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‘Married to the Mob,’ but under a chuppah: A new memoir details a Jewish family’s crime ties
(New York Jewish Week) — The Geiks weren’t your typical Bronx working-class Jewish family.
One brother ran a mob-protected trucking company in Manhattan’s Garment District. Another brother, an NYPD detective, chauffeured organized crime couriers around the city with illicit cash. Their kid sister visited a Las Vegas casino where the tween was set up with a couple of slot machines in a private room.
And a close family friend was sent up the river for killing a notorious Jewish gangster.
Meet the family whose close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz,” a memoir just published by Alan Geik.
Dutch Schultz was the mob name of Arthur Flegenheimer, the Jewish bootlegger and numbers racket kingpin who left this mortal coil in October 1935 at the Palace Chop House in Newark. The triggermen were two Jews, members of the organized crime group Murder Inc. Mendy Weiss and Charles “Bug” Workman, the Uncle Charlie of the memoir’s title, did the hit.
Workman, who reportedly killed more than 20 people before pleading guilty to the murder of Dutch Schultz, was not a blood relative of author Alan Geik. But Workman grew up with Geik’s father on the Lower East Side and was so close to the Geik family he was considered an uncle. The author was in his 20s when he first met Workman, after the hitman was released from a New Jersey prison in 1964.
“I would never think of calling him anything but Uncle Charlie,” said Geik, 80, a retired TV producer and radio host who lives in Las Vegas.
In addition to diving deep into Workman’s story, the book also explores how Jewish mobsters and their hangers-on fought antisemitism, beat up Nazis and helped a fledgling Israel acquire arms for its War of Independence.
“These were people, from the first generation of Jews in America, who fought back against antisemitism in the streets,” Geik said. “Their parents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were not going to let it happen again and they didn’t.”
Geik’s book joins a crowded shelf of histories and memoirs of the Jewish mob, including “But He Was Good to His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters,” by Robert A. Rockaway, and “Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams,” by Rich Cohen. Like those books, Geik’s family history provides a sort of reverse image of typical Jewish immigrant stories: Instead of scrapping their way up from New York’s Jewish enclaves into retail and the professions, Geik’s family joined a criminal counterculture.
Alan Geik’s family’s close ties to Jewish gangsters are chronicled in a just-published memoir, “Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz.” (Sonador Publishing)
Books such as Geik’s “really put a personal experience to this whole world that we all know about, the world of New York mobsters,” said Larry Henry, author of a monthly column for the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. “The public’s appetite for mob stories is insatiable.”
“Uncle Charlie Killed Dutch Schultz” describes a tangled family tree ripe with, well, rotten apples. Geik’s father, Lou, was not actually in the mob but did reap benefits from his ties with organized crime, Alan concedes. Lou Geik was one of several individuals who delivered mob cash to Workman’s family over 23 years.
“Uncle Charlie felt indebted to my father,” said Geik.
The author’s father is cited as a source for many of the anecdotes included in the memoir. Geik said that while his father’s business relied on mob protection, Lou Geik didn’t have “that extra whatever-it-took to be a really hardened criminal” — a trait, he said, his own older brother Bernard also lacked.
“My brother always wanted to be a gangland figure,” said Alan Geik. “So, instead my brother became a policeman.”
An ultimately very corrupt policeman. Bernard Geik joined the force in 1962 and resigned in 1971 after serving in the notorious Special Investigative Unit, which, as depicted in the book and the motion picture “Prince of the City,” devolved into an extortion ring. After resigning from the NYPD, Bernard Geik was arrested for bribery and bribe-taking in 1974. He reportedly pleaded guilty but served no time.
The disgraced detective went to work at his father’s trucking company. According to the author, his brother was one of the detectives provided by a supervisor to drive their Uncle George and other mobsters around town when they were transporting mob money in New York.
Uncle George Gordon was a real uncle. Gordon is allegedly one of the gangsters the actor George Raft modeled himself after for his roles in 1930s and ’40s crime melodramas. For decades, beginning at a casino and speakeasy near the Hudson River in midtown Manhattan, Gordon had a big hand in organized crime’s gambling operations, supervising enterprises in Florida, the Midwest, Las Vegas and Havana.
