For Jewish and Israeli authors and the people who enjoy their books, the publishing industry has been a decidedly depressing place over the last two years. 

A spreadsheet titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?” went viral on social media and called for readers to boycott so-called “Zionist” authors, a label extended even to some who merely spoke to Jewish audiences. The literary magazine Guernica retracted an essay by an Israeli author in response to protests from staff. LitHub, the preeminent news site dedicated to the publishing industry, has adopted a stridently anti-Israel stance since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks two years ago. “A litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel,” the author Jamie Kirchick wrote in The New York Times last year. 

A new initiative from the Jewish Book Council, a 100-year-old nonprofit dedicated to promoting Jewish literature, aims to fight back against the torrent of bad news for Jewish writers. This month, JBC unveiled Nu Reads, a subscription service that will deliver selected Jewish books to subscribers bimonthly. The first book, Happy New Years by the Israeli author Maya Arad, has already shipped to Nu Reads’ inaugural subscribers.

“There’s a chill for our community across the industry,” JBC CEO Naomi Firestone-Teeter told Jewish Insider in an interview this month. “If we care about Jewish literature and we care about these authors and ideas, we need to buy these books. We need to invest in them and support them.” 

Curated book subscription services have soared in popularity in recent years. A reinvigorated Book of the Month Club launched in 2016, an homage to the ubiquitous brand of the 1950s and 1960s that helped curious readers find new titles; the new iteration has a reported 400,000 members. More than 230,000 Jewish families in the U.S. and Canada receive children’s books each month through PJ Library, a program modeled on Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. It was PJ Library — which has transformed young Jews’ experience with Jewish books in the two decades it has existed — that served as an inspiration to JBC.

“I very jokingly suggested that I wish that there was a PJ Library for grown-ups,” said Tova Mirvis, the author of five books and Nu Reads’ writer-in-residence, who helps curate the book selections. “It was just an idea, and I began to think about it. I spent a lot of time thinking about my own experience of reading Jewish books, and how who I am as a person and as a writer is so shaped by my love of Jewish fiction.” 

Unlike PJ Library, Nu Reads is not a charity project. It asks consumers to choose to spend their money on hardcover copies of new Jewish books. The founding subscriber rate of $154 includes six books delivered over the course of a year, along with invitations to community gatherings and author talks. Several hundred people have become subscribers in the two weeks since Nu Reads was announced.

At a time when Jewish writers face growing challenges in the publishing industry, JBC hopes Nu Reads will herald Jewish readers’ purchasing power to remind publishers that Jewish books are a good investment, because publishing is, ultimately, a business. 

“It’s much harder to get published because there are fewer venues. There are fewer places that review books. We have so many other distractions we use aside from reading books. There are fewer bookstores — all the ways that, I think, the literary world has shrunk, and so of course that affects Jewish writers as well,” Mirvis told JI. 

Nu Reads, Mirvis hopes, will serve as “a reminder to the literary world, to publishers and editors, that there are so many people within the Jewish community who love these books. I think it’s a way to galvanize readers to say, ‘I want to read the next generation of these writers.’”

In early 2024, JBC created an online resource for Jewish writers and publishing industry professionals to report instances of antisemitism they had experienced. The organization, which is best known for presenting the annual National Jewish Book Awards, also launched a virtual support group for Jews in the literary world that still meets regularly. 

“This is such a competitive industry,” said JBC CEO Naomi Firestone-Teeter. “We’re holding all of that together to try to not be sensationalist about anything, but at the same time, these are real concerns that are valid.”

So far, JBC has received more than 400 reports of antisemitism, with examples including digital harassment and abuse, students kicked out of literary journals because of their views on Israel and writers asked by publishers or marketers to discuss their Judaism only in a particular way. 

Still, it’s nearly always impossible to attribute a decision in the literary world purely to antisemitic motives. A book may be dropped by a publisher because of the author’s attitude toward Israel or the Jewish themes it portrays. But it could also be dropped for a near-infinite number of other reasons: limited demand, fewer books being published overall or the book simply not being very good. 

“This is such a competitive industry,” said Firestone-Teeter. “We’re holding all of that together to try to not be sensationalist about anything, but at the same time, these are real concerns that are valid.”

Nu Reads’ second selection is Sam Sussman’s Boy From the North Country, a novel about a boy in upstate New York who grows up with a nagging sense that he is Bob Dylan’s illegitimate child. (The book is based on Sussman’s own life, and a glance at a photo of the author reveals more than a passable resemblance to the folk icon.) 

As a child in the Hudson Valley, far from other Jews, Sussman had formative encounters with stories by Jewish writers such as Chaim Potok, Philip Roth and Tony Kushner. When he moved to New York City, Jewish book events were how he tapped into the Jewish community.

