The publishing industry is canceling Jews

(JNS) — One of my favorite stories of the Jewish American experience begins in the early days of Hollywood. Jewish immigrants, newly rich from the success of their movie studios, were denied entry to Los Angeles’s elite country clubs. So, of course, they built their own. Shortly after the Hillcrest Country Club was opened in 1920, oil was discovered on the club’s grounds. As a result, among Hollywood’s elite, the Jews were the only ones whose club paid them for their membership.

Today, we face a growing list of entities that—openly or surreptitiously—deny us entry. In my corner of the book world, the stories are everywhere: A bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., canceling a book talk about a Jewish book at the last minute; 1,000 authors signing onto author Sally Rooney’s boycott of Israeli cultural institutions; a hostile reception to Mayim Bialik and Moshe Kasher at an event for Kasher’s new book; Bernard-Henri Lévy getting an advertisement for his book on Israel yanked by a trade publication for no other reason than that the publication “didn’t want trouble.”

These high-profile events, disturbing as they are, represent just a small part of the antisemitic headwinds buffeting Jewish authors. Get a bunch of us together, and you’ll hear a cacophony of whispers about works rejected, speaking events canceled and longtime professional relationships turning sour.

What’s a Jewish author to do? I know many authors who are simply plowing forward with their work and hoping that the storm will soon pass. Some are turning to Jewish publishers to release their books. But Jewish publishers typically focus on Jewish titles for Jewish readers—a much smaller market than the general population. These are bandages, not cures.

I think there are some lessons to be learned from our Hollywood predecessors. Those movie moguls were no strangers to the art of the pivot. Before they built Hillcrest, they founded their movie empires on this very principle. Shut out of traditional careers on account of their Jewishness, the young upstarts turned to movies as a way to make a living in an industry that was too young to deny them entry. Movies weren’t a sure thing at the time, so entering this untested industry was a big gamble. But it paid off.

I’m excited about the gambles I’m seeing in the Jewish book world. Increasingly, authors are turning to self-publishing as a way to bypass the gatekeepers and bring their books directly to the public. Like the founders of Hollywood, these authors are entering risky and much-maligned new territory. Self-published books rarely get high-profile press, and face the skepticism of the literati, who assume that self-published books simply aren’t good enough to land a publishing deal. But as the movie moguls learned a century ago, audiences don’t care where their entertainment comes from, as long as they’re entertained.

My own self-published books and comics, some of which I released in the last few months, have been nominated for awards, received great reviews in major trade publications and have begun to find their audience. It’s tempting to say that they’ve achieved this success despite being self-published. But in this current landscape, their achievements are all because they were self-published. If I hadn’t put them to market, they might not have been published at all.

To be fair, working with a publisher is still much easier, and most worthy publishers have an easier time getting a book to a broader market than an individual author does. So I’m happy to see that among Jewish publishers, there’s a growing awareness of their shifting role—from curators of content for Jews to amplifiers of Jewish content for the world. In a recent interview in Publishers Weekly, Fran Greenman-Schmitz, the new publisher of the veteran Jewish kid-lit house Kar-Ben Publisher (which released my first graphic novel) said: “My hope is that more of our books will be seen as appropriate for general, not-necessarily-Jewish audiences … even with all of their Jewishness included.”

Whether we turn to self-publishing or find a publisher that’s leaning into the headwinds instead of buckling under their pressure, we’re following in the footsteps of our forebears in entertainment. In other words, when the establishment shuts us out of the club, we build our own. 

And sometimes, we strike oil in the process.