Alan Geik isn’t the only keeper of his family’s convoluted story. His sister Iris has her own memories of growing up mob-adjacent, such as when she and her parents were Gordon’s guests at the Stardust Hotel in Vegas when the mob was running its casino and skimming cash from the profits. Gordon wanted Lou Geik to work there.
According to Iris, Gordon posted a guard outside a private room in which she had been ensconced with a couple of slot machines. The 13-year-old was “mesmerized” by the slot machines. Her mother was initially unaware of what was going on.
“Uncle Charlie” Workman, seen in 1941, pled guilty to the 1935 murder of mobster Dutch Schultz and was given a life sentence. (NYPD)
“I was having a blast,” Iris Geik said. “I’ll never forget when the door flung open and my itty-bitty mother came in with a big guard behind her. She immediately made me stop [playing with the slot machine] and give back the money I had won.”
Iris Geik, now a privacy lawyer in the Boston area, has written hundreds of pages of her own memoir about the wives and girlfriends of the Jewish gangsters, tentatively titled, “The View From the Women’s Table.”
“Their lives were complex but they were also heimische Jewish women,” she said, using the Yiddish word for cozy and familiar. She and her father eloped because they were a mixed couple: Her mother Reba was a Sephardic Jew and her father was Ashkenazi.
Geik remembered that as a child she noticed a newspaper article about a family friend being arrested. She said, “Mom! Mom! Look, we’re famous.” To which her mother replied, “That’s infamous, dear.”
Geik said that on several occasions her mother observed: “There are no second-generation Jewish mobsters. Jews don’t make gangsters out of their children.”
Reba Geik had been involved in caring for two of Iris’ aunts who lived in Brooklyn while they were dying. Those acts of kindness had a profound impact on Uncle George, the casino supervisor.
After the aunts passed away, Gordon always stood when Reba entered a room, Iris said. “My mother was very honored by that because he was such a big shot.”
Throughout her life, Reba Geik remained close to Sylvia Lorber, a friend from her teenage years. Lorber was the only mob mistress her mother would spend time with, said Iris. Lorber was the paramour of two Jewish gangsters: Benny Kassop, the brother of Murder, Inc. gunman Sammy Kassop, and Sam “Red” Levine, an observant Jew who wore a kippah under his fedora. Levine won the affection of Lorber while the Kassop brothers were in Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, New York.
“Sylvia was a hell of a lot of fun but my mother worried about her,” Iris said. “Sylvia told me her stories, which were kind of glamorous when she was young but sad when she was older.” After spending 20 years with Levine, Lorber couldn’t attend his funeral. Sylvia Lorber stopped talking to Reba Geik in her last years.
Jewish gangsters do, on occasion, display some altruism in Alan Geik’s memoir. Take Moe Dalitz, the head of the Cleveland Syndicate. He was a major bootlegger during Prohibition whose flotillas of illegal liquor on the Great Lakes came to be known as The Little Jewish Navy. His family ran legitimate laundry businesses in Boston and Detroit. Too old to be drafted during World War II, he enlisted at the age of 42 and was commissioned as a lieutenant. Dalitz ran the military laundry service on New York’s Governor’s Island — but declined to bunk in the island’s barracks, opting instead to stay at a swanky hotel overlooking Central Park.
Then there was Johnny Eder, a major source for Geik’s narrative. Eder was part of the Lower East Side teenage crime crew that included Uncle Charlie and Uncle George. As an adult he was a major fence for stolen jewelry and always had a bag of stolen rings on him. Eder also had many connections at City Hall and in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.
According to Geik’s account, Eder was the mob’s representative to the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force in Palestine. Eder arranged meetings in the noisy kitchen of the Copacabana, a mob hangout, between Haganah agents and mobsters and others described as “former wartime U.S. intelligence agents” working to secure weapons for Israel’s War of Independence. (The late Teddy Kollek, Jerusalem’s longtime mayor, would tell a story about passing cash to an intermediary at the Copacabana, who brought the money to an Irish sea caption with a ship full of munitions bound for the Holy Land. The bagman, according to Kollek, was Frank Sinatra.)