“We only have so much control over how the wider world receives Jewish literature,” author Sam Sussman told JI. “But I think it’s very important that within the Jewish world, we’re open to stories from Jews of all backgrounds and with all political and cultural perspectives.” 

“I really grew up in a part of the world where there weren’t a significant number of other Jews, and literature was a really important way for me to connect to a broader sense of Jewish community,” Sussman told JI. 

Sussman has not experienced the kind of pushback or stigmatizing that some other Jewish writers have reported since Oct. 7. Instead, he urged Jewish readers to think about how to ensure that the full diversity of Jewish voices and stories are told and respected.

“We only have so much control over how the wider world receives Jewish literature,” Sussman told JI. “But I think it’s very important that within the Jewish world, we’re open to stories from Jews of all backgrounds and with all political and cultural perspectives.” 

Sussman’s story, and the growing positive acclaim for his debut novel, is a reminder that despite the steady drip of negative headlines for Jewish authors, the literary world — an industry Jewish authors and intellectuals helped shape over decades — is not a monolith, and the story of American Jewish literature has not yet reached its conclusion.

“How do we respond to the urgent needs of our community and raise awareness about them and create written documentation around them, but also, how do we find ways that we can just really celebrate our Jewishness and have that propel us forward?” asked Firestone-Teeter. “The ability to hold all these things at once is incredibly inspiring.”

The current boycott by Hollywood actors, directors and other industry workers against Israeli counterparts “violates federal and state civil rights laws,” according to a letter distributed on Wednesday by a Jewish civil rights group to major U.S. film industry leaders, Jewish Insider has learned. 

The letter was sent by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law to top studios, distributors, platforms, talent agencies and film festivals — including Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate, Netflix, Amazon, MGM Studios and Apple Studios. It warns that participation in the “Hollywood Blacklist,” a boycott circulated last month by Film Workers for Palestine that calls for industry professionals to blacklist Israeli artists, companies and institutions, could result in legal consequences. 

The letter was signed by more than 5,000 Hollywood actors, directors, and other industry employees, including industry heavyweights such as Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo. 

Boycotting Israeli institutions would also jeopardize studios’ eligibility for film tax credit status, the letter said, noting that “a production that participates in the Hollywood Boycott may also violate its contractual obligations in connection with receiving state tax breaks.”

The letter cites the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which “prohibits both organizations and individuals from refusing to contract for goods and services with Jews and Jewish businesses operating in the United States,” which it says is “an evident component of the Hollywood Blacklist targeting the Israeli film industry while carving out Palestinian Israelis for different treatment from Jews.” The letter also refers to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on national origin.

While the blacklist claims to only target Israeli institutions deemed “complicit” in denying Palestinian rights, and not individuals, it refers to all but “a few” Israeli film institutions as complicit. Additionally, the letter states that the effort would affect Jewish individuals who work for boycotted films. Discrimination on the basis of national origin is “self-evident,” the Brandeis Center wrote, “since the Hollywood Blacklist exclusively targets ‘Israeli film institutions,’ while non-Israeli film institutions who may be similarly ‘complicit’ in the alleged whitewashing or support for Israel are not subjected to the same scrutiny and shunning.”  

“Boycotting Jews isn’t an original idea, or, thankfully, a legal one in the United States of America,” Rory Lancman, director of corporate initiatives and senior counsel at the Brandeis Center, said in a statement. “We caution Hollywood decision makers against submitting to pressure to effectuate this blatantly illegal blacklist of Jewish Israeli artists and institutions. As we say in our letter, we much prefer to see their work on the screen, and not them in court.”

Since the blacklist petition’s release, approximately 1,200 prominent members of the film industry signed a counterletter, spearheaded by Creative Community For Peace, calling for signers of the original boycott to rethink their stance. Signatories of the counter petition include Mayim Bialik and Debra Messing.

The University of Maryland Student Government Association is set to consider a resolution at the start of Yom Kippur on Wednesday evening calling on the university and its charitable foundation to implement a boycott of companies and academic institutions with ties to “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation.”

The final vote “was first set for Rosh Hashanah and now moved to Yom Kippur,” Leo Terrell,  who leads the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, wrote on X. Terrell criticized UMD’s student government for “intentionally picking the holiest days of the year for Jews in order to force them to choose between defending their Zionist identities or observing their religion.” 

UMD has one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country — nearly 20% of the College Park undergraduate student body of more than 30,000 students is Jewish, according to Hillel International.  

When the vote was announced, UMD President Darryll Pines told the university’s newspaper, The Diamondback, that the university supports SGA’s right to debate the issue. But he added that the university wants to ensure the process is “open and fair and has dialogue from all parties of our broad student body.” 

