By Barrrett Holman Leak in San Diego
The right to free speech has taken a beating in the last few years. Since October 7, 2023, Jewish creatives have been quietly suffering. Now the wheel is turning.
The fragile peace within America’s elite cultural institutions cracked open on July 9 when Dinaw Mengestu resigned as president of PEN America. His resignation came just hours after the literary freedom organization published an article titled “A Silent Moratorium,” which detailed the systemic isolation, blacklisting, and harassment facing Jewish and Israeli writers in the publishing world since October 7, 2023. Mengestu, who served only seven months of his term, stated that his departure was driven by PEN America’s “ongoing failure to defend free expression fairly and equitably.”
He argued that by defending Jewish writers against coordinated cultural boycotts, the organization was unethically restricting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which he views as constitutionally protected political speech. To understand this moment, we have to look at how the fundamental definition of free speech is being weaponized to rewrite civil rights protections.
The core mission of PEN America, founded in 1922, has historically been simple: to protect writers from censorship and defend the right to create without fear of political retaliation. Yet, the report PEN published last Thursday revealed a sharp departure from that ideal in the modern literary landscape.
It documented more than 30 Jewish authors, translators, and agents who have faced canceled book launches, event disinvitations, online review-bombing, and professional blacklists. Many requested anonymity simply to protect their livelihoods. When the leadership of a free-expression organization frames the defense of blacklisted Jewish artists as an act of political “suppression” against those doing the blacklisting, a dangerous inversion occurs. It suggests that the freedom of speech includes a right to enforce ideological conformity, and that objecting to the exclusion of a minority group somehow violates the rights of the majority.
This dynamic is not unique to the literary world; it mirrors the broader patterns of American history when institutions buckle under ideological pressure. By casting a cultural boycott against individuals based on their identity or nationality as a noble form of “dialogue,” institutional leaders effectively legitimize discrimination under the guise of political dissent.
For Jewish creatives, the message from the top is clear: your right to speak and exist in public spaces is conditional upon passing an ideological litmus test that is required of no other group. Historically, when a society begins to tolerate the systematic exclusion of a specific group from its cultural and economic life, it signals a deeper decay in democratic norms. The loneliness felt by Jewish writers today is the predictable result of institutions that choose political expediency over universal principles.
The resignation of PEN America’s president illustrates that the current battle is no longer just about defending unpopular ideas. It is about whether our primary cultural gatekeepers still believe that free expression belongs to everyone, or if it has become a privilege reserved only for those who hold the approved political opinions.
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Barrett Holman Leak is a freelance writer based in San Diego.