AWP as a Narrow Place

The conference that once felt like a gathering of my community this year felt like an assault on my ethnic and religious identity.

Content Warning(s): Anti-Israel propaganda (shared to demonstrate what happened, not to promote it), experiences by individuals shared with me but not verifiable by me, and quite likely opinions with which you will—maybe very strongly—disagree.

What’s This AWP Thing, Anyway?

Since not all of my followers are the kinds of writers who would attend or even know about AWP, or any kind of writer at all, a little background. From the “About” tab on AWPwriter.org: "

AWP provides support, advocacy, resources, and community to writers, college and university creative writing programs, and writers’ conferences and centers. Our mission is to amplify the voices of writers and the academic programs and organizations that serve them while championing diversity and excellence in creative writing.

But that’s a very top-line, not particularly useful description, I think, of what AWP is to the writers for whom it is significant. For us, it is a yearly gathering where we connect and reconnect with the people who are doing the same work we do, where we sell our books (which are often the sort of books we sell primarily to other writers), where we teach and learn about craft, pedagogy, and publishing, and maybe most importantly where we renew our connection to the larger writing community, which can feel distant to those of us outside larger cities. In short, it’s kind of a mix between a continuing education conference and writer Mardis Gras. For myself, it’s usually a deeply renewing and productive time creatively and personally.

A Note on Terms:

I’m going to use the phrase “anti-Israel” where some might want me to use the phrase “Pro-Palestinian.” I do not think organizations calling for the eradication of Israel are pro-Palestinian. The only hope for all people to live in peace and security in the region is coexistence; calls for the destruction of Israel are calls for war. I’m also going to adopt the ADL’s definition of antisemitism:

The belief or behavior hostile toward Jews just because they are Jewish. It may take the form of religious teachings that proclaim the inferiority of Jews, for instance, or political efforts to isolate, oppress, or otherwise injure them. It may also include prejudiced or stereotyped views about Jews.

What Happened This Year?

Unsurprisingly, this year parts of the conference were co-opted by the anti-Israel discourse currently holding much of the left in its grip. The keynote speaker, Jericho Brown, made it a focus of his talk. A few days ahead of the conference, an anti-Israel organization farmed publicly available email addresses and sent out a letter to all panel organizers (except those who were obviously Jewish or whose panel had a Jewish theme) that initially appeared to many to have the blessing of AWP. AWP issues what I think is a very tepid response.

RAWI letter to panel moderators

AWP’s response

Do I love their response? No. I wish they’d added phrasing like “The statement includes inflammatory language that does not meet our own standards for respect, generosity, and dignity.” Even that’s weak-sauce, but it would have been something. I’m not, however, surprised that AWP didn’t engage with the content of the letter.

My far bigger problem is that there was a protest in which there were many far more blatant antisemitic signs and chants allowed to disrupt the bookfair (the central shared space of the conference) for two hours. These included chants of “from the river to the sea¹” and signs with a map of Israel covered in a large black X. AWP issued no statement during the protest, and declined to call security when asked to by a Jewish participant (this is one of those “told to me, I believe it, but I can’t verify it” pieces of information.) Speeches were made through a bullhorn, disrupting other planned events and making the space at the very least uncomfortable (though I would say threatening) for Jewish attendees and anyone with sensory processing issues. After two hours, the protest moved—or was moved, I’m not sure—out of doors, which is where it should have been all along. (I’m not suggesting AWP should silence this, or any, protest. I’m suggesting it should not allow this, or any, protest to create an inaccessible or threatening space for other attendees.)

Footage taken by the writer Jessie Glenn

This was further problematized by the fact that another event happening on a lower floor meant that we had limited access to exits from the bookfair and the conference center in general. Several Jewish writers reported trying to leave and finding it difficult to navigate. The most obvious egresses were an elevator that was out of service and an escalator that was blocked off. Navigating the flow from bookfair to street was difficult even at other times and there was no signage making it clear which routes were available to us.

What I Would Like AWP to do in the Future:

Let me say I am a member of, and supporter of, AWP. But it was clear AWP was caught unprepared for navigating the complexities of allowing dissent while ensuring a safe and accessible conference for all that lived up to their own commitment of “providing a conference environment that is free of harassment, fear, intimidation, or ridicule.” I think there are some concrete steps AWP could take in the future that would go a long way toward helping them live up to that commitment.

• At the suggestion of writer and overall Literary Citizen Extraordinaire

  Erika Dreifus
  , I would love to see AWP engage Project Shema to help the staff, board, and conference organizers understand the complexities of the issues at hand and learn to recognize the language that moves beyond legitimate protest and into antisemitism.

• I would like to see AWP either create a specific space for protest, one which does not disrupt the regular workings of the bookfair or other major conference element, or create a policy that any protest which does disrupt the regular activities of the conference will be evicted. (Some will argue that this did not disrupt the bookfair. I assure you that for many participants, it did, including at least one Jewish poet whose scheduled signing was in a booth directly adjacent to it, and so nobody could come to the booth to buy her books without also having to wade through the protestors. Needless to say, the Jewish members of her reading audience weren’t predisposed to make that trek. Also, she had to sit through the whole thing, which she certainly found disruptive of her conference experience. This is only one example, but this is already a long post. There were several.)

