Elisa Albert had been set to moderate a panel called "Girls, Coming of Age" at the Albany Book Festival on Saturday. What happened following the panel's cancellation is still trying to be unwound.
Perhaps there’s an alternate, better universe in which author Elisa Albert moderated a panel discussion at the Albany Book Festival that thoughtfully addressed the war in Gaza — or even stayed well clear of the topic.
That, alas, is not the world as it exists.
Instead, as is well known by this point, the panel scheduled for last weekend — titled “Girls, Coming of Age” — was canceled on the eve of the festival, allegedly because, as the assistant director of the New York State Writers Institute put it to Albert, two of the authors didn’t “want to be on a panel with a 'Zionist.'”
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To many ears, that sounds as though the authors simply didn’t want to appear on stage with a Jewish person. If so, it was an expression of bigotry, plain and simple. But both writers, novelists Aisha Abdel Gawad and Lisa Ko, have pushed back against that accusation.
“There is a devastating accusation circulating that I refused to be on a literary panel with another writer because she is Jewish,” Gawad said in a statement to Hearst newspapers in Connecticut, where she lives. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I ultimately withdrew from the panel because of this writer’s public rhetoric, which I felt mocked anyone........