Forgive me if I don’t gasp in horror at the totally brand new idea that literary organizations don’t promote people they don’t like:
The world of literature, where Jews have made so many invaluable and long-standing contributions, is succumbing quickly to the new anti-Semitism.
The most recent example comes from the United Kingdom. Two cultural organizations in England have just rejected hosting talks by novelist Richard Zimler—explicitly because he’s Jewish. In the Guardian, Zimler writes of the conversation with a friend in which he learned of the trouble: “‘They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,’ he said. “‘They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.’”
Zimler had been hoping to promote his new novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, and up until his friend confirmed the author’s Jewishness, these unnamed organizations had been interested. And then they weren’t. “It made Britain seem like a place I didn’t know and maybe never knew,” Zimler writes. “Even just asking about my religious affiliation struck me as outrageous.
It doesn’t bode well for the next Bellows, Roths, and Malamuds, none of whom would come close to making it through today’s identitarian obstacle course to publication. And it’s going to get worse.
Invaluable? It would be very hard to name three more overrated novelists than Bellows, Roth, and Malamud. Anyhow, Zimler is still getting published. How many writers known to be conservative Christians are published these days by the Big Five’s primary imprints?