U.S. Publisher Prohibits Ads For Israel Books While Terror Books Promoted

Any author, artist, free thinking human who sits by, as they have now for the past ten years, and says nothing, does nothing, is as guilty as the dictator who pulls the trigger.

Shelf Awareness, the magazine that canceled my ad order for @BHL’s ISRAEL ALONE, had no problem last June with an ad for ‘P is for Palestine.’
Double standard? I’d say so.
Thanks for the follow up @FrancescaABlock @TheFP👇🏼 https://t.co/2pWaILZtm3

— Melanie Notkin (@SavvyAuntie) October 26, 2024

The Free Press has learned that a newsletter from @ShelfAwareness, sent out to 37,000 publishing professionals, contained an ad for “P is for Palestine,” a children’s book promoting “intifada” ideology.

Read @FrancescaABlock’s update: https://t.co/CL4E3ERQKx

— The Free Press (@TheFP) October 26, 2024

My First Censorship Experience

A trade publication rejects an ad for my book about Israel. I’m responding with a U.S. campus tour.

By Bernard-Henri Lévy, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 27, 2024:

For the first time in my life, I have been censored. Wicked Son, the U.S. publisher of my latest book, reserved an ad spot in Shelf Awareness, an electronic newsletter for the book industry that is sent to more than 600,000 readers. The ad was set to run, and then it was canceled. Why?

Because the book is called “Israel Alone.” The publisher of Shelf Awareness said he thought of his “partners” and worried that the ad would “cause them trouble they haven’t asked for and don’t wish to have.” Bookstore “employees” would go to “the management” insisting that “we don’t support this,” and “customers” would “complain” too. “Our partners trust us to protect them from those kinds of situations.”

ADVERTISEMENT

At first I was stunned. I found it hard to believe that a book of reflection, written by a philosopher, could be blacklisted simply because of the presence of the word “Israel” on its cover. I found it almost unbelievable that the name Israel can become unspeakable in a part of this great country, which since the Holocaust has been the second homeland for Jews, and whose brave soldiers liberated Auschwitz 80 years ago.

But here we are. It seems that no Jewish author, no one remotely connected to Judaism, is safe from this kind of exclusion.

As for me, I’ll be fine. I’ve written nearly 50 books, a dozen of which have been published in the U.S., and this pathetic act of censorship won’t harm my career. But I think of a young author, Elisa Albert, who was excluded from the New York State Writers Institute in Albany, N.Y., because two panelists refused to share the stage with a “Zionist.” I think of another young author, Joshua Leifer, who is neither pro-Israel nor Zionist but was canceled at powerHouse Books in Brooklyn, N.Y., because he was slated to discuss his new book with a rabbi, Andy Bachman.

And I think of the grotesque excuses given each time by those organizing: One speaks of “regrets”; another says he faced “a situation beyond his control”; a third invokes an “unfortunate” but inevitable decision.

I will certainly not compare the incomparable. But European ears hear echoes of those who in the 1930s watched, with great “regret” too, as “employees” and “customers” denounced their Jewish neighbors to the pro-Nazi police forces and let them go in the night and the fog.

Continued…..