In Combatting Anti-Semitism, We Need Diverse Jewish Books
By Mark Gottlieb, literary agent at Trident Media Group
This article was inspired by the recent news that Jews have been beaten and chased in New York City streets, explosive devices launched in the predominantly-Jewish Diamond District and a mob in Los Angeles attacked restaurants, demanding to know, "Who’s Jewish!" Kristallnacht comes to mind—a tragedy that took place a little over eighty years ago—many of our grandparents were alive to witness it portrayed in the news. It is important to remember that the Holocaust didn’t begin overnight… It started with hate speech and increasingly coordinated attacks on Jews that went ignored by governments and the media. We are seeing unmistakable echoes of that today. Major media outlets are silent on these recent attacks. There are videos of police officers standing by while attacks happen in broad daylight. We cannot let this become normal. We know all too well where that path leads… Never again. Jews and—most importantly—non-Jews must stand together against anti-semtism.
In Praise of We Need Diverse Books and Own Voices
For a very long time, book publishing and the books it published were predominantly, for lack of a better term, mostly white. At one time referred to as a "gentleman’s profession"—prior to more women, Jewish people and other diverse groups working in book publishing—the industry resembled something of a waspy boy’s club, replete with bowties, boat shoes and white Land’s End beach tote bags (in case anyone was ever wondering from whence the whole literary canvas book bag fad was reclaimed). One visit to famed Scribner’s book editor of the Lost Generation, Maxwell Perkin’s historical home in New Canaan, Connecticut—and it is easy to see that the town resembles something of a creepy Twilight Zone episode, with Rod Serling narrating: A time in space, in a town where most people are white and practically everyone eerily has blonde hair, blue eyes and stepped right out of a Vineyard Vines advertisement. Naturally, since most people who worked in book publishing were traditionally from mostly white backgrounds, the types of books they published and assumed readers enjoyed reading, practically mirrored their own experiences. So the canonical authors whom the famed and celebrated “genius editor” Maxwell Perkins was famous for editing (Earnest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe) were then, by no coincidence, all white.
Behind the scenes of the film “Genius” (2016) with Jude Law (Thomas Wolfe) and Colin Firth (Max Perkins), based on Scott A. Berg’s book Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.
In today’s diversified United States and highly-globalized world, it was a godsend to those in book publishing and the readers they serve, when the diversity initiative of "We Need Diverse Books" (WNDB) arose, via a hashtag of the same name. Whether the general public may regard WNDB as well-intentioned or not, a funny thing began happening… There was a sudden influx of books about diversity, though not written by diverse authors, or those who had lived each of those particular diverse experiences. Understandably, this was incredibly frustrating to many diverse publishing professionals, diverse readers and diverse authors. Perhaps even more so, this frustrated hopeful writers looking to become published authors—those whom were, in actuality, culturally or racially diverse—to see non-diverse authors writing their narratives for them and their audiences. Not only that frustrating result: the sudden influx of diverse books by non-diverse authors stirred the social media mob enough to urge book publishers to change books by including sensitivity reads, cancel publications and, in some cases, drop authors and thereby prevent future publications.
This resulted in a movement to further the interests of WNDB, known as "Own Voices" (OV), which created a hashtag of the same name. The OV initiative set out to promote and encourage the publication of books about diversity, written by authors who came from those particular diverse backgrounds. So by this very logic, in today’s highly-charged/politically-correct world, Mark Twain—even as the quintessential American author—could not publish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Rudyard Kipling could not publish the beloved and celebrated classic The Jungle Book; James Clavell could not publish the epic thriller Shōgun; Margaret Mitchell could not publish the stirring Gone With the Wind; Kathryn Stockett could not publish the bestseller The Help, because they all wrote diverse characters, while being white authors.
The Near-exclusion of Jewish People from the National Discourse on Diversity
Ethiopian Jews who fled to Israel as a means of escaping persecution.
The most recent diversebooks.org article on Jews was published long ago and titled, "Jewish Readers Deserve to See Themselves Outside of the Holocaust and Holidays." In the eyes of many in book publishing, Judaism exists solely as a religion, though it in fact regards itself as an ethnic religion, rather than a universalized religion, meaning that the Jewish religion is primarily built around people of a particular bloodline or ethnicity. Of course there are some exceptions, per the Jewish Virtual Library:
“Although Judaism arose out of a single ethnicity in the Middle East, there have always been conversions into and out of the religion. Thus, there are those who may have been ethnically part of the original group who are no longer part of Judaism, and those of other ethnic groups who have converted into Judaism.”
However, the Jewish religion is unique in predominantly being based around an ethnicity because the religion follows the bloodline of the mother, so in the Jewish religion, if one has a Jewish mother, they are considered to be Jewish. Outside of a religious context, the practical reason for this being that Judaism predated modern-day paternity tests. So, in ancient times, without a Jewish father present, no one could truly know if a baby was ethnically Jewish, unless someone witnessed it birthed by a Jewish mother. It is important to note that the primary ethnic makeup or DNA of the Jewish population, despite more Western features from intermixing and post-colonialism, is actually Middle Eastern. One only needs to look closely at Jewish or somatic features to take note of this. Many Jewish families can trace their roots back to Israel and other parts of the Middle East. For instance, some believe that Moses and the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten may have been one and the same, thereby making Moses and his descendants from the Tribe of Levi, of Middle Eastern and North African descent.
