When writer and disability justice activist Alice Wong received a MacArthur Fellowship earlier this month, she shared a statement about accepting it “amidst the genocide happening in Gaza.” The backlash was swift, with a deluge of posts on X attacking Wong’s character and accusing her of antisemitism.

This conflation of opposition to Israel’s military action with hatred of Jewish people is only one part of a broader wave of political and social repression that is attempting to silence writers speaking out against the war. In the past month alone, authors who have criticized Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza — which is funded largely by the U.S. — have been labeled extremists, been suspended and fired from faculty jobs, and targets of defamation and harassment.

I had my own recent experience with the latter following an incident with the New York State Writers Institute’s Albany Book Festival. I reached out privately to the festival organizers in support of a fellow author, Aisha Abdel Gawad, expressing concern about the public rhetoric of the moderator with whom we were to share a panel. In social media posts and published articles, the moderator mocked people who advocate for a ceasefire by calling them “terror apologists” and other names. Such rhetoric seemed disturbing in its mischaracterization of those mourning the loss of life, including Palestinian lives. In response, the assistant director of the Writers Institute emailed the moderator calling our concerns “crazy,” going so far as to fabricate a story that I refused “to be on a panel with a ‘Zionist,’” a message that was then made public. This resulted in death and rape threats, harassing messages and the loss of professional opportunities for me and Abdel Gawad.

To set the record straight, I neither refused to be on the panel nor used the word........

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