PEN America: A Free-Speech Meltdown

Sad:

…Maybe the most revealing aspect of this eruption, though, is just how little it took to set it off. Thursday’s article nodded to the curtailed freedoms of Israeli and Jewish writers without taking any ideological side. It was far from a battle cry or a shift in priorities. It was just a way of acknowledging, in the measured but principled language common to PEN America, that the past three years of discourse have had an effect on a large group of writers. For anyone who has spoken to Israeli or Jewish artists—as I have—this is undeniable; you hear it everywhere. This reality does not neutralize the cause of pro-Palestinian writers or the suffering in Gaza and elsewhere. The fact that the article was perceived that way, and that it led to the resignation of a president, tells us all a great deal about the hair-trigger moment we live in, and about the precarity of the liberal principles on which PEN America was founded.  

Source: A Free-Speech Meltdown