High Line Publishing Studio launches amid Jewish publishing dispute

PEN America president resigns as compendium presents writers’ accounts of isolation

High Line Publishing Studio launched Sept. 10 with two imprints and a goal, attributed to founder Neil Blair, of publishing writers whose ideas and subject matter he believes have been shut out of mainstream publishing. Blair, a London-based literary agent best known for representing J.K. Rowling, started the company as Jewish publishing professionals described barriers affecting Jewish and Israeli writers.

“The lack of diversity in publishing in New York and London with respect to Israeli and Jewish voices started years ago and increased exponentially after October 7,” Blair said. “There’s a real need and desire to launch a new vehicle that is invested in voices across the whole spectrum.”

High Line’s announced titles include U.K. editions of recent books by Dara Horn and Matti Friedman. It also obtained world rights to new books by Adam Louis-Klein, an influencer and founder of Movement Against Antizionism, and to “Anatomy of a Failure: The Road to October 7th” by Amos Harel, a military correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Anatomy of a Failure” examines strategic errors by Israel before and after Oct. 7.

The company initially consists of Odessa Editions and Antidote Books, which Hachette will distribute. Jacky Klein, Odessa’s executive publisher, said the imprint chiefly intends to support Jewish voices but also wants books by non-Jewish writers, including Israeli-Arab authors and others writing about Israel, Iran, the Middle East and Jewish subjects.

“It’s very important that we not create a hermetic ghetto,” Klein said. “We are here chiefly to support Jewish voices, but I’d also like to publish non-Jewish voices including books by Israeli-Arab writers and others writing about Israel, Iran, the Middle East and Jewish subjects. I want to connect with all those communities.”

Antidote Books has a broader remit. Led by Joel Simons, a former publisher at HarperCollins UK, the imprint plans idea-driven nonfiction spanning technology, ethics, history, current affairs and ideas about power.

Novelist Lee Child, who is not Jewish and has publicly opposed cultural boycotts of Israel, joined High Line’s advisory board. “The idea is to give access to writers that the commercial publishing industry is uneasy with,” Child said.

Blair said most of High Line’s financing comes from foundations and trusts but declined to identify them. He said High Line is neither a charity nor a nonprofit and called the venture a “fantastic commercial opportunity.”

High Line’s founders say they’re aware they are working against strong headwinds in publishing, but believe they are offering something the public is hungry for and a need that has been underserved by mainstream publishers. They plan to offer competitive advances, invest in marketing and often work with established communities of Jewish readers.

Klein and others compared the ventures with Jewish efforts to create law firms, universities and hospitals after exclusion from existing institutions. Klein said that although the startups will compete, together they have a better chance of reasserting Jewish writers internationally.

High Line joins Canary Publishing, a nonprofit founded earlier this month by Howard Lovy, an independent editor based in Michigan, to publish Jewish, Israeli and Zionist writers. Meg Keene Books, a fiction imprint of Wicked Son press, launched in July.

Meg Keene Books plans to release the American edition of Booker prizewinner Howard Jacobson’s “Howl” as its first title. The 2026 satirical novel about diaspora Jews after Oct. 7 came out in the U.K. in March but had been unable to secure a U.S. publisher.

Some literary professionals expressed concern that specialized publishers could produce ghettoization. Many others welcomed the ventures as a way to confront bias, support new writers and reach readers of Jewish and Israeli books across borders.

The dispute arises within a longstanding Jewish literary tradition. Jews may be known as “the people of the book” for religious reasons, and the phrase also captures a strong literary tradition. Many notable editors and founding publishers of the past century have been Jewish. Books by Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel have long been assigned in American schools, while for decades bestseller lists and prestigious literary awards have featured Jewish novelists from Philip Roth to Michael Chabon. Yet today, many Jews believe that publishing is biased against them.

