BEETZ.” You see it more and more. Let’s roll with it!

Bonus story: back in college, some pranksters would hang out next to the French table in the dining hall and conduct what they called the “French accent table.” While the Francophiles spoke really French, they sat one table over and spoke English in French accents. It was kind of brilliant. N’est-ce pas?

Improv and the death of TV comedy

Genius Substacker Jeff Maurer has a theory about the death of the sitcom:

I write a lot about the sudden death of comedy, because it baffles me. How can a genre exist for thousands of years, and then, suddenly — in 2019 — everyone decides: “that’s enough”? Most comedy writers I know are both stunned and wondering how long we can live on residual checks that arrive $3.14 at a time. Comedy’s death surely involves many structural and cultural factors — if I was a doctor trying to fill in the “cause of death” line on comedy’s death certificate, I wouldn’t know what to put. But I want to talk about one factor that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else: The fact that comedy writers now come largely from improv, while they used to come largely from standup. I think the standup-to-improv shift might matter far more than most people realize.

For decades, there have basically been three paths into comedy writing: standup, sketch, and improv. If you show aptitude in one of those areas, you might get a writing job that rescues you from show-up-at-six-to-hand-out-fliers-for-a-gig-that-will-pay-you-in-mozarella-sticks hell. Improv is a late-comer to the mix; modern improv dates only to about the ‘60s or ‘70s. The other two forms used to dominate, and standup had a boom that spanned from the late ‘70s to early ‘90s. Improv then came on strong in the 2000s and 2010s. We don’t really have numbers here — the contemporaneous accounts I just linked to are the closest we’re going to get to hard data — but trust me: This happened. When I started comedy in 2005, many writers came from standup, and by the time I entered my Hunter S. Thompson lone-nut-writing-in-isolation phase in 2023, improv was dominant.

And I won’t attempt to hide my bias: I’m a standup. I did standup intensely (4-5 times a week) for ten years, and moonlit (1-2 times a week) for five years after that. I also dabbled in improv when I moved to New York in 2011 — that’s where most of my impressions of that world come from. And let me say for all to hear: Improv can be great. Many funny people came from improv: Conan, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler, to name a few of many. The existence of bad improv doesn’t erase good improv any more than bad standup erases good standup, and there is more bad standup than there are atoms in the universe. So now that that’s out of the way: Let me rip improv as many assholes as my word count will allow.

Improv relies on laughs much less than standup. In Truth in Comedy — the sacred text of improv — lesson 1-A is that you should condition the audience not to expect too many laughs. This is explained in terms of world-building and character establishment and sure sure, you need that shit, but I think it would have been more honest for the authors to say “We’re making this up on the spot, so you have to get people to understand that something truly funny will probably happen once every several minutes if you’re lucky.” That’s different from standup, where you start being crushed by shame and embarrassment if you go more than 20-30 seconds without a laugh. Jokes are essential to survival in standup, while in improv, survival often depends on cultivating an audience that will be satisfied with one mildly droll bon mot every five minutes.

Improv is performance-heavy, while standup is writing-heavy. In improv, you need to invoke characters and moods at the drop of a hat; many standups are mildly autistic people who tell jokes while standing perfectly still. Performance helps in standup, but you can scrape by on writing only, and I say that as a standup-turned-writer who couldn’t perform my way out of a wet paper bag. The two forms have different skillsets, and many improv people succeed because they have that mix of extroversion and pathological narcissism that we call “it”. And it makes sense that when they get a writing job, they gravitate more towards characters and stories than jokes.

The improv world is — for lack of a better term — a culture of theater kids. At least: That’s how I found it when I was in New York in the 2010s. At The Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theater — one of the three big improv theaters in the country — I found the vibe to be twee, cultish, and very high school. Social hierarchies were pronounced. Fake laughing was endemic. Unfunny people outnumbered funny people maybe 20 to one. Those are only my perceptions, there were funny people there, and I’m sure that other people had different experiences and blah blah blah caveat caveat: I found UCB to be a weird, insular, mostly-unfunny environment. And I often felt that UCB advanced people based on how “in” they were with the cool kids, not due to how funny they were.

Barriers to entry in improv are also usually very high: You’re expected to spend thousands of dollars on classes that typically take a few years to complete before you’ll be considered to perform at the good shows. Standup is different; most standups I know never took a class. The time and money required to get your foot in the door in improv surely contributes to the theater kid culture — usually the only people able to burn the time and money required are 20-somethings with a parental safety net! It’s also true that the big-city theaters are the only ones that matter, career-wise: If you’re the best improviser in Phoenix, your path to a job still involves moving to LA and taking Improv 101 at The Groundlings. And no: Your “credits” from the Phoenix Improv Theater don’t transfer, because improv is an even bigger racket than college.

Put it all together: Improv attracts many people whose strength is theater, not comedy, and they often come from privileged families and incubate in insular environments in big cities. This is a shift from the more joke-heavy, misanthropic, more beer track world of standup. Could this change contribute to “dramadies” with wine track sensibilities crowding out “joke bucket” shows with broad appeal? How could it not? If suddenly, a disproportionate number of comedy writers came from Quebec, and we noticed a concurrent rise in storylines about poutine and moose deterrence, would it be crazy to wonder if the two things are linked?

More here.

And if you are in NYC tomorrow…

I will be speaking about Judy Blume at the swank National Arts Club tomorrow night. Come! Register here.

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