What the parallel spats over a Guernica magazine essay retraction and the boycott of Standing Together teach us about how to build a movement
In early March, most of the all-volunteer staff of the leftwing political and literary journal Guernica resigned in protest of the publication of an essay by an Israeli woman about her struggle in the weeks after 7 October to “tread the line of empathy, to feel passion for both sides”.
What they objected to most in Joanna Chen’s essay, From the Edges of a Broken World, was what it left out: an explicit critique of Israel’s longstanding policies of apartheid, its violent occupation and the genocide it is currently committing in Gaza. Guernica’s former co-publisher called the piece “a hand-wringing apologia for Zionism”. Grace Loh Prasad, a Taiwanese-born writer whose memoir was excerpted in Guernica last week, tweeted: “I am alarmed & upset that my writing has appeared alongside an essay that attempts to convey empathy for a colonizing, genocidal power.” Chen’s essay was removed from the site.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept, and the author of five books
