In May, a color-coded Google spreadsheet titled “Is your fav author a Zionist???” began circulating online. Its creator scrutinized the social media posts, public activities, and, to a lesser degree, the content of books by 200 mostly North American writers to determine if they fell into the Zionist category, in which case viewers were urged to boycott them.

Among those to be shunned were Kristin Hannah (for posting about a fund-raiser for an Israeli emergency service provider after the start of the Hamas-Israel war); Emily St. John Mandel (“travels to Israel frequently, talks favorably about it”); and Gabrielle Zevin (“spoke at an event with Hadassah,” a Jewish women’s organization that supports Israeli hospitals and schools for children at risk). The Google document garnered a million views. It was clear the Zionist label was an epithet.

Sales may not have suffered for the best-selling Hannah or Mandel or Zevin as a result of the spreadsheet, which has since been taken down, but two months after it circulated the assistant manager of a bookstore in Chicago informed the store’s book club that he was removing Zevin’s latest book from consideration for their next read because “it has come to my attention that the writer is a Zionist.”

A month later, a bookstore in New York City canceled the launch event of Joshua Leifer’s history of Judaism in America, “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life,” an hour before it was to start because, according to the employee who decided to cancel, “We don’t want a Zionist onstage.”

In September, a panel on female coming-of-age stories at the New York Writers Festival in Albany was canceled the day before it was to take place after two of the three panelists declared they were unwilling to participate because the Jewish moderator — a novelist, story writer, essayist, and advocate for Israel in other contexts — was a Zionist.

Shelf Awareness, a trade publication for the publishing industry distributed to 250 independent bookstores and claiming a readership of 600,000, refused to run an ad for a book by the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy titled “Israel Alone” because, “whether right or wrong,” the publisher felt the ad would cause some of their bookstore customers trouble “they didn’t ask for and don’t wish to have.”

I’ve been watching these events unfold for many reasons, not least because my newest book, a collection of Jewish short stories half set in Israel where I lived for periods of my life, came out in June. But anti-Israel sentiment in the publishing world began months before, starting immediately after the outbreak of war between Hamas and Israel in October 2023, when Jewish writers began reporting in private Facebook groups that literary agents were telling them they couldn’t sell their books, whatever their Jewish content; literary journals were retracting their acceptances of their work; and writers like me with new books coming out were not receiving invitations from festivals or panels or even their own alma maters.

Why would they? It would be a headache, an invitation to either an empty auditorium or a protest. And while my book had won a prize in manuscript form before Oct. 7, selected for publication out of more than 500 manuscripts by a New Yorker-published novelist with a national reputation, why submit it for all the current book prizes for which it is eligible — at considerable personal expense — in such a climate? Even if it were to receive a favorable read, would prize organizations want to risk upsetting their members, staff, and supporters with a nod to such a book, which features stories of everyday life in Israel, when another choice would raise no such concerns?

In late October, a new boycott was launched, this one against the entire Israeli publishing industry. Its stated goal is to be the largest cultural boycott of Israel in history. Signers, including initiating signatories Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Arundhati Roy, vow to work only with Israeli publishers, book festivals, literary agencies, and publications who “denounce and distance themselves” from the state of Israel.

While the letter is vague, it is notable that it doesn’t call for a cease-fire or an end to the war or the resignation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or that Israel withdraw from the West Bank. Rather, it appears that the only way Israeli writers or anyone published by one of Israel’s 98 publishers can avoid the blacklist is to denounce their own country and, by extension, their identity as Israelis.

For many of us in America for whom Israel as an ancient homeland is fundamental to our identity as Jews, to denounce Israel and its existence is tantamount to denouncing ourselves.

This is Jewish Book Month. Calling Jewish writers Zionists as an epithet and hence reason to be excluded from bookstores, festivals, panels, literary magazines, and the annals of publishing unless we denounce our attachment to our identities is a frightening development in American culture. It should terrify everyone of every nationality in America.

What was once unthinkable has now become acceptable, even commonplace — and, in some quarters, lauded.

This is how we live now.

Joan Leegant is an author. Her latest book is “Displaced Persons.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/12/21/opinion/jewish-authors-backlash-zionist/