Jewish authors, agents, scouts, editors and other book professionals described an ecosystem stretching from large publishers to #BookTok that they say suppresses Jewish and Israeli voices. Agents and scouts said it had become impossible to sell foreign rights to works by Israeli writers. Established authors said projects had been rejected without explanation, while published writers with overtly Jewish books said agents had dropped them. Writers also said editors asked them to remove Jewish or Israeli elements from manuscripts.

Multiple agents have posted on their websites that they do not want “Zionist” submissions. One said neither “Nazis nor Zionist” writers should apply. One author shared an email in which a former agent advised delaying a biography of a major Israeli figure until “anti-Zionism” within publishing subsides. Several agents and editors said American authors face expectations that they be the “right kind of Jew.”

Authors of books with Jewish or Israeli characters said their titles were “review bombed” with one-star reviews on Goodreads and similar sites intended to depress interest. They said outlets that previously covered their work did not review the books and that bookstores, particularly independent ones, refused to stock or display them. Many described “a chill” in the literary world that was difficult to document because it is hard to prove why something did not happen.

Publishing professionals also said it can be hard to establish why a proposal is rejected or why a book passes unnoticed, unreviewed or unpromoted. Publishing remains a challenging and risk-averse business in which publishers worry about taking on any project that might face a boycott or predictable headwinds, even when some breakout books sell strongly.

One editor said opaque decisions create “plausible deniability” throughout the chain, from publicists to independent bookstore employees, even if some participants deliberately undermine a book. Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan, the five largest U.S. publishing houses, declined to comment. HarperCollins Publishers and The Wall Street Journal are owned by News Corp.

In August, an independent bookstore in Nashville canceled the launch for Alyssa Rosenheck’s “White. Blonde. Jew.: A Call to End Extremism, Speak Up and Reclaim Center” after an Instagram post promoting the event drew public opposition. One removed comment said, “Ain’t nobody coming to your Nazi book rally.”

“It always starts with a pressure campaign, with institutions capitulating to online and offline pressure campaigns for platforming Zionist authors,” Rosenheck said. She said she pleaded with the owner, who publicly cited security concerns, and had hired private security for the event.

The owner, whose husband is Jewish, wrote on Instagram: “This was never about an author, her Jewish identity, or the subject of her book. It was never about censorship.” Rosenheck said she told the owner that the cancellation reflected a pattern of excluding Jewish people from public spaces. The owner declined to comment.

Matti Friedman, an Israeli author whose most recent book, “Out of the Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe,” came out in the U.S. in March, said he could not say there was a ban on Jewish or Israeli books.

“But I know for a fact that it’s very difficult to get Israel-related books published and that Israeli authors are often either ignored or expected to sign declarations of support for BDS and to use the word ‘genocide’ as the price of entry,” Friedman said. BDS refers to the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement targeting Israel.

Alberto Mansur’s “Only the Dead Know Peace,” a thriller set in Israel and Palestine, came out in August 2023 to strong initial reviews. Mansur said his publisher gave him “the cold shoulder” after Oct. 7 and told him bookstores were not buying the book and the publisher would no longer ship copies.

“I check most of the boxes for minority representation,” said Mansur, who is Jewish and Mexican-American. “I’m an immigrant from Latin America; my ancestry is Arabic. I don’t look white. But for many people, not just in the publishing industry, Jews are perceived as white people, with all the privilege that entails.”

Mansur’s publisher disputed his account. It said it maintained correspondence with him throughout, did not restrict or withhold shipments of the book and would have no financial interest in doing so.

Horn called the treatment of Jewish authors “a racist and bigoted hate movement that many people in the publishing industry have swallowed.” Her latest book, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living,” was published in the U.S. earlier this month by Avid Reader Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint, and debuted at No. 6 on the New York Times bestseller list.

“Any publisher who is not publishing Jewish books is making a financial mistake because this is a community that supports authors and buys books,” Horn said. “I feel bad for those who have because they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”

The Jewish Book Council, a nonprofit literary organization, opened a hotline in 2024 for authors to report antisemitism in the literary world. As of July, the council had received 350 independently verified responses.

