Who Gets to Speak at Writers’ Festivals?

A version of this post was first published at Australian Financial Review

During the Adelaide Writers Week scandal – the removal of Randa Abdel-Fattah from its schedule, then an apology and an invitation for 2027 AWW – my predominantly literary socials have been on fire, buzzing with declarations. Declarations of writers’ voluntary withdrawals. Declarations of support for free speech. Declarations of support for the cancelled writer, herself a party to various cancellation demands, including the removal of a Jewish American writer, Thomas Friedman, from this same festival in 2024. She also gained notoriety for her brazen call to make cultural spaces unsafe for ‘Zionists’, meaning to purge from public discourse any Jews who feel a connection to their ancestral homeland and support its right to exist. This is at least 77% of Australian Jews, according to conservative estimates.

It is also widely documented that Abdel-Fattah actively participated in the 2024 doxxing of over 600 Jewish creatives and academics from a WhatsApp support group that I founded in the wake of October 7, 2023 to help one another deal with the antisemitism we were facing professionally. She was among those who publicly shared the leaked chat and falsely framed us – predominantly progressive Jews, often advocates for two-state solution – as a sinister cabal of fascists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Occasionally some of us wrote letters protesting antisemitism we encountered. Some of us signed some petitions, just as any other groups fighting their oppression would do. However, when Jewish people come together to engage in support and activism, double standards seem to apply to us. And we certainly didn’t draw lists of the kind circulating now online – of writers who withdrew or didn’t from Adelaide Writers Week (just as it was done during the Bendigo Writers Festival debacle last year). But a spreadsheet resembling a ‘Jewish hit list’, with our personal details and photographs, was drawn and widely circulated. Since then, many of our lives, including my own, have been turned upside down with jobs, reputations, relationships and a sense of safety lost.

I cannot recall any of my now-indignant literary peers protesting on behalf of doxxed Jewish artists. If anything, at the time, a considerable number of people in the arts bought into the lies spread about our group, urging to cancel us. Also that year, over 500 writers and arts workers signed an open letter calling for the cancellation of Jewish musician and author Deborah Conway from the Perth Festival’s Literature and Ideas program (to their credit, they didn’t succumb to the pressure). Many of the signatories of that letter are those who protested the cancellation of Abdel-Fattah, who, unsurprisingly, also signed it.

Now, exactly two years since the doxxing, the hypocrisy is real and glaring. It’s been both heartbreaking and discombobulating to observe the selective outrage about Abdul-Fatteh’s cancellation and the so-called defense of freedom of speech. It feels positively Orwellian –a world where everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. It feels like the Soviet Union, where I spent my childhood.

Of course, I should know better than to be surprised, and yet, in the wake of the Bondi massacre I briefly entertained a hope that the horror may open some eyes and hearts in the Australian arts community, where antisemitic sentiment has been normalised on the background of the Israel-Hamas war. Instead, my eyes have been opened to how entrenched the double standards held in my milieu are.

            In her resignation letter, Louise Adler, former Adelaide Writers Week director, wrote: ‘The raison d’etre of art and literature is to disrupt the status quo.’ This is the only point on which Adler and I agree. In practice, however, for some years now the status quo in the festival has remained intact, which is to say – anti-Zionist views in, Zionist out. Jewish writers have been repeatedly marginalised – even those who are known to be critical of the Netanyahu government, and even those whose work has nothing to do with politics – unless they are vocally anti-Zionist like Peter Beinart or Adler herself.

            The implosion of the Adelaide Writers Week is unmissable, but the problem is systemic. The chair of the Sydney Writers Festival board, Kathy Shand, for example, quit last year over what she saw as unbalanced festival programming. ‘Only after that,’ Michael Gawenda, left-wing Zionist and author of My Life as a Jew (2023) told me, ‘at the very last minute, the festival invited me to discuss my book. The year before, I wasn’t even considered.’

As in Gawenda’s case, most Jewish writers get cancelled quietly, covertly, through exclusion rather than removal. In the last eight months, my coeditor Tamar Paluch and I pitched our book, Ruptured: Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7 (2025), to most literary festivals in Australia. Ruptured comprises the voices of 36 Australian Jewish women, many of whom are prominent public personalities. It is the only book that documents the explosion of antisemitism in Australia, an issue constantly in the news. So far, only one small festival has been courageous enough to program us. And privately, several writers who are now vocally advocating for freedom of speech, told me they would not support Ruptured because this is not the time for Jewish voices.

Ours isn’t an exceptional story. Acclaimed Jewish authors with bestselling books released these past two years, such as Elise Hearst and Linda Royal, have also been almost utterly overlooked by writers’ festivals. The list goes on.

To genuinely uphold freedom of speech, festival organisers need to create space for difficult conversations with balanced representation. Especially considering that Abdel-Fattah – known for her hateful rhetoric towards Zionists and for her part in the doxxing of Jews – will appear in 2027 Adelaide Writers Week, this must include programming Jewish voices in fair rather than tokenistic ways. In that festival, and across others.

It is also time to drop the expectation that Jewish writers are spokespeople for anything but their craft and stories. And one more point to consider in the wake of both Bendigo and Adelaide festivals’ fiascos is that to withdraw from festivals, and even to be removed from a program, is actually a privilege. It is a privilege that most Jewish writers in Australia don’t even possess, simply because we are not invited in the first place.