This article originally appeared in the National Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Christopher Dummitt, December 2, 2024
Despite all the pressure from activists to shut it down because of the funder’s financial links to an Israeli defence contractor, the Giller Prize was awarded last month. Yet the gang of activist writers who wanted to cancel the Gillers are still hounding others who dare poke their heads over the top of the cultural trench.
Take the case of Hal Niedzviecki. The Canadian writer and editor and all-round supporter of Canada’s “zine” industry has been unceremoniously thrown out of his life’s work. He was the founder of Canzine — a long-running festival of the arts that activists closed down this year.
The problem, you see, is that Niedzviecki is both Jewish and a supporter of Israel. This just isn’t allowed to pass unnoticed and without consequence in today’s Canada. Now, those same activists are forcing the closure of Broken Pencil, a literary magazine Niedzviecki founded that is approaching three decades in print.
It wasn’t always this way. Niedzviecki explained in an interview that when he founded Broken Pencil in 1995, he was part of a generation of new writers trying to upend what they saw as their staid predecessors.
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Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics at Trent University and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