“Resolutions voted on by the Student Government Association are student-led and reflect perspectives of voting members of the SGA,” a university spokesperson told Jewish Insider. “They have no bearing on university policy or practice.” 

Still, Jewish leaders on-campus expressed concern about the vote’s impact on campus climate for Jewish students — especially as it’s being held on a Jewish holiday.   

“Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people, a time of introspection when our students are fasting, and attending prayer services with their community. Holding a vote that seeks to demonize the Jewish homeland on a day when Jewish students will not be able to participate is exclusionary, biased and flat-out wrong,” Rabbi Ari Israel, executive director of UMD Hillel, told JI. 

“I am deeply disappointed that SGA decided to hold a BDS vote on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people,” Einav Tsach, a senior studying journalism and business who formerly led Mishelanu, an on-campus Israeli-American cultural association, told JI. “This strategy underscores the true intention of the BDS campaign: to divide our campus community and exclude Jewish students from a vote that is biased and wrong.”

If the resolution passes, the student government would urge the university and the University of Maryland College Park Foundation to implement boycott, divestment and sanctions policies against companies and institutions “complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.” 

The resolution mentions Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin as two companies that provide infrastructure used by Israel. The association would also call on the university to implement a process for student oversight on investments and partnerships to ensure it isn’t “complicit in violations of international law and human rights, including those perpetrated against the Palestinian people.”

UMD’s student government voted in support of divestment in a campuswide referendum in April, at which time the university responded that it would not divest from Israel. Other divestment resolutions fell short of advancing in 2017, 2019 and 2024. 

The University of Maryland hasn’t faced the same levels of antisemitism that have occurred on many elite campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel. 

However, the university faced controversy last year when it granted Students for Justice in Palestine a permit to hold a demonstration on the campus’ central McKeldin Mall on the first anniversary of the attacks, prompting swift backlash from campus groups including Hillel and the Jewish Student Union. 

After the university canceled the protest, SJP filed a lawsuit stating that its First Amendment rights had been violated. A federal judge wrote in an opinion that the group “has demonstrated a substantial likelihood that it will prevail [in its lawsuit] on the merits of its freedom of speech claim.” 

The university reversed its decision and allowed the demonstration to take place, but the lawsuit moved forward. In August, the University of Maryland and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown asked the state to approve their joint request to settle the First Amendment lawsuit for $100,000 paid to the plaintiffs. 

The American Association of Geographers became the latest professional association to face pressure to adopt a boycott of Israel after a recent member petition urged the association “to endorse the campaign for an academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions.”

The campaign also calls for “financial disclosure and divestment of any AAG funds invested in corporations or state institutions profiting from the ongoing oppression of the Palestinian people.” 

A special member meeting is scheduled for Oct. 3 to move toward a vote on the resolution after the group behind the petition succeeded in reaching the required 10% of member signatures. An AAG spokesperson told Jewish Insider that the organization has “no statement or resolution about Israel-Palestine.” AAG did not respond to a follow-up inquiry asking which Israeli institutions the association currently invests in.  

“I was absolutely shocked,” Liora Sahar, an Israeli-American member of AAG, told JI.

Sahar, a geospatial expert with a PhD from Georgia Tech, said that she first noticed anti-Israel rhetoric within the association at this year’s annual meeting, held in Detroit in March. 

“I was deeply disturbed by the inclusion and promotion of sessions that allowed for inflammatory, biased and harmful rhetoric, far removed from academic rigor or geographic inquiry,” said Sahar. 

“Sessions, organized by a group calling itself ‘Geographers for Justice in Palestine,’ centered not on scholarly exploration, but on academic boycott and divestment campaigns. These are political actions, not scientific ones, and they directly undermine the values of academic freedom and open discourse.” 

Sahar, who attended the conference virtually, said that she came across a session titled “Dismantling the Palestine Exception” as well as six other “related abstracts [that] accused Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and a ‘U.S.-enabled genocidal war.’”

“It had nothing to do with geography,” she said. Geographers for Justice in Palestine’s “entire goal was to get 10% of the AAG membership to sign the petition.” 

The Anti-Defamation League urged the AAG to reject the resolution in a statement, highlighting “its divisive impact on academic communities and violations of AAG’s own ethical guidelines. We have previously expressed concerns about similar issues at AAG meetings and are ready to help AAG understand the potential harm of this resolution before the meeting.”

The campaign comes as members of other professional associations have also called for the adoption of academic boycotts of the Jewish state, a movement that has gained momentum in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war. 

Last September, for example, the American Association of University Professors reversed course and dropped its longtime opposition to academic boycotts. Faculty members on several campuses soon after started implementing non-official boycotts of Israel by not assigning articles written by Israeli scholars, refusing to invite Israeli academics to conferences and declining to write study abroad letters for students wishing to spend a semester in Israel.