Advocates say the pattern — agents advising cuts to Jewish names, editors going silent on Israeli-themed submissions — deepened sharply afte
Here's the beginning of the story:
Meg Keene, an established nonfiction author who has sold more than 150,000 copies of her two books offering tips for wedding planning, couldn’t find a publisher for her first novel — not because of the writing, she said, but because it was “too Jewish.”
Keene said she was advised by one agent to cut anything Jewish from the manuscript unless it drove the plot, including changing a character’s name because Yael read as Israeli. The book, written soon after the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel, about a Jewish woman’s long-distance relationship with a boyfriend in Tel Aviv, was never published.
Keene is one of a growing number of professionals who have announced in recent weeks the launch of their own Jewish publishing companies, aimed at fulfilling a need for frustrated authors who say they’ve hit the same wall: agents advising them to cut Jewish names and references to Israel, editors going silent on submissions that once would have been fast sales and a mounting sense that the industry’s embrace of the #ownvoices storytelling trend — a hashtag used to amplify the work of diverse and minority voices — has an unspoken exception for Jewish writers.
Keene recently announced the launch of Meg Keene Books, her own imprint at Wicked Son Press, a Jewish publisher known mostly for right-leaning nonfiction. The company plans to release four to six fiction books a year, from romance to thrillers, selected by Keene and the Wicked Son founders, with the goal of elevating Jewish voices.
"Earlier this year I got to the point where I realized I didn’t have anything left to lose,” Keene told *Jewish Insider*. “Jews were having all these conversations behind the scenes but it felt like whoever came forward was going to destroy their career. I felt like I was in a position — because of my past in digital publishing and connection to editors, I knew how to do it. So many authors couldn’t sell their first book. At least I had a track record, I could say I was a successful author and be taken seriously.”
While discrimination against Jewish authors has been reported for years, industry professionals say it became more apparent and accepted after Oct. 7 and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war.
In 2024, the Palestinian Festival of Literature published (https://jewishinsider.com/2024/11/petition-jewish-writers-palestinian-festival-of-literature-israel/) a petition signed by Irish author Sally Rooney and more than 1,000 others, which stated that, “We cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement.” More recently, the free speech organization PEN America published a report (https://pen.org/a-silent-moratorium-interviews-with-israeli-and-jewish-writers/) detailing interviews with more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals describing a widening cultural isolation.
“PEN America’s recent blog post about the targeted harassment of Jewish and Israeli authors and literary institutions is an important acknowledgment of this problem,” Ari Ingel, executive director of Creative Community For Peace, told JI. “At the same time, many in our community believe that acknowledgement came only after a long period in which prominent incidents involving Jewish and Israeli writers did not receive the kind of timely and forceful public defense expected from a leading free-expression organization.”
There is no reliable industry-wide figure showing what percentage of Zionist or Jewish authors have been dropped, although Keene has collected data (https://www.jta.org/2026/07/16/ideas/i-gathered-the-data-on-jewish-fiction-publishing-the-trends-are-alarming) specifically on Jewish fiction publishing, which found that between 2023 and 2024, there was a 76% decline in fiction deal announcements to large presses that mentioned Jews, Judaism or Israel. “Publishing decisions are generally confidential and are rarely explained to involved parties,” said Ingel. “But the evidence points to a recurring and increasingly documented pattern rather than a handful of isolated cases.”
"What we are seeing is a form of a silent boycott set in, with authors being dropped or their projects not being picked up by editors, publishers, agents and publicists, sometimes not because of anything they had said about Israel, but because they were told that it was not the right time for a Jewish-themed book,” Ingel said. “New publishing ventures of this kind are necessary in the current climate.”