Author Alan Geik’s father-in-law, Lou Lenart, left, and other fighter pilots in front of Avia-S-199 plane. Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to the Holy Land for use in the War of Independence. (Courtesy of Boaz Dvir)
Alan Geik has a very personal connection to the creation of the Jewish state. His late wife Nina was the daughter of Lou Lenart, a World War II fighter pilot who served in the U.S. Marines. Geik’s memoir details how the elder Lenart was part of the group of men transporting surplus fighter planes and other weapons to Palestine for use in Israel’s War of Independence. Lenart’s story was featured in Nancy Spielberg’s 2014 documentary “Above and Beyond,” about the creation of the Israeli air force.
The story of how Jewish gangsters used some violent muscle against Nazi sympathizers in New York has been told before in historical accounts, but one episode in Geik’s memoir is particularly dramatic. A pair of Jews attended a Bund rally at Camp Siegfried on Long Island, a summer camp that taught Nazi ideology, and were offered a ride back to the city by a Nazi sympathizer who they ended up beating senseless in Brooklyn.
Alan Geik was not really hungry when he met Meyer Lansky at a Central Park hotel in the late 1950s. The gangster asked the 15-year-old nephew of George Gordon if he wanted a pastrami sandwich. Geik declined. Then Lansky, who struck Geik as an “older Jewish man who I knew was really powerful,” suggested that they split one. It was an offer that Geik did not refuse.
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Protesters picket Manhattan synagogue over Israel real estate sale, testing Mamdani and new law
Protesters thronged a Manhattan synagogue Tuesday night outside an event promoting real estate in Israel and the West Bank — returning to the scene of a clash last year that prompted a new law shielding houses of worship and put the heat on newly elected mayor Zohran Mamdani.
The demonstration at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side drew more than 100 protesters, kept nearly a block away from the house of worship by barricades and a heavy NYPD presence.
Chants of “There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and “We don’t want a two-state, we want ’48” rose from the crowd — slogans Zionist organizations view as antisemitic and a call for violence and removal of Jews in the region.
At one point, two protesters near the event ripped down a plastered poster of the Lubavitcher Rebbe that read “Messiah is here” from a traffic light and threw it in the trash.
A smaller group of pro-Israel counterprotesters rallied across the street from the pro-Palestinian demonstrators.
A spokesperson for the synagogue said it rented out the space for the Great Israeli Real Estate Event, which advertised properties for sale in Israel and the West Bank.
The standoff comes just days after a new law governing protests outside houses of worship took effect — a measure that City Council Speaker Julie Menin introduced after a November 2025 demonstration at Park East Synagogue.
The protests, combined with what some Jewish leaders saw as slow or equivocal responses from Mamdani, led to calls for legislation that would limit demonstrations near houses of worship.
Menin initially aimed to establish protest-free buffer zones of up to 100 feet outside synagogues but revised the bill after pushback from Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, some progressive Jewish groups and free speech advocates, under threat of legal challenges.
A watered-down version of that legislation that allows the NYPD to determine how large buffer zones need to be on a case-by-case basis passed with a veto-proof majority last month. Mamdani allowed the bill to become law without his signature.
Mamdani meanwhile vetoed a similar bill that would apply to schools. The Council could still vote to override that veto.
Police closed off the entire street where the synagogue sits to the public, while allowing the event’s attendees to enter. The demonstrators were well over 100 feet away from the building — a greater distance than even the largest buffer zone proposed by Menin.
Supporters of the law argued that its flexible standard — allowing the NYPD to determine buffer zone distances rather than specifying them precisely — would protect protesters’ rights. But the security at Park East showed how that discretion can, in practice, expand protest-free zones by granting the NYPD wide latitude to set the distance themselves.
A spokesperson for Mamdani, a vocal critic of Israel, said on Tuesday before the protest that the mayor is “deeply opposed” to the event, characterizing the sale of property in the West Bank as a violation of international law. The spokesperson, Sam Raskin, nevertheless emphasized that the city was ready to ensure the safety of participants entering the venue and those demonstrating.
“Our administration has been clear that we are committed to ensuring safe entry and exit from any house of worship, and that such access never be in question while all protesters are able to exercise their First Amendment rights,” said Raskin ahead of the event.
‘People are outraged’
Tuesday’s event was the first time under the new law, but the NYPD protest plan it calls for is still a work in progress: the police department still has another month to present a plan and 90 days to publicize it.
Local politicians noted the sensitive nature of the protest, saying that alone is reason to condemn it.
Assemblymember Alex Bores and Councilmember Virginia Maloney, who represent the district where the synagogue is located, said in a joint statement that the situation naturally evoked “painful memories of times when people have been harassed while entering houses of worship.”
