The world of the arts is largely a progressive one, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that it has been beset by anti-Zionist fervor since October 7. Contemporary English-language poets may no longer put much stock in the works of such distinguished predecessors as Chaucer, T.S. Eliot, or Ezra Pound, but many of them seem to share their attitudes toward Jews. Maxim D. Shrayer writes:

American poets, specifically, have been at the vanguard of local and national efforts to isolate friends and supporters of Israel. Organized anti-Israel protests also occurred at the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) in Kansas City, an annual gathering especially important for independent and literary publishers and literary magazines. According to a detailed report by the writer Sarah Einstein, “a few days ahead of the conference, [Radius of Arab American Writers] sent out a letter to all panel organizers (except those who were obviously Jewish or whose panel had a Jewish theme).” Panel organizers and moderators were “urged” to “acknowledge the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

Quite a number of America’s literary publishers and literary magazines are run by writers openly opposed to Israel and increasingly disinterested in Jewish poetic creativity; the fact that they may have Jewish editors on staff, or as part of their historical patrimony or matrimony makes them even less willing, or able, to publish work by Jewish writers. . . . A literary agent in the UK recently claimed that “Half of British publishers are refusing to take books by authors who are identifiably Jewish.” How long will it be before U.S. publishers follow the British trend?

Shrayer, who grew up in the Soviet Union, feels he has seen all this before:

As a teenager, I saw poets forget our Moscow phone number after my father, David Shrayer-Petrov, was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers for our family’s attempt to emigrate and branded a “Zionist writer.” I remember picking up a copy of a daily Soviet newspaper in 1980 and reading a poem by a gifted Russian nationalist, in which he called my father a “werewolf” (oboroten) and a “son of a bitch.”

Yet Shrayer is also hopeful that these very circumstances could spark an American Jewish poetic revival.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Israeli special forces carried out a daring boots-on-the-ground raid on September 8 targeting the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in northwestern Syria. The site was used for producing and storing missiles which are then transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer notes that the raid was accompanied by extensive airstrikes in Syira,and followed a few days later by extensive attacks on Hizballah in Lebanon, one of which killed Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, a senior officer in the terrorist group’s Radwan force, an elite infantry group. And yesterday, the IDF destroyed a weapons depot, an observation post, and other Hizballah positions. Spyer puts these attacks in context:

The direct purpose of the raid, of course, was the destruction of the facilities and materials targeted. But Israel also appeared to be delivering a message to the Syrian regime that it should not imagine itself to be immune should it choose to continue its involvement with the Iran-led axis’s current campaign against Israel.

Similarly, the killing of al-Shaer indicated that Israel is no longer limiting its response to Hizballah attacks to the border area. Rather, Hizballah operatives in Israel’s crosshairs are now considered fair game wherever they may be located in Lebanon.

The SSRC raid and the killing of al-Shaer are unlikely to have been one-off events. Rather, they represent the systematic broadening of the parameters of the conflict in the north. Hizballah commenced the current round of fighting on October 8, in support of Hamas in Gaza. It has vowed to stop firing only when a ceasefire is reached in the south—a prospect which currently seems distant.