In 2015, after Islamist gunmen murdered a dozen people in an attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I joined the American chapter of PEN International, PEN America. It is the most respected writers’ organization in the country; past presidents include Dorothy Thompson, Norman Mailer and Salman Rushdie. When PEN awarded the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo its Freedom of Expression Courage Award later that year — lauding the magazine for “its dauntlessness in the face of one of the most noxious assaults on expression in recent memory” — it acted in the best traditions of its august history which, since its founding in 1922, has meant refusing to bend to political pressures.
Many writers felt differently. Denouncing the magazine’s caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, 242 members of PEN signed an open letter against the prize. “Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire,” the letter stated. “The inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.”
The signatories’ assertion that Charlie Hebdo was some sort of Gallic cartoon version of “The Turner Diaries,” a foundational text of white supremacy, showed ignorance of French culture, French politics and the French language. For instance, their claim that the publication was “selectively offensive” to Muslims willfully ignored the fact that out of 523 covers published during the preceding decade, seven mocked Islam, while 21 mocked Catholicism and over 300 skewered political targets.
But the actual content of Charlie Hebdo didn’t matter. Voicing opposition to PEN at that moment was a political gesture to prove one’s membership in the community of the virtuous. That PEN didn’t cave to this small but vocal minority signified fidelity to its founding principles.
Alas, that PEN no longer exists.
The proximate cause of PEN’s demise can be traced to a statement it released on Jan. 29 condemning the cancellation of shows by an Israeli comedian, Guy Hochman, in New York City and Beverly Hills. Mr. Hochman, who was deployed to Gaza along with the Israel Defense Forces as something akin to a U.S.O entertainer and who has made disparaging comments about Palestinians, stands accused by the Hind Rajab Foundation, a pro-Palestinian organization, of “war crimes” and “clear, repeated and public incitement to genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.” Among Mr. Hochman’s controversial remarks, according to the Foundation, was his call for the “conquest, expulsion, and settlement” of Gaza.
Last month, following a 40-page dossier compiled by the foundation, Canadian authorities detained Mr. Hochman at a Toronto airport and interrogated him for six hours. After being released without charge, Mr. Hochman performed his show while protesters demonstrated outside the venue.
Mr. Hochman would not fare so well in the United States. His New York show was canceled after protesters blocked access to the theater. In Beverly Hills, after receiving “a large volume of messages, including threats of violence,” the venue where Mr. Hochman was due to perform requested him to “refute the allegations and to release a press release and post on his social media that he did not support the genocide, rape, starvation and torture of Palestinian civilians.” When Mr. Hochman refused to submit to what he accurately later described as a “loyalty test,” the theater canceled his show. (It has since apologized.)
“It is a profound violation of free expression to demand artists, writers or comedians agree to ideological litmus tests as a condition to appear on a stage,” Jonathan Friedman, PEN’s managing director for U.S. Free Expression Programs, said in the statement published on the organization’s website. Acknowledging what he characterized as Mr. Hochman’s “history of dehumanizing social media posts about Palestinians,” Mr. Friedman emphasized that Mr. Hochman “has a right to perform without facing threats or litmus tests.”
But then on Feb. 3, five days after proclaiming that “shutting down cultural events is not the solution,” PEN posted a terse, three-sentence revocation of the statement. Last week, PEN’s co-chief executives told The Times that they had approved the original statement and its retraction; the original, one of them said, did not “meet our standards.” The day after the Times story appeared, PEN’s leaders released a statement. “We recognize that the willingness to defend a person’s right to engage in controversial speech is essential to a principled commitment to free expression,” they wrote. “This includes defending people’s right to engage in speech that may be anathema to our personal or organizational values.” Furthermore, “We have seen powerful institutions obeying in advance or breaking under the pressure. PEN America isn’t going to do that on our watch.”
The word “gaslighting” is much overused these days, but there’s no better way to describe PEN’s behavior. Refusing to defend “controversial speech” that is “anathema to our personal or organizational values” is precisely what PEN has just done. PEN’s second guiding principle states that “In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion.” It has largely adhered to that proposition — until now. And it has done this in response to a two-year, self-described “pressure campaign” by the same ideological forces as those it rightfully resisted 11 years ago.
In February 2024, nearly five months after the Hamas attack on Israel and well into Israel’s punishing military response, more than 500 writers signed an open letter demanding that PEN release a statement about Palestinian writers killed in Gaza “and name their murderer: Israel, a Zionist colonial state funded by the U.S. government.” An organization called Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), which describes itself as “building a revolutionary cultural front for a liberated Palestine,” has made it its mission to drive “Zionists” out of the literary world.
Demanding that writers boycott PEN over its insufficient denunciation of the “Zionist entity,” WAWOG played a major role in forcing the organization to cancel its annual literary awards ceremony and World Voices Festival in 2024, and has organized an ongoing boycott of The New York Times for “manufacturing consent for war, for exploitation, for genocide.”
The Israel-Hamas war is not about free expression, and is therefore far beyond the remit of PEN. Throughout this crisis, PEN’s then-president, Suzanne Nossel, did her best to resist PEN’s politicization. When she resigned in October 2024, WAWOG congratulated itself for her departure, claiming that she primarily “lost her job because her commitment to Zionism made her a liability to PEN America.” (PEN had announced that she was stepping down to take another role.) Included in WAWOG’s bill of particulars against Ms. Nossel was her bestowal of PEN’s Freedom of Expression prize upon the surviving members of Charlie Hebdo.
Last summer, when PEN, in its call for a cease-fire in Gaza, also called for a U. S. arms embargo against Israel (something it has not done for any other state), WAWOG claimed credit. “We know that we are winning,” the organization crowed on its website, which does not name its leadership. “Our pressure campaign is working and transforming PEN’s infrastructure, which is why we must keep pushing.” With PEN’s revocation of its statement in defense of Mr. Hochman’s free speech rights, that campaign has finally triumphed.
Asked on Wednesday to elaborate on why they withdrew their statement of support for Mr. Hochman’s free speech rights, PEN explained that “the decision had nothing to do with Hochman’s identity.” They said it was “based on a judgment about whether it appropriately addressed the specific dynamics of the situation, including the rights and responsibilities of private venues and the fact that the Los Angeles venue had already reversed course and offered to reschedule the show.”
That a group inspired by the power of the written word would surrender, even if indirectly, to the dictates of an organization behind an anonymous Twitter account is bad enough. That it would shrink in the face of an adversary spewing such turgid, propagandistic prose only compounds the indignity. PEN has demonstrated a cavalier attitude toward transparency more befitting an intelligence agency than a writers’ organization. At least one trustee, Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, has resigned as a result of PEN’s actions.
The old PEN was willing to buck progressive opinion when circumstances warranted; today’s PEN propitiates it. By doing so, it has followed the path trod by so many liberal nonprofit institutions, sacrificing its principles to enlist in the progressive omnicause. The organization that inspired me with the romantic idea that words are precious and must be defended no matter the cost is no more.
Photographs by JimDPhoto, Javier Zayas Photography/Getty Images.
James Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”
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