A Leading Free Expression Group Is Roiled by Dissent Over Gaza

As it cancels events amid criticism of its response to the Israel-Hamas war, PEN America faces questions about when an organization devoted to free speech for all should take sides.

When PEN America celebrated its 100th birthday two years ago, it was a rousing if sober celebration of a nimble defender of free expression around the world.

Once a small writers group best known for its staunch defense of imperiled writers in authoritarian regimes, it had become a leading fighter against book bans, educational gag orders and other surging threats across the United States. It was also taking on 21st-century scourges like misinformation and online harassment, while standing up for the old-fashioned power of the pen, rallying support for Salman Rushdie after he was stabbed onstage at a literary event in 2022.

Today, amid spiraling protests over the Israel-Hamas war, battles over free speech are pitched as high as ever. But PEN America has found itself roiled, and at times hobbled, by escalating controversy over its response to the war.

Last month, it canceled its literary awards ceremony and its World Voices Festival, which brings writers from around the globe to New York, after dozens of authors pulled out as a protest against what they said was PEN America’s failure to adequately speak out about dire threats to Palestinian writers and cultural life posed by Israel’s military action. But far from quelling controversy, the cancellations have unleashed a war of words over just who is trying to silence, shame and bully whom.

“Go ahead, shut down PEN America, put a few heads on pikes,” the novelist Margaret Atwood, a former president of PEN Canada, said of the group’s critics in an email. “Then burnish your brand and congratulate yourselves on your own purity and righteousness while those who PEN America could have helped — worldwide, at home, and in prison — wither on the vine.”

To others, it’s PEN America that is falling down on the job of defending writers. The novelist Hari Kunzru, a former deputy president of English PEN, said in an email it had made “the nakedly political choice to downplay the destruction of Palestinian civil society.” And rather than listening to critics, he said, it is “trying to mobilize sentiment against them by using insinuation and hearsay.”