AWP 2025: The Bridge Widens
A Shehecheyanu Moment
I’m very happy to say that everything AWP could have done to make the conference a safer and more welcoming place for Jewish voices, it did.
and did excellent jobs of recapping our experience on the A Narrow Bridge: Jewish Writers on Resilience in an Antisemitic Climate panel in their newsletters:The Cossacks are Always Coming from Howard’s Newsletter Emet-Truth
I Sound My Ecstatic AWP Over The Roofs Of The World from Elissa’s Newsletter Never Alone
I was grateful to them,
, and Jennifer Lang, for being willing to brave what one person in attendance said was the only openly Zionist panel he’d ever seen at a mainstream literary event. I feel honored to have been able to be a part of making that happen.
But the truth is I was only a small part of making it happen, in spite of having been the person who proposed the panel. I’m very grateful to Allison Lee at PEN America, Naomi Firestone-Teeter and Miryam Pomerantz Dauber at the Jewish Book Counsel, and the AWP leadership who did the real work of ensuring that this, and five other important panels elevating Jewish voices originally left off the program, were part of this year’s conversation at AWP.
This isn’t to say it was an easy year. Many people I would have run to embrace just two years ago instead turned in the other direction when I waved at them, or said “let’s get together later” and then didn’t answer my texts to set up a time to do so. There were protestors at the Narrow Bridge Panel, but AWP had hired security to ensure this could be handled and asked for feedback about how we wanted it handled, both of which I am grateful for. One of the panelists at the other panel I was on, Spiritual Outsiders United: Writing Our Way to Collective Liberation blindsided the rest of the panel by reading the RAWI statement mentioned in my last newsletter before reading her own work. (I had made my only condition to participate on panels this year that the statement, which I find both deeply misleading and an act of violence in the way it conscripts other peoples who have not agreed to be included in this way under the guise of “solidarity.”)
But it was a beautiful year. Jennifer Lang and I sat in a coffee shop and talked, and cried, about life in Israel and loneliness in the diaspora. Elissa Wald and I had a slumber party, since my hotel was nearer the conference center than the place she was staying, and stayed up late (for me) chatting about life.
and I chatted at a cocktail gathering hosted by the Jewish Book Council and Amy Fish forgave me for missing her reading at he end of the conference because I was, as we say back home, plumb tuckered out.But while I’m talking about Amy and her reading, you should buy her book, One in Six Million. Here is my blurb for it, and I mean every word:
“One in Six Million is a stunning achievement that interlaces the dark shadows of the Holocaust with the redemptive light of discovery. Through the lives of Maria, the survivor seeking her roots, and Stanley, the man who dedicated his life to unravelling genealogical mysteries, Fish crafts a narrative that is both heartbreaking and inspiring. With her impeccable storytelling and keen emotional insight, Fish takes readers on a journey that underscores the resilience of the human spirit and the power of connection. This book is a poignant reminder of the importance of understanding history to pave the way for a brighter future.” -- Sarah Einstein, author of the Writing Family Histories Substack
So, overall, AWP was a success, if a hard-won success. I’m already looking forward to AWP 2026. Next year in Baltimore, to borrow from the Haggadah.
The virtue signaling of the “educated elites” is matched with a callous disregard for the suffering of non Gazans. 800 Syrian Allawites murdered in the most vicious way- silence. Arrest of the mayor of Istanbul by the Pres of Turkey - silence.
Their sloppy thinking turns their enemies in “fascists” and the crimes of their allies are cushioned with rationalizations.
Their political “aktion” is snubbing Jews.
Vile and pathetic. And you are brave!
If you're wondering how nonsense like this: "There were protestors at the Narrow Bridge Panel, but AWP both security there to manage that asked for feedback about how we wanted it handled, both of which I am grateful for." makes it into a newsletter, welcome to my aphasic brain! Not only do I sometimes struggle for words, I also see what I meant to write, not what I actually wrote, when I look at a page until some time has passed. Pity my poor editors. But it's fixed now.