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Letters
Feedback from readers
One of the obligations of an esteemed publication is to examine its agenda, to see if it is one of openness and inclusion or of promoting only particular perspectives. Namrata Poddar’s essay “Decolonize the Novel: Writing Against Western Strictures of Realism” (January/February 2025) seems to fit the former as she argues for wider definitions of forms of storytelling. But then she pivots to a diatribe against Israel using context for her essay as an excuse. At this point she is not addressing writing at all. While I do not support some of Israel’s actions in Gaza, I cannot accept the distortion of history by those who clearly haven’t done their due diligence. At her most offensive, Poddar [paraphrases Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism and] writes: “[T]he Holocaust was the culmination of a white history of colonial and genocidal violence perpetrated against people of color across the planet.” The Holocaust was a systematic attempt to destroy Jews. … This is a grave insult to the six million killed, to their ancestors, and to all Jews being threatened now with increasing levels of antisemitism. … Anyone can make black-and-white statements. It takes more courage to dissect the complications.
Judith Hannan
New York, New York
It is unfortunate that Namrata Poddar wrote this in the penultimate paragraph of her otherwise elegantly argued and truly important essay: “To the People of the Global Majority and anti-Zionist Jews who stand in solidarity with Palestine and have repeatedly taken to streets in protests across the world, a history of genocidal violence is far from new.” Regardless of Poddar’s intent, there is no way to read that sentence that does not at least implicitly elide both the fact that a “history of genocidal violence” is nothing new to Zionist Jews either and the fact that knowledge of this history, including the ways in which most of the rest of the world turned its back on the Jews of Europe during World War II, is perhaps the primary reason they believe Israel should exist as a Jewish state. It is possible to call [Israel’s actions] in Palestine a genocide, to call Zionism a settler-colonial ideology, and to argue with Jews who don’t agree with you without resorting to even as subtle a version as Poddar’s of the argument that Zionist Jews should “know better” (than to be Zionist) precisely because the Nazis wanted to wipe all Jews off the face of the earth. That logic, to which Poddar at least implicitly appeals, divides Jews as Jews into two groups: those who are good Jews because they are anti-Zionist and therefore stand on the side of justice, and those who are bad Jews because they are not anti-Zionist. It is a left-wing version of the right’s position that the good Jews are those who unconditionally support Israel, and the bad Jews are those who do not, especially when they express solidarity with the Palestinians. In each case, because the logic singles out Jews as Jews, the argument is antisemitic. It has become commonplace to use the devastation Israel has wrought on the Palestinians, whether you call it genocide or not, to dismiss concerns such as the one I have raised here as trivial by comparison. I, however, am not the one making that comparison. I am responding as a Jewish writer to an article about the politics of narrative published in a magazine for writers, in which the article’s author uses my identity to make her closing argument; and I am pointing out that her use of my identity, while it does not invalidate her argument as a whole, does not live up to the decolonizing standard she set for herself in her essay. In this context, in an era when we expect writers to care very much about, and to take care with, how we use the identities of those who are Other to us, that does not seem to me to be trivial at all.
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Jackson Heights, New York
The haunting systematic erasure of Palestine that Mosab Abu Toha recalls in Destiny O. Birdsong’s interview, “The Definition of Poetry” (November/December 2024), and in his poetry is echoed in the many episodes of cancellation of all things Palestine in the public discourse over the past year and a half. Your choice to feature Abu Toha is a vital retort to this systematic denial. I hope that institutions like Poets & Writers will continue highlighting essential and timely voices such as these.
Dina Sorour
Weston, Massachusetts