Albany Book Festival, last weekend’s program run by the NYS Writers Institute at SUNY-Albany, was supposed to have a panel discussion on girls coming of age, including Albany writer Elisa Albert, until one of her three fellow panelists, a woman with an Arabic name, refused to participate with a “Zionist.” A second panelist quit in “sympathy,” and the third because she didn’t want to get involved.
Here is a link to national coverage in The Forward newspaper, which also quotes Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Albany radio station WAMC’s Ian Pickus and the Albany Times Union have covered the story as well.
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Follow-up in Times Union:
Authors speak out after book festival firestorm
Novelist Lisa Ko said she never dropped out of the scrapped panel and is demanding an apology from the New York State Writers Institute.
By Patrick Tine,
Staff Writer
Sep 25, 2024
Writer Aisha Abdel Gawad said her decision to drop out of a panel at last weekend’s New York State Writers Institute event was due to the moderator’s rhetoric, not her religion.
Contributed photo/Aisha Abdel Gawad
Elisa Albert had been set to moderate a panel called “Girls, Coming of Age” at the Albany Book Festival on Saturday.
Tanja Hollander
ALBANY — Two authors at the center of a firestorm surrounding a canceled literary event said they are facing death threats and one is asking for an apology from the New York State Writers Institute, saying she never dropped out of the planned discussion at last weekend’s Albany Book Festival.
Authors Aisha Abdel Gawad, Lisa Ko and Emily Layden had been scheduled to speak on a panel titled “Girls, Coming of Age,” moderated by novelist Elisa Albert on Saturday at the Writers Institute’s festival at the state University at Albany. Albert is Jewish and has written about her reaction to last October’s terror attacks on Israel by Hamas.
Gawad — who has not responded to the Times Union’s requests for comment — told the Connecticut Post she withdrew from the event because of Albert’s “public rhetoric, which I felt mocked anyone who expressed grief over loss of Palestinian life.”
In screenshots of an email that surfaced on social media late last week, Writers Institute Assistant Director Mark Koplik wrote to Albert that Gawad and Ko “don’t want to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist.’” Gawad and Ko both rejected that characterization.
In a statement released Wednesday, Ko said she never backed out of the event.
“I never refused to participate on the panel, and the accusation that I withdrew because the moderator is Jewish, or that I am unwilling to appear onstage with someone who is Jewish, is hurtful and completely false,” Ko said. “The festival informed me that I would no longer be attending. Even more shocking, I discovered the organizers had emailed the moderator separately to tell her that I had refused to appear on the panel with her — misinformation that has gone on to foster an increasingly hostile response toward myself and others, including defamation and death threats.”
Ko said she did write to the festival’s organizers last week to express “support of a fellow author who expressed concerns about the public rhetoric of the panel’s moderator. I was concerned about statements that this individual had made, including calling those who have spoken out against the ongoing violence of Israel’s war on Gaza ‘terror apologists’” — a reference to a piece by Albert that appeared in Tablet magazine a few weeks after the attacks and the Israeli military response.
Ko and her publisher, Riverhead Books, an imprint of publishing giant Penguin Group, have called on the Writers Institute to issue a correction and an apology.
Writers Institute Director Paul Grondahl, a former longtime reporter for the Times Union who contributes a column to the paper, declined to comment on the record. A representative for Layden declined to comment.
Albert’s brief Tablet piece — titled “An Open Letter to Hamas’ Defenders” and beginning “Hi, terror apologist!” — fiercely criticized elements of the activist response to the attacks and Israeli’s retaliation as “putting forth some sort of argument for — or implicit defense of — terrorism.” Among those she put in that category were social-justice-minded Gentiles who have “recently become interested in a centuries-old conflict between people you don’t know in a place you’ve never been near” and assimilated Jews with “some intellectual curiosity and the epigenetic trauma response of trying to cover your ass so you’ll be accepted by the secular world.”
Gawad told the Connecticut Post, a Hearst newspaper, that Albert’s “labeling of anyone who questions a war as a ‘terrorist apologist’ seemed a form of silencing inappropriate for a literary forum committed to free discussion. As an Arab, Muslim writer, I made the private choice to withdraw from the panel because it did not feel like a productive forum for me.”
Gawad’s statement said she had become “the target of a campaign of intimidation, defamation and death threats” in the days since her withdrawal became public.
Albert said she had been willing to appear at the event solo, and Grondahl said earlier this week that she was offered “other alternatives” to speak — though not in the time allocated for the scrapped panel discussion or during the daylong literary festival.
When asked how she felt about Ko saying she had not dropped out of the event, Albert responded, “She-said/she-said is never going to be anything but a waste of time and energy. I have no way of knowing what went down verbally or in writing to which I was not privy. I was told that the two demanded I be replaced, and when that wasn’t an option they boycotted. At this point, there is some concrete repair and learning and commitment to doing better that can and will be demanded of our institutions.”
Albert said she still considered both women antisemites: “The fact that Ko and Gawad are mewling about the fallout they have faced is comical,” Albert said. “Try being a Jew, ladies.”
Albert is scheduled to moderate a Nov. 12 Writers Institute discussion with Joshua Cohen, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2021 novel “The Netanyahus,” which delves into issues of Jewish identity within an upstate New York academic setting. Albert said over the weekend that Cohen was “apoplectic” about the controversy.
The tsuris led SUNY Chancellor John King to send a letter to UAlbany President Havidan Rodriguez on Saturday while the festival was still in progress. “It is abhorrent and contrary to SUNY’s values to censor individuals because of their identity,” King wrote.
In response, Rodriguez reiterated the Writers Institute’s explanation of why the panel did not go forward.
“The one and only role of the moderator was to moderate a discussion among the three panelists on the topic of girls coming of age,” Rodriguez wrote. “Consequently, without any panelists, there was no longer a panel to moderate. … We too were very disappointed that this session did not take place, but we could not automatically create another session or insert the moderator into a different session at the last minute.”
Rodriguez also rejected accusations of censorship at UAlbany and that it “strongly and unequivocally stands against and rejects antisemitism, Islamophobia, and any and all forms of hatred and bias.”
Sep 25, 2024
STAFF WRITER
Patrick Tine is a reporter with the rapid response team. He was previously a planning editor with Spectrum News 1 in Albany. He is also a former freelancer for the Times Union where he contributed art reviews and features. He can be reached at [email protected]
