Cancelling the Book Jew

On Friday, September 18, while most Jews were preparing for Yom Kippur, the Jewish-Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz received bad news from the Granada’s famous literary and arts festival, CULTUR-ALH. Harwicz, whose debut Die, My Love was recently adapted into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson, had been invited to participate in a series of conversations around the avant-garde, “art, literature, and the humanities.” But days before opening, the festival rescinded their invitation to Harwicz because of her “lack of involvement in the BDS movement.”

Harwicz is one of the leading novelists of the Spanish-speaking world, and her expulsion from the Granada festival has created a commotion throughout the literary world. Her novels explore the darkest and most sinister parts of the human female experience—the protagonist of Die, My Love is a postpartum woman on the verge of madness, and her latest novel, Unfit, is also about a disturbed mother. It’s also her first novel to directly confront antisemitism. In it, a Jewish-Argentine woman named Lisa moves to the South of France with her boyfriend and gives birth to twins. Her partner’s family enjoys making “a stupid joke about the Jewish moles” on her chest, and wonders whether she is “a hundred percent Jewish” (“she must have impure ancestors, mixed ones”). When she finally decides to get married, they announce with worry that “a Jew is going to join the family.” When the marriage fails. Lisa loses custody and spends much of the novel yearning to be reunited with the twins, thinking about her ex, and testing the border between love and violence. Finally, she goes completely insane, burns her ex-husband’s farm down, and kidnaps her kids in the chaos.

When Jessica Winter reviewed Unfit for The New Yorker, she chastised it for being a secretly pro-Israel novel. Winter also took issue with Harwicz’s public concern with the rise of antisemitism (Harwicz has said that “the novel of her life . . . begins with October 7”). But Harwicz’s writing doesn’t map neatly onto any politics. And Unfit isn’t about Zionism. It’s about antisemitism—about being a stranger, a sensation intensified by motherhood and the violence Lisa is subjected to in France. At the end of the novel, whenLisa flees France with her children, she doesn’t escape to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. She returns to Argentina, where she settles with her children in an old apartment in the traditional Jewish neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Two days after Harwicz’s banishment from “arts, literature, and the humanities,” many of the other participants in the CULTUR-ALH festival—including the Chilean Lina Meruane and the Peruvian Gabriela Wiener—published a communiqué that supported cancelling Harwicz. It took her to task for her “public position” and her “endorsement of extermination.” This is a baffling statement for anyone who looks through Harwicz’s work and public statements, in which she has never spoken in support the war, though she has called the genocide accusations against Israel the result of “brainwashing and Qatari money.” She has also commented on the rise of antisemitism in pro-Palestinian groups and tweeted that learning that some of her peers were pro-Palestinian activists was like learning that her father was “a rapist or a murderer.”

But as many authors, including myself, commented in a public letter, one need hardly agree with Harwicz to support her participation in a festival. Harwicz’s literary project, as she has explained many times, is aimed at complicating the present and challenging common wisdom. The ethos of her fiction is precisely about the artist’s need to provoke and think out loud.

Harwicz’s expulsion from the festival shows the special demands placed on a Jewish writer, demands that no other minority writers face. In doing so, the organizers of CULTUR-ALH—as well as many of the participants—have not just censored her, they have launched a new inquisition, from Granada of all places.

“They want the good Jew and I’m not the good Jew,” Harwicz said to an Argentine newspaper. “So they’re kicking me out.”