Key Takeaways
- Meg Keene, the bestselling wedding-blog author of A Practical Wedding, wrote an “achingly Jewish” novel in seven days after October 7, drew four competing agent offers, and then watched it die on submission. One agent she respected told her the book could survive if she stripped the Judaism out of it and renamed the best friend from Yael to Sue.
- She was the most-quoted voice in PEN America’s July 9 report, “A Silent Moratorium,” on the freezing-out of Jewish and Israeli writers. Twenty-four hours later, PEN’s own president resigned over the suggestion that boycotting Jews might be a form of discrimination.
- Keene says while she may be pushed out of publishing, she will not go quietly. She assumes Big Five publishing will not correct itself, so she is building the record, on the theory that testimony written down while it happens is the one thing that survives.
While she was researching her recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Meg Keene went looking for a 2024 story in the archives of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. She searched “Jewish blacklisting.” Three articles came back. She clicked the first, read the top two paragraphs, and thought: this is it. This is the one.
It was not. It was dated 1939, and it was about the blacklisting of Jewish authors in Germany. Then she opened the second one. “I was like, this is the right article,” she said. “Click through… it was also from 1939 in Germany. It was the third article that was from 2024.”
The point of the story is not that history repeats. The point is that someone, in 1939, wrote it down, and that is the only reason Meg Keene could find it eighty-seven years later and mistake it for the present.
And it is the whole reason she decided to “sacrifice her career on the pyre” as she puts it. Not to change the industry’s mind, but to make sure there is a record.
The Dream Author
For fifteen years, Meg Keene was not a political writer at all. She built one of the most-read wedding blogs in the country, A Practical Wedding, and two books that combined sold well over a hundred and fifty thousand copies and reaching thousands more brides who passed it hand-to-hand. “I got regularly recognized on the street,” she recalls. She was, by her own description, “the dream author. I do my own press. I deliver books that are ready to go. It was always, ‘If you want another deal, it’s on the table.’”
Then she wrote a Jewish novel, and the deals stopped being on the table.
The book came fast. After October 7, 2023, she said, “like all of us, I was catatonic emotionally.” She could not produce a word of fiction for weeks. Then one afternoon in the first week of November, while her kids were in Hebrew school, she sat down to break the block by writing out a scene she had carried for years. She sent it to a friend. The friend told her it was a book. She wrote that story in the span of a shiva, seven days. She had it edited within six weeks. When it went out to agents, twenty-four requested the manuscript, and four made offers.
That was where the story stopped being about a book and became about an unspoken phenomenon.
The Agent Who Called Her a Zionist
When Keene started to shop for an agent, she built her research pool the way Jewish authors were quietly doing it in 2024: by combing agents’ social feeds for anything she might have to defend herself from later. Roughly a third of the field was in play. “It wasn’t like they’ve ever said anything nice about Israel or Jews,” she said. “It was that they’ve never said anything terrible.”
One of the offering agents was blunt. “She had looked at my Instagram,” Keene said, “and she was willing to work with me, but wanted to be clear that she didn’t know if anyone would touch me because of politics. And I was like, what do you mean by politics? And she was like, well, you’re a Zionist.”
Keene had written what she called an “incredibly Jewish” novel, the one she felt Jewish women needed. The characters spoke Hebrew slang. They talked about their families’ Holocaust history. “It has been read on the beach in Tel Aviv, on Shabbat, on someone’s phone, beginning to end in one sitting,” she said. “Women were like, this is what I needed.”
Then came the second agent. Jewish. Someone Keene respected. “She said, ‘this is breaking my heart, but we would need to take out basically every part of the book that is Jewish that doesn’t drive the plot.’” The Hebrew slang would have to go. The Israeli references would have to go. And the best friend character would have to be renamed. “The best friend is named Yael,” Keene said. “It’s one of my favorite names. I name my characters based on names I wanted to give my kids but didn’t. And [the agent] said we have to pull it out. It’s an Israeli name and it will be a red flag for editors. It needs to be something like Sue.”
This was at the end of 2024, and Keene did not sign with her. She sent the book to the Big Five instead. It did not sell. “I believe seven Jewish books by Jewish authors, or books on Jewish themes by Jewish authors, sold that year,” she said. That was the whole industry.
Nobody Sent a Rejection Reading “Filthy Zionist”
The part Keene emphasizes is that there was no official announcement, nothing so blatant as an industry blacklist. “No one is getting a rejection that’s delivered saying, we’re not going to publish this because you’re a filthy Zionist,” she said.
The quiet force driving this was the P&L, profit and loss. Big Five publishing had grown increasingly reliant on influencer marketing, and the influencers, Keene said, would not work with Zionist authors — or with authors merely perceived to be Zionists — and would raise it in meetings when a house signed one. “They will bring it up and say, why did you sign this genocidal Zionist? We are not sure we want to work with you as a company.”
The proof of concept was the boycott of St. Martin’s Press that began in the weeks after October 7, when a Jewish marketing staffer reposted the same “pray for Israel”–style content most Jews online were sharing. “She reposted stuff that all of us reposted,” Keene said. Influencers targeted her. “Specifically, they said she was anti-Arab, she was racist, she was Islamophobic.” They called for a boycott of the entire publishing house. “They certainly lost money,” Keene said. “They had influencers that wouldn’t work on major books. Major books not written by Zionists, major books written by anti-Zionists… they wouldn’t even work on those books.”
