On the Resignation of PEN America’s President
William Kolbrener, Publisher, Writing on the Wall

I. PEN America exists for one reason: to defend writers when institutions fail them. The organization’s own report, A Silent Moratorium, documents how Israeli writers have been systematically excluded from literary festivals, prize lists, and publishing conversations since October 7th. That the organization’s president resigned within hours of the report’s publication was not in acknowledgment of failure, but in protest against the report itself.

II. The silencing described in the report is not governmental. No law prohibited Israeli writers from being invited to festivals; no statute prevented publishers from translating their books. What happened was something subtler and more troubling: a voluntary withdrawal, institution by institution, editor by editor, festival director by festival director. While the great defender of liberty, John Milton wrote Areopagitica in 1644 against a government licensing office, today’s censorship requires no official apparatus. In a culture of preemptive silence, no censor’s stamp is needed. Everybody already knows what is permitted, and what is not.

III. Writers, of all people, understand what it means to be silenced. Literature presumes complexity, acknowledging the irreducibility of the human experience to simple political categories. An Israeli novelist is not the Israeli government. A poem written in Tel Aviv is not a policy document. The conflation of the Israeli writer with the Israeli state is virtue-signaling, not a coherent political position, but a failure of imagination, a profound failure of literary judgment.

IV. We founded Writing on the Wall because we knew, from October 7th onward, that the world preferred its cartoon allegories of Israel to complexity. Ronit Eitan, our co-founder, is an Israeli novelist. Our contributors – Israeli Arabs, Jews, and Christians – are writers who have continued to write, create, and publish through a war. They create through grief, through displacement, and through the fraught experience of being alive in Israel at this moment. PEN’s report names Writing on the Wall as living evidence that an alternative exists.

V. PEN America’s president did not step down in acknowledgment of failure, but as a protest against the report, simply unable to stand behind a document that defended freedom of expression for Israelis, for Jews. The leader of the world’s preeminent free expression organization, when confronted with documented evidence of the systematic suppression of Israeli voices, chose to resign rather than defend them. Freedom of expression for Israelis is the one cause that could not be taken up, even by those whose entire professional purpose is to lift it up. That one of the report’s own authors contacted us as the story dropped to say she, too, was resigning from PEN only underscores this reality. She could only speak the truth on her way out the door.

VI. The PEN report and the resignation it prompted leaves us with the question: How did a culture dedicated to the free expression of the human voice become complicit in the suppression of one?

We are not waiting for an answer. We are here; we are creating; and we are publishing.