This article originally appeared in the Hill. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Bruce Hoffman and Casey Babb, November 11, 2024
Nearly a century ago, the Nazis burned the books of Jewish authors. Today, the publishing world is attempting to resurrect the exclusion of writers because of either their faith and nationality or their refusal to conform to a new intellectual diktat.
Books deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis for being “un-German” — especially those written by Jews — were purged from bookstores and libraries for reasons of racial as well as intellectual superiority. This self-righteous effort to purify German thinking targeted such Jewish luminaries as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Lion Feuchtwanger and Vicky Baum, whose works were either banned outright or torched by Nazi Stormtroopers.
Nearly a century later, a new effort is afoot to compel Israeli authors into a contemporary variant of ideological submission. Last week, more than 1,000 writers, including acclaimed Irish author Sally Rooney and award-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy, signed a letter calling for a boycott of Israeli writers, publishers, book festival organizers and literary agents who have yet to publicly denounce the “genocide” in Gaza.
Boycotts like this are self-licking ice-cream cones, enabling the signatories to congratulate themselves for taking a stand on the “right side of history,” as Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last spring fittingly described the protestors in Western countries championing groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. That such literary boycotts are as blatantly antisemitic as they are hypocritical is of course ignored by their exponents.
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Bruce Hoffman is senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.
Casey Babb is a senior fellow for the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, a senior fellow with the Macdonald Laurier Institute in Ottawa, and a special advisor to Secure Canada, in Toronto.