• At least one person has reported that when they told AWP they felt unsafe coming to the conference because they felt the organization had taken inadequate measures to ensure the safety of Jewish participants, the advice they received was not to come. This is an unacceptable response (although, again, one of those told-to-me-not-verified happenings). At the very least, the response should have been “what steps do you think would be effective in increasing everyone’s safety?” At best, it should have been “here are the concrete steps we are already taking to ensure it.” I would like to see AWP do the work this year to have those steps in place next year.

What I Think We, as Jewish Members and Conference Attendees, Can Do Moving Forward:

• I have come to agree with the many people who say that a caucus isn’t in our best interest; we are of too many divergent opinions about world events, and caucuses are about reaching consensus, a thing which would necessarily exclude some Jewish participants as we do not have a universally-held understanding of, well, damn near anything. But we need something, some way of creating a network of people who can be called upon during the conference to provide comfort, aid, and maybe even voices to counter the anti-Israel protestors. (That last might be a terrible idea. Part of me wished for a choir of voices to join on the other side of the bookfair to sing Hatikvah, most of me suspects that would have gone badly.) Some such networks exist in scattered ways on social media; by next year, I think we need to centralize. Maybe it’s just a hashtag (but on Threads, perhaps, because Jews have no business on Twitter, IMHO). Maybe it’s a closed social media group on Facebook or through Discord. But I heard from several people, particularly those not well-connected within the AWP community, that they felt isolated and didn’t know how to reach out to or find other Jews to help them through their anxiety or distress. Maybe it’s fundraising to rent a hospitality suite in the conference hotel (so that it’s hotel security, and not AWP staff, who would be responsible for removing anyone who disrupted the space). I am not sure what, exactly, this should look like… but I hope we all come together to imagine and implement a more robust system for caring for one another.

• I would like to see an open letter to AWP from a large contingent of Jewish attendees/members (even if they didn’t attend this year)—particularly those with more significant voices than my own—asking for a better strategy for creating “a conference environment that is free of harassment, fear, intimidation, or ridicule.” I’m happy to be one of the laborers in that effort, but haven’t the stature in the writing community to lead it. I hope someone who does will step forward.

What I Wish Many Who Participated in the Protests Understood:

The anti-Israel protestors have managed, against all logic and reason, to position themselves in the popular imagination as the Palestinian voice for peace. They are not. They are voices for entrenched conflict that cannot, in fact, be resolved peacefully or lead to any lasting security for either the Israelis or the Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. (I say it this way to remind you that IMEU estimates that there are 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, comprising about 20% of the total population.) The real voices for peace, and for justice and security for all, are and have always been those working on coalition toward that end. The largest such organization doing this work is Standing Together².

Standing Together is a grassroots movement mobilizing Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in pursuit of peace, equality, and social and climate justice. While the minority who benefit from the status quo of occupation and economic inequality seek to keep us divided, we know that we — the majority — have far more in common than that which sets us apart. When we stand together, we are strong enough to fundamentally alter the existing socio-political reality. The future that we want — peace and independence for Israelis and Palestinians, full equality for all citizens, and true social, economic, and environmental justice — is possible. Because where there is struggle, there is hope.

I’m certain a number of the people who participated in the protest believed they were participating in a protest that was calling for, and only for, a mutual cease-fire and a better life for Palestinians living in Gaza. That is not what a protest that leads participants in the chant “from the river to the sea,” refers to “Israeli apartheid” (remember those 1.6 million Palestinian Israelis from the last paragraph), and brings pre-made signs with images of Israel crossed out is arguing for; it is arguing for the dissolution of the State of Israel in favor of a Palestinian state that will not be, as Israel is, a pluralistic democracy. But because the bulk of the coalition work is done—as it should be—in the region, by the people whose lives are directly impacted, there isn’t adequate representation of this conversation in American political life. There needs to be. And it needs to be visible enough so that people who only think about this when violence erupts in the region know how to recognize the difference between a protest that calls for peace and one that calls for continued war. I suspect if people could make such a distinction, there’d be a lot less support for latter.

Please feel free to share your experiences and suggestions here, but more importantly, with AWP. Let’s make LA a little closer to AWP’s self-proclaimed goal of a space where everyone treats one another with respect, generosity, and dignity.

1. Claiming the meaning of “from the river to the sea” has changed at a protest in which people carry signs showing the map of Israel crossed out with a black X is as much a nonstarter as claiming your Confederate Flag t-shirt is about heritage not hate. People of good will stop using a phrase or symbol when it’s made clear to them that it is a dog whistle.

2. I’m not saying their position(s) perfectly align with my own. Like a lot of American Jews, I don’t feel like it makes sense to broadcast my position(s) both because I’m not a key stakeholder and because they are always evolving. I am saying that if you are attending rallies whose mission is the displacement of 46% of the world’s Jews through terrorism and war, but think you are attending a peace rally, their position(s) probably more closely align with yours than those of the leaders of said protest. If your position is, in fact, “I support the displacement of 46% of the world’s Jews through terrorism and war,” then, as we say, may a child be named after you soon.