“That really had a chilling effect,” she went on. “It was a warning shot across the bow, that if you work with Zionist authors, we’re going to make you pay, and it’s going to cost you on your P&L. And publishing is an industry that is absolutely run by the P&L.”
From there, the math wrote itself. A house could sign her, a public Zionist with a real audience and a real track record, and maybe make a million dollars, after routing a crisis-PR budget around a boycott. Or it could sign someone else with roughly the same book and no politics and make a slightly smaller million with none of the risk. “Obviously you’re just going to sign Sue,” she said. “You’re not going to sign me.” Nobody had to write the blacklist. The spreadsheet wrote it for them.
The Report and the Resignation
That was the pattern PEN America finally documented on July 9. “A Silent Moratorium,” the report was called, based on interviews with more than thirty Jewish and Israeli writers describing event cancellations, agents and editors refusing their work, Goodreads review-bombing, and the 2024 “is your fav author a Zionist???” spreadsheet. Keene was its most-quoted voice. The Yael-and-Sue anecdote was its most viral image.
Within twenty-four hours, PEN’s own president, novelist Dinaw Mengestu, had resigned. It wasn’t because the report went too far, but because it suggested, gently and with footnotes, that maybe boycotting Jews was a form of discrimination. His formal objection was that the report criticized cultural boycotts, and that criticizing boycotts, in his reading, restricted the speech of the people carrying them out.
Keene wrote the Wall Street Journal op-ed that took the argument apart. One line jumped off the page: when PEN discussed Gaza, she wrote, it spoke in declarative sentences; when it discussed Jews, it retreated into attribution — Jewish writers felt, they described, they reported. Gaza got the flat present tense of settled fact.
“The language creates a culture of questioning reality,” Keene said. She pointed to the Atlantic’s write-up, which used her quote and called the accounts “highly anecdotal.”
“Someone pointed out that that’s a misuse of the word anecdotal,” she said. “Anecdotal shouldn’t imply that someone is lying.” If she went to the store and bought a gallon of milk, that was not “anecdotal,” that was a fact. Aggregate enough anecdotes and you have a trend, that was how the world was measured. The report, in her reading, could put Gaza’s suffering in its own mouth by making declarative statements of fact. Antisemitism could only be acknowledged with attributions, caveats, anecdotes.
Why She Writes It Down Anyway
Here is the thing that separates Keene from a whistleblower. A whistleblower believes that if the institution only knew, it would act. Keene has stopped believing that. She documents anyway.
“Even if we cannot get anyone to change their actions, I want to make sure that I have done my part to document what is happening so that things change, even if it takes a decade, even if we’ve lost an entire generation of talent, even if I never have a novel published.”
That is testimony as strategy. It is the same instinct that put the 1939 article in the JTA archive where she would find it: the assumption that the people in power will not save you, and that the record is the thing you leave for whoever comes looking. She is not writing to be believed today. She is writing so that in 2113, when someone types “Jewish blacklisting” into whatever the archive has become, the entry for 2024 is there: flat, sourced, undeniable, a fact and not an anecdote, the way the entry for 1939 was there for her.
We Are Not a People for Whom Culture Is Icing on the Cake
Ask Keene where the hope is, and she does not point at the industry, she points at the Jews.
“We are not a people for whom culture is an extra,” she said. “We are not a people for whom culture is the icing on the cake.” She meant it as a working definition of who the Jews are: a people whose survival has always rested in their story passed down. The Talmud, she said, had “created the culture where you and I are having an intellectual discussion and debating.” Take away the argument, and there is no us left to argue about. “We cannot save ourselves and lose our soul.”
So her answer is the oldest Jewish answer there is: when the institution stops protecting you, build your own, and take pride in doing it. “That’s how we survived as a people,” she said. “We have so many hospitals with Jewish names because we needed them and because Jews who were successful wrote checks.” The blacklist, in that light, is not mainly a catastrophe. It is a summons: back to peoplehood, back to the conviction that a culture worth belonging to is worth funding, defending, and being loud about.
She said this is what actually lifts the spirits. “I live in a culture worth being part of,” she said. “It literally helps save and heal our souls and helps us return to ourselves in the midst of an emergency.”
And to the young Jewish writer sitting on a manuscript nobody will buy, she has one instruction: keep writing anyway. “We cannot depend on our legacy institutions to take it from here, because they haven’t,” she said. “It really has to be incumbent upon us. We have to stop saying, ‘Someone else will do it. Someone else will write it. Someone else will start the press. Someone else will speak out.’”
History may not repeat, but it rhymes. A blacklist made up of business decisions. A cultural boycott built on misplaced righteous anger. And a people who have always answered erasure the same way: by recording their testimony, by building the thing that was denied them, and by refusing to be the generation that let the story go untold.
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Meg Keene is the bestselling author of A Practical Wedding and A Practical Wedding Planner and the founder of the A Practical Wedding blog. She writes the Substack “Field Notes for the Brave” and can be found at @megkeene on X and Instagram. This interview was conducted by Ben Chertoff for The Honest Take. Listen and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast streaming platform. [https://podcast.honestreporting.com/episodes/no-one-wants-a-jewish-protagonist-inside-publishings-new-blacklist-with-meg-keene]
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© Divuach Ne’eman R”A, 2025