Further to the conversation on homogeneity in Judaism and the minority status of Jews, in her article "We Need Diverse Jewish and Muslim Books: A Conversation" for The Horn Book Inc, Heidi Rabinowitz writes:
Kaifeng Jews from China read from a prayer book.
“Like Muslims, Jews are not a monolith. There are white Jews, brown Jews, Black Jews. There are Jews who are visually identifiable and others who are not. But there is a general incorrect impression that nearly all Jews are light-skinned and of European descent, and that because of the privilege that comes with whiteness, Jews need not worry about prejudice. Old antisemitic tropes tell a false story of Jewish power that may have been absorbed subconsciously by many people, making it hard for them to see that Jews are just as much in need of support as any other minority group. Perhaps because of these misapprehensions, Jews tend to be left out of the diversity conversation.”
So is that why Jews, by-and-large, have been excluded from the national conversation surrounding the need for more diverse books? It is simply because Jews "blend in," or are "white passing" and therefore do not have to wear their diverse experiences on their faces as much as people with more diverse features? If those who happen to be diverse were told that they do not look "diverse enough," they might be insulted by that assumption and feel excluded from the respect given to other diverse groups. One only needs to look at the people of Eurasia to see that they do not look entirely Asian, nor do they look entirely white. Or one may look at the people of Turkey or Iran: while they reside in the Middle East, they consider themselves to be Aryan peoples, despite their appearances. If we follow this argument about including more Jewish voices from the margins—in considering Cohin Jews from India, Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, Kaifeng Jews from China, etc.—then we really begin to see that many people have been largely left out from the discourse surrounding Jews as a diverse group in publishing.
In looking around us in book publishing and even in the classroom, we can easily see the result of the near-exclusion of the Jewish ethnicity from the discourse of diversity initiatives. For instance, in "Still Wandering: The Exclusion of Jews from Issues of Social Justice and Multicultural Thought," an article for the Multicultural Perspectives Journal, Dan Ian Rubin of New Mexico State University writes:
“Anti-Semitism, prejudice, and discrimination against Jewish people are still largely absent from the study of social justice issues and multicultural education... Although often seen as being White, Jews are still discriminated against, with current reports showing that acts of anti-Semitism have been at their highest levels since World War II. There has also been a resurgence of anti-Semitic incidents… yet Jewish oppression is still neglected in multicultural/diversity classroom discussions. This must change in order to create the next generation of social justice educators who can continue to deconstruct anti-Semitism.”
Of course, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud, as well as others, defined the Jewish literary landscape for a while there and some authors, such as National Jewish Book Award-winning author of Defending Britta Stein Ronald H. Balson, have to this very day, but today’s book publishing landscape could still do with more Jewish narratives.
Book Publishing Should Expand Their Definition of Diversity & Inclusion
The publishing industry needs to ask itself what it truly means to be diverse. Is placing importance on diversity and deciding who is truly diverse really about looking diverse, rather than blending in—or simply being from a largely and historically disenfranchised group? Being diverse should not simply be about looking diverse, nor should diversity be only defined by the disenfranchisement of a particular group of people. To say that Jewish people are not diverse because they have adjusted well in most societies, despite their hardships, minority status and discrimination, is insulting and exclusionary. To think of this in opposite terms for a moment, according to the U.S. Census Bureau report on educational attainment in the United States, Asian Americans have the highest educational attainment of any race in America, despite appearing more racially diverse than Jewish Americans…
Instead, let us begin to reconsider the status of Jews as a significant part of diversity movements, by asking: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (i.e. “Who watches the watchmen?”) It is important to not only explore, “Where do we draw the line in defining who is diverse and who is not diverse?” but also: “Who defines those who are diverse and who are not diverse?” Rather than listening to any one person, bowing to the fear of cancel culture via the social media mob, or even following the advice of the author of this article, for that matter—perhaps it would be best if we simply followed the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of diversity:
1. the state of being diverse; variety.
"there was considerable diversity in the style of the reports"
2. the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.
"equality and diversity should be supported for their own sake"
Instead of defining who is “the other” based upon whiteness as a counterpoint, the definition of the word diversity from the Oxford English Dictionary truly is that diversity is about including everyone, rather than excluding anyone or discriminating against anyone, at all. It can then only be the hope of the Jewish people, widely dismissed from the diversity conversation, that diversity initiatives will also become movements of inclusion. Until then, for the foreseeable future, there will remain a broader need to include Jews in the discussion around diversity. As mentioned before, people have written/thought a lot about the exclusion of Jews from the diversity discourse, at least somewhat. It would help readers of this article who care enough about this issue to dig around in that work a bit more.
Mark Gottlieb is a prominent literary agent working at book publishing’s leading literary agency Trident Media Group in New York City. He has ranked highly among literary agents across the industry for overall number of deals and other individual categories. While at Trident Media Group, Mark Gottlieb has represented New York Times bestselling authors as well as major award-winning authors. He has optioned and sold numerous books to production companies and studios for film and TV adaptation. Mark Gottlieb greatly enjoys working with authors to help manage and grow their careers with the resources available at Trident Media Group. In addition to having worked at the company’s Foreign Rights Department, he also ran the company’s Audiobook Department. Utilizing his drive and intuition for discovering talented writers, he is currently expanding his client list of authors. As a literary agent he looks forward to bringing authors to the largest possible audience.