On July 9, PEN America published “A Silent Moratorium,” a compendium of accounts from Israeli and Jewish writers who described “a widening cultural isolation since the attacks of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza.”

PEN America President Dinaw Mengestu resigned the same day. In an essay on LitHub, Mengestu attributed his decision to what he described as the organization’s inconsistent position on boycotts, particularly BDS. He later wrote on Instagram that the paper suggested “writers are excluded because of their ethnicity rather than the quality of their work and [conflates] political beliefs with identity.”

PEN America said its longstanding policy on cultural and academic boycotts had not changed. The organization said it opposes such boycotts institutionally while defending individuals’ right to participate in them.

Several Jewish authors and editors disputed the suggestion that publishing has become antisemitic. They cited the continued success of Jewish and Israeli novelists including Etgar Keret, Deborah Levy and David Grossman, as well as nonfiction writers addressing explicitly Jewish subjects.

Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University and author of “Israel: What Went Wrong?” published this spring, said people who classify the assertion that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza as antisemitic are likely to falsely perceive a vast expansion of antisemitism.

“Opposing the existence of the state as a political statement, whether it is made by Orthodox Jews, Palestinians or anyone else, is not antisemitic,” Bartov said.

Books by Jewish writers with sharply different political views have succeeded since Oct. 7. Peter Beinart’s “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” and Molly Crabapple’s “Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund,” both by anti-Zionist authors, hit the bestseller list. “Hostage,” a 2025 memoir by Eli Sharabi, an Israeli held by Hamas for 491 days, and “When We See You Again,” Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s memoir about the murder of her son by Hamas, were also bestsellers.

Ben Hyman, appointed in 2024 as editorial director of Schocken Books, a Jewish imprint within Penguin Random House, acknowledged that there is “incredible power” in anti-Zionist narratives right now. He cited two forthcoming titles on his list as examples of Jewish publishing’s diversity: “Pretend you Believe” by Rabbi Noa Kushner and “Arab/Jew” by Maurice Chammah, a Syrian-Jewish author writing about Arab-Jewish identity in the diaspora.

“I don’t really buy the idea that only anti-Zionist books are getting attention,” Hyman said. “I’ve seen successful books on both sides of that divide.”

Jews remain divided over whether anti-Zionism amounts to antisemitism, and many believe the boundaries overlap. A 2025 poll found that 37% of American Jews identified as Zionist, 7% as anti-Zionist and 8% as non-Zionist, while 48% selected none of those labels. The poll found that 79% were deeply concerned about antisemitism.

In 2024, more than 5,000 writers and literary professionals, including some Jewish signatories, pledged not to work with Israeli publishers, festivals, literary agencies and publications “that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.”

That year, a spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a Zionist???” spread widely on social media. It identified authors who had participated in Israeli book festivals or included Zionist characters and contrasted them with writers who had issued statements supporting the pro-Palestinian movement.

Increasing numbers of authors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, are declining to sell Hebrew rights to their books and refusing to appear on panels with authors they consider Zionist.

“Zionism is out of fashion in the publishing world and it’s not ever going to be in fashion again,” said Benjamin Moser, whose “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History” is publishing this month. Moser and others described book publishing as an overwhelmingly progressive industry in which opposition to Zionism is a strong component.

Moser’s book appeared on multiple “most anticipated” lists for September. Books by Horn and Simon Sebag Montefiore, high-profile writers with significant readerships who have not publicly denounced Zionism, did not. Sebag Montefiore’s “The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East” is the No. 1 bestseller in the U.K.

Adam Bellow, a veteran editor and the son of Saul Bellow, founded Wicked Son in 2021 in response to rising antisemitism and what he described as the decline of Jewish intellectual and literary culture. Wicked Son publishes a range of nonfiction. The days when every Jewish home in the Midwest had a copy of “The Joys of Yiddish,” he said, are gone.

Bellow said his goals were “to rebuild the Jewish reading public, promote a positive image of Israel among American Jews, import more Israeli authors to the U.S. and foster a thriving global, secular Jewish culture.”