Micah Lasher, a state legislator who is vying for the open congressional seat on Manhattan’s west side, described the protest as “intended to create fear in the hearts of Jewish New Yorkers and stigmatize the community.” Lasher said leaders should condemn the protest, no matter any disagreement on policy.
Rob Jereski, a local attorney who is Jewish and came to support the Palestinian side, had reservations about the security perimeters, arguing it kept protesters too far from the real estate event.
“I know the new law is supposed to maintain free speech and honor the Constitution, but this doesn’t seem to do it,” Jereski said. “The fact that Jews pray in a place doesn’t mean that crimes that are committed in that place should be without a response if people are outraged.”
Some counterprotesters also criticized the new Council measure — for not going far enough.
“That’s outrageous that it’s not clear that you cannot demonstrate and harass kids or people around religious institutions,” said Tomer Morad, a demonstrator on the Israeli side.
Karen Lichtbraun, an activist affiliated with the Zionist Herut movement in New York, said the new bill was a “joke” that doesn’t address the problem.
“Today, thank God, they’re away from the synagogue,” she said. “But what happens if next time the police commissioner decides that they can be 50 feet or 10 feet away?”
The post Protesters picket Manhattan synagogue over Israel real estate sale, testing Mamdani and new law appeared first on The Forward.
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Canadian Intel Reveals Gaza War Motivated At Least 7 Lone-Wolf Terror Plots in 2025
Dueling pro-Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; May 2, 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)’s newly published annual report documents how aspiring domestic terrorists have felt justified to plan attacks in response to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“The threat of a domestic lone-actor attack in Canada increased significantly since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict,” the CSIS report said in a section on religion-motivated crime. “In 2025, at least seven of CSIS’s priority investigations involving mobilization to violence have been assessed as motivated by this conflict in whole or in part.”
CSIS Director Dan Rogers offered examples in the report’s introduction, writing that “we achieved a number of counterterrorism successes that led to law enforcement action, including the arrests of Hide & Stalk members in Québec, and of a minor who intended to violently target Jewish people and police in Montréal.”
The report further described how the war in Gaza “has also fueled violent extremist organization narratives and has the potential to inspire a new generation of extremists. The conflict will likely continue to motivate some extremists in the near term, but understanding the true impact of the conflict will only be clear over time.”
Antisemitism appears in Canada in many forms today, with the report noting continued incidents of vandalism, graffiti, online propaganda, overt racist statements, and bomb threats. The document also said that, since 2014, there has been one attack against a Jewish institution and five plans stopped, including an incident in August 2025 involving a minor in Montreal.
Earlier this year, three shootings targeted Jewish institutions in less than a week in Toronto.
Other terrorist crimes from last year spotlighted in the report included a man in Winnipeg charged in March for offenses motivated by “nihilistic violent extremism,” and a woman in Montreal who pleaded guilty in July to providing material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That month, law enforcement arrested four members of Hide & Stalk, a far-right conspiracist militia driven by an “accelerationist” ideology which seeks to speed up societal collapse.
In September, the neo-Nazi propagandist Patrick Gordon MacDonald, known by the alias “Dark Foreigner,” received a 10-year prison sentence on three terrorism offenses. The report described how “his objective was to inspire others to engage in violence through his graphic designs and videos he produced in support of Atomwaffen Division (AWD).”
Founded in 2015 by neo-Nazi Brandon Russell — who now serves a 20-year prison sentence after a conviction last year for plotting attacks on electrical substations in Baltimore — AWD draws inspiration from James Mason, a former member of the American Nazi Party (ANP) and leader of the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF), who wrote an essay collection titled SIEGE which advocated for a white American ethno-state. The group has often blended with Salafi and Jihadist terrorists, “citing their culture of martyrdom and insurgency as inspiration for their tactics and propaganda.”
Another terrorism conviction in Canada came in October when Matthew Althorpe pleaded guilty for his involvement in the Terrorgram Collective, a neo-Nazi Telegram channel. CSIS explained that “the violent tenets of Terrorgram’s content and manifestos have inspired at least three violent attacks in Slovakia, Brazil, and Türkey, two plots to attack critical infrastructure in the United States, and the attempted assassination of a foreign government official in Australia.”
