Keen On

James Kirchick’s New York Times op-ed, “A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing”, has elicited much controversy. I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced by Kirchick’s thesis, particularly on his position that a Jew these days has no choice but to be a Zionist, but it’s a provocative argument. While meritocracy has “been good for the Jews”, he explains, our new “woke” politics, especially surrounding Israel, has transformed Jews into “the new whites”. So Jewish writers are now being silenced by a censorious publishing industry if they express even the slightest ambivalence about Gaza. Is this the new McCarthyism or just another storm in the literati teacup?James Kirchick is a journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. A writer at large for Air Mail and a contributing writer for Tablet, he has reported from over 40 countries and his writing has appeared in many public