George Packer: Writers Have Become Their Own Censors

By Daniel Okafor

George Packer delivered the Newark Public Library's annual Philip Roth Lecture on Thursday, and his message was blunt: the censorious rabbis, commissars, and mullahs have become writers. The Atlantic staff writer adapted the lecture into an essay arguing that literary culture is destroying the very free expression it depends on.

Packer knows the terrain firsthand. Shortly after October 7, 2023, he joined the board of PEN America, the century-old free-speech writers' organization. His timing was, in his dry phrasing, "perfect." A pressure campaign by well-known writers had just begun against PEN and its leader for insufficient zeal in condemning the war in Gaza.

What happened to PEN America?

When PEN failed to say what its critics wanted, they boycotted its two premier events, the literary-awards ceremony and the literary festival. Packer writes that the goal wasn't dialogue. "The purpose was to flex enough cultural power to force the cancellation of the events; if possible, to destroy PEN America." The boycott achieved the first goal and nearly achieved the second.

One moment stands out. A well-known writer called Packer to ask whether he should drop out of the festival — worried, he said, about optics, because his panel "might be down to a couple of white writers." Packer urged him to stay. He could tell which way the wind would blow him. The exodus became a stampede, and the events were canceled for lack of participants. PEN America survived, barely.

A second crisis followed. Last year PEN published a report on the cultural destruction of Gaza by Israel: heritage sites, museums, libraries, universities wiped out, and hundreds of journalists, writers, and artists killed. This past summer it published another document on the exclusion of Israeli, and even some Jewish American, writers from literary life — editors reluctant to read their submissions, novelists told to downplay Jewish characters, bookstores vetting writers for "wrongthink." The Pulitzer-winning biographer Benjamin Moser told The Wall Street Journal: "Zionism is out of fashion in the publishing world, and it's not ever going to be in fashion again."

The second document, Packer notes, "lit a small conflagration." PEN's new board president, a novelist, immediately resigned. Several board members followed. The ex-president denounced the report as "unethical" — his complaint being that it would arm critics of the Israel boycott. More than 7,000 literary professionals have signed the global boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. Packer's verdict: "The leader of a free-speech writers' group quit because it defended the free speech of writers."

Why does he think writers turned censor?

Packer's answer is political saturation meeting literary decline. Politics, he writes, now seeps into everything, "from pet-food choices to tampon brands," while literature risks becoming an eccentric elite taste, like opera. He quotes Philip Roth from 2004: "I think the novel's day has come and gone." If writing itself is losing value, silencing a writer for a political blow feels costless.

He also cites the M. Gessen exchange. The Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist argued on Facebook against publishing Israeli writers now, invoking Heinrich Böll as a German soldier in World War II. Gessen wrote: "Now, I think, is a time for laying down basic moral coordinates." The Israeli writer Mikhal Dekel, who is writing a book about Arabs and Jews in one Haifa building, replied by invoking J. M. Coetzee — attacked for public silence on apartheid, yet brilliant on the psychology of oppression. Packer lets Gessen's phrase sit and curdle: "presumably Gessen will let us know" when the shades and colors return.

What is at stake, according to the lecture?

Packer grounds the case in Roth's own history. In 1959, 25-year-old Roth published "Defender of the Faith" in The New Yorker. Rabbi Emanuel Rackman, president of the Rabbinical Council of America, asked the Anti-Defamation League: "What is being done to silence this man? Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him." Roth's reply is preserved: "He who criticizes must be silenced—that is a terrible tenet to have to live by, Rabbi." Roth later edited Writers From the Other Europe to bypass Communist censors, and hosted Salman Rushdie — under death sentence from Iran — with half a dozen security officers at his London flat.

Government censorship hasn't vanished either, Packer adds: his Pentagon purged 381 books from the Naval Academy library, including Henry James and Sexuality, and Burmese poets still invent coded metaphor to dodge censors. He quotes Orwell: "If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it."

The lecture closes on AI. Elon Musk recently predicted that in five years AI will outdo humans at everything, "apart from being human perhaps." Packer notes AI novels have already fooled major literary prizes until the detector Pangram caught them. If writers abandon their own principle just as a trillion-dollar industry threatens to mechanize it, "the whole thing might as well be done by machine." Literature, he concludes, remains one of the last barriers against surrendering human dignity.