While a variety of ideologies can inspire terrorist attacks in Canada, the perpetrators fit a familiar pattern, with 93 percent being male and the average age being 34, findings consistent since 2022. However, the report noted increases in both youth and those over 48.
The Canadian government also designated numerous organizations as terrorist organizations. In February, newly proscribed groups included seven transnational criminal organizations reclassified as terrorist entities: Cártel del Golfo, Cártel de Sinaloa, La Familia Michoacana, Cárteles Unidos, La Mara Salvatrucha, Tren de Aragua, and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación.
Later in the year Canada added Lawrence Bishnoi Gang, 764, Maniac Murder Cult, Terrorgram Collective, and the ISIS-aligned Islamic State-Mozambique.
The report explained how foreign governments engage in espionage in Canada. Tactics range from agents cultivating friendships with targets to manipulate them to using blackmail and launching cyber-attacks to compromise digital devices. “In 2025, the main perpetrators of foreign interference and espionage against Canada remained the People’s Republic of China (PRC), India, the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Pakistan,” the report stated.
Canada joined 13 other countries in July 2025, issuing a statement condemning “the attempts of Iranian intelligence services to kill, kidnap, and harass people in Europe and North America in clear violation of our sovereignty.”
The report described the concept of transnational repression as “when foreign governments, or those acting on their behalf, reach beyond their borders to harass, threaten or harm individuals or groups to advance their interests or to silence criticism and dissent.” Methods employed include physical violence, threatening overseas relatives, lawfare, cyberbullying, online defamation, extortion, and community ostracism.
CSIS named Handala Hack Team as among Iran’s henchmen. The group “doxed several Iran International-linked journalists, including a Canadian resident,” the report said. “The Canadian’s photos, provincial driver’s license, permanent resident card, and Iranian passport details were released on the internet and social media platforms. The hacktivist group reproached the Canadian for, among other things, their promotion of 2SLGBTQIA+ issues in Iran.”
The doxxing resulted in death threats and the harassment of family members in Iran. CSIS warned that Iran may use proxies to go after dissidents, sometimes relying on transnational organized crime networks.
Hostile governments may also seek to plant disinformation, false narratives deliberately spread as “part of broader information operations aimed at manipulating audiences.”
One of the report’s most alarming findings was the degree to which extremist groups with differing ideologies draw inspiration from one another. CSIS described finding “an overlap in content, aesthetics, conspiracy theories and grievance narratives, including those that are anti-liberal, anti-2SLGBTQIA+, antisemitic, and Islamophobic … On occasion, similar violent content is consumed, including gore sites, jihadi beheading videos, and attack manuals.”
CSIS warned that “violent extremists with these different ideologies are increasingly finding common causes. They find inspiration and motivation in the events and trends that polarize society or cause them to lose hope for the future. They easily access and amplify content online that radicalizes them and reinforces their view that violence is justified to achieve their extremist goals.”
The report named Islamic State as the most significant threat to Western interests, with CSIS analysts warning the terrorist group “will continue to attempt to influence supporters — particularly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan — to plan attacks on targets related to world events, and enable them to do so, while Al Qaeda will continue efforts to reconstitute itself in permissive territories, including through the rise of the Islamic State in Somalia and increased Al-Shabaab terrorism activities in North Africa.”
A recent example of the trend of cross-ideological alliances appeared late last month in Mali, where Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM,) an Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist group, joined with Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg rebel separatist militia, in a shared effort to overthrow the military junta which has ruled the African nation since Aug. 18, 2020. The coordinated attacks resulted in the killing of Defense Minister Sadio Camara and the seizure of Kidal, a key town in Mali’s eastern region.
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A best-selling novelist identified a minor character as Israeli. Some fans are canceling their orders.
(JTA) — A bestselling author is facing a flurry of anger from fans after advance copies of her upcoming novel identified a character as Israeli — a move that her critics say advances “normalization” of a country they oppose.
Rebecca “R. F.” Kuang, the Chinese-American author of the 2023 satirical novel “Yellowface” and “The Poppy War” trilogy, is set to publish her seventh novel, “Taipei Story,” in September. The advance version, an excerpt of which was leaked on social media on Sunday, includes a short scene involving an Israeli musician.
The musician, a successful pianist whose performance ignites a near-religious fervor for a character in the story, is not named, and the text identifies him as “a dour-faced man who did not so much as crack a smile as we applauded.”
