A few weeks ago, right here in Nashville, an author's book launch was canceled. Not because the book was inaccurate, not because the venue changed its mind, but because pressure and intimidation made it feel unsafe to hold.
Alyssa Rosenheck wrote “White. Blonde. Jew.” — a book about identity, in part about the experience of antisemitism — and the response to it proved, in real time, exactly the point she was making. Bell Bird Books, the independent bookstore that simply wanted to give a local author a place to share her work, was put in an impossible position. There were two victims that day: a writer whose voice was silenced before her readers ever heard it, and a small business punished for the ordinary act of attempting to host a conversation.
I keep coming back to that moment, because I don't think it was an isolated one. I think it was a symptom.
Across the country, we are watching a slow and steady narrowing of who feels safe to speak, and about what. Authors are quietly disinvited. Exhibits are shelved rather than defended. Professors reconsider, mid-sentence, what they're willing to say in their own classrooms. Institutions that would never say they're making an exception for Jewish voices somehow keep finding reasons to make an exception for Jewish voices. It rarely announces itself as censorship. It shows up as a scheduling conflict, a security concern, a "let's revisit this next season." But the effect is the same: fewer people willing to say what they think, and a public square that gets a little smaller every time someone backs down.
The arts are especially vulnerable to this, because the arts have always been where a society works out its hardest questions — and because artists, unlike institutions, rarely have a legal or communications team standing behind them. When a bookstore, a gallery, a theater, or a university decides that hosting a Jewish voice is more trouble than it's worth, that's not neutrality. That's a decision, and it has a cost, paid first by the person being silenced and eventually by all of us.
Here's what I keep thinking about, though: none of this is inevitable, and none of it is new. The freedoms being quietly eroded — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to gather and express an unpopular view without fear of reprisal — are not fragile ideas. They are written in the founding document of this country. They do not belong to any one community. They belong to everyone, which means defending them is everyone's job.
That's why I don't think this is a moment for Jewish leaders to simply speak up for ourselves, as important as that is. It's a moment for leaders — period — to remember what their influence is for. Public officials who've built careers on defending the Constitution. University presidents who've built institutions on the premise of open inquiry. Clergy of every faith who've spent their lives teaching that human dignity isn't conditional. Business leaders who understand, better than anyone, what happens to a community's trust once its institutions stop standing for anything. Every one of them has a sphere of influence. Every one of them gets to decide whether to use it.
I'm not asking anyone to agree with every position a Jewish organization or a Jewish person holds. Disagreement, argued honestly and in the open, is exactly what a healthy civil society is supposed to look like. What I'm asking is harder and, I think, more important: that our leaders — in government, in academia, in faith communities, in business and each of us as individuals — treat the silencing of any voice, including ours, as everyone's problem to solve, not just ours to survive.
Bell Bird Books didn't set out to become a test case for free expression. They just wanted to sell books. That they were forced into that position at all should bother every person who believes in the country we say we are. Reclaiming civil society doesn't happen with one statement or one op-ed — it happens when enough people with real influence decide that a just, pluralistic public square is worth defending out loud, not just in principle.
That's the work ahead of us this fall, alongside everything else our community is building. I hope you'll join me in it. From my family to yours, may we all enjoy a happy, healthy and prosperous new year and may we find our way forward, together.
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