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Further to John’s post on “Anti-Semitism in the arts” (the British arts, that is) consider this testimony taken by Liel Leibovitz from an insider with first-hand knowledge:

“There’s no question that Jews are being excluded from the publishing industry at every level and rank—from editors at publishing houses unwilling to publish Jewish books, to literary media outlets refusing to cover Israeli or Jewish books and authors, major festivals no longer inviting Jews, and down to bookstores now boycotting Jews.”

The speaker is Adam Bellow, a legendary American editor and publisher. After an extensive career at prestigious houses such as Doubleday, HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, and after discovering and nurturing some of America’s most successful authors’ careers, Bellow decided he could no longer tolerate the industry in its current form.

This was no easy decision, considering not only his own achievements but also that his father—Nobel Prize laureate Saul Bellow, one of the most important Jewish-American authors of all time—helped to elevate the industry and remained among its most cherished figures for decades.

“In a sense,” Bellow told Israel Hayom, “what’s happening now to Jews in the publishing industry represents a tremendous injustice. This industry was institutional and dormant, the exclusive domain of WASP gentlemen. Jews arrived and transformed the industry into a global powerhouse, just as we did in Hollywood and other industries. And now, we face exactly the same discrimination we see in so many other industries we helped elevate, like universities.”

Which leads us, Bellow continued, to a difficult choice.

“Now we Jews in all these industries excluding us have exactly two options,” he said. “Do we stay and fight to reclaim positions earned honestly through hard work, or do we leave and establish our own parallel institutions, as we did in the first decades of modern Jewish existence in America?

“I won’t presume to judge either way, but I can tell you what I did—which was to leave quickly and establish my own publishing house, which is thriving. So now, as someone once said, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times.”

I believe the publishing house to which Bellow refers is his joint venture with Post Hill Press. Post Hill’s Wicked Son imprint specializes in books with Jewish themes. Gil Troy has more on Wicked Son with this personal note:

Full disclosure: I am a Wicked Son author. In 2011, when I shopped around what ultimately became “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism,” the executive editor of one of the top university presses championed my proposal. But the editorial board rejected it, uncomfortable, she admitted, “with the word ‘Zionism’ in the title.” But when the same press published an anti-Zionist hit job, it became clear that the problem wasn’t the word ‘Zionism.’ The problem was that I was defending Zionism, not condemning it. Eventually, another, bolder publisher, Oxford University Press, did publish the book.

In subsequent years I started hearing the stories of this silent then-unspoken shunning of Jewish authors, and certainly of many pro-Israel and Zionist texts.

That’s why I went to Wicked Son with my latest book. I wanted to defend Zionism, Americanism, and liberalism. I also wanted to make the book personal, telling my own story and that of others who recall hearing about the misery our parents and grandparents grew up with, and knew our lives would be better than theirs….

Gil Troy’s column is aptly titled “Wicked Son to the rescue.”