That was enough to trigger some readers and potential readers who said Kuang was whitewashing Israel in the wake of the war in Gaza — even as she has previously expressed support for the movement to boycott Israel.
“RF kuang had 190+ countries to choose from to write about a character’s nationality and she still chose to write about the one who’s actively committing gen0cide against Palestinians for years,” user alltoowellreads wrote on X, in one representative comment that has been shared nearly 1,000 times that used an online version of the word “genocide” meant to evade censors.
Others railed against the excerpt on Threads, where there is a thriving community of people discussing books. Some readers said they even canceled their preorders of the book.
Kuang and her publicists did not respond to requests for comment, and she has disabled comments on her recent Instagram posts, where she has not addressed the criticism.
The backlash to Kuang’s inclusion of the Israeli character reflects a trend in the literary world, in which even minor mentions of Israel or Israelis are enough to land authors on boycott lists.
The trend predates the most recent war in Gaza: Casey McQuiston, the author of the 2019 romance novel “Red, White, and Royal Blue,” initially included a scene where the U.S. president jokes that an ambassador “said something idiotic about Israel, and now I have to call Netanyahu and personally apologize.” In 2021, McQuiston said they would remove the reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in future printings of the book.
But the trend has intensified after Oct. 7 thrust Israel into the center stage of cultural conversations. An online list titled “Is your fav author a Zionist???” that went viral in 2024 urged boycotts against authors for whom the crowd-sourced answer was yes.
Some authors landed on the list without ever commenting publicly about Israel or Gaza. Gabrielle Zevin, for example, was included in part because her 2024 hit novel about Jewish video game designers, “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” received backlash for its inclusion of an Israeli character even though he was presented unfavorably. (Zevin also drew criticism for having spoken at a Hadassah event in February 2023.)
Kuang’s silence on the dustup has left some readers to speculate about why she chose to identify the pianist as Israeli in “Taipei Story,” a work of literary fiction about a young Chinese-American woman on an intensive summer language program in Taiwan.
Kuang, whose work largely deals with the Asian diaspora from an anti-colonial perspective, has historically supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. In December, she withdrew from an appearance at a literature festival in Dubai, citing a call from the BDS movement.
That record had led some of her fans to argue that the Israeli character may have been included to subtly critique Israel. Others speculated without evidence that Kuang could have been paid to mention Israel in the book, while others simply expressed bafflement or anger at her choice to mention a state they believe is a colonial enterprise.
“Making your books sm about colonization but normalizing israel is insane to me idk im very disappointed,” wrote one X user who garnered 1 million views with the sentiment. (“Sm” is internet shorthand for “so much.”)
For Jews who have been keeping a close eye on trends in publishing since Oct. 7, the response to the Kuang excerpt has been worrying, even if its ultimate impact remains unclear. Meg Keene, a writer who argues that data shows a sidelining of Jewish content in new book deals, summarized the brouhaha with a deflated tweet: “This is where we are now.”
Even some Jews who do not identify as Zionists say they see something worrying in the backlash to the Kuang excerpt.
“The people canceling a preorder over [a] single mention of an Israeli pianist being booked at a concert hall in R.F. Kuang’s new book lack so much f–king nuance. There’s literally no mention of Zionism yet y’all can’t seem to differentiate,” wrote a Jewish threads user who goes by Axis of Anarchy.
After experiencing some blowback, she followed up: “Also stop with this ‘y’all’ business about normalizing Israel. This is exactly the problem and I have been very vocal on calling Zionists out on their s–t so goodness forbid, I point out when y’all are taking your s–t too far.”
Though Kuang has closed most of her recent Instagram posts to comments, her readers continue to comment on older ones that are still open, asking the author about her choice to include an Israeli character.
Some books bloggers argue that the immediate call to boycott Kuang’s latest book is akin to censorship — and distracting from literary analysis.
“Reactionary outrage like this only acts as a form of censorship, because it discourages analysis,” wrote a user who goes by emily.isliterate, accompanying a widely viewed video on the episode. “From what I can read, I think Kuang (in very few words) manages to criticize the way people treat musicians from certain places over others (namely colonizer states). Maybe people stopped reading after the word Israel or they simply can’t garner subtext and theme, but either way, I think the entire situation is troublesome.”
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