Sally Rooney Has Lost the Plot
Millenial literary chic vs. the Jewish language
It’s a tale as old as time: the artist who is good at making things turns out to be bad at nearly everything else. Dr. Hyde on the page gives way to Jekyll in the public square. Too often, the with which they struggle is attaining a sane attitude towards Jews. When Wagner wasn’t writing music that listeners experienced as the sonic equivalent of a nuclear bomb he was ranting about the Jews. T.S. Eliot composed poems but had a similar anti-Semitic side hustle. Alice Waters and Amiri Baraka say all the quiet things out loud, ranting about Talmudic conspiracy theories and Jewish complicity in the 9/11 attacks, respectively.
An optimist would note that all of these are fossils, living or dead. But the pessimist, who is too often right, might respond that the latest entry to this lost is very much in her prime. Three books in, the Irish author Sally Rooney has established herself as the defining millennial novelist. She’s cool, and her books are ubiquitous among the younger subway reading set. They all center on literate but vaguely disillusioned Irish twenty-somethings juggling careers, friendships, and sex, not particularly adroitly. The books’ style is cold rather than warm, flat rather than emotionally jagged. Reading them feels kind of like reading an email from an especially literate friend who is studying abroad and reporting on their life. They are readable in a way that resembles the hours you spend on your phone. They’re not bad: they’re just scrollable.
They have also made Rooney one of the true stars of the literary world. Her second novel, Normal People, now also exists as a Hulu miniseries: the other two will follow in short order. Her latest book, Beautiful World, Where Are You, came into the world accompanied by bespoke bucket hat merchandise and coffee trucks roving around the city festooned with her book cover. It is a regular on best seller lists. At a time when the universe of belles-lettres is often bemoaned as in deep eclipse, Rooney is a huge success.
How remarkable and utterly unsurprising then, that at her moment of triumph, Rooney decided that her considerable cool and clout should be leveled against of all things, Hebrew. Most writers welcome the translation of their work into other languages: in addition to being good for the bottom line, the demand signals a broad interest in their work. Before last week, Rooney was no exception: her work has found homes in Chinese, Arabic, and many others. Millennial angst is something like a lingua franca.
All of this is the backdrop to Rooney’s announcement that she is cancelling an agreement to bring out her new book in Hebrew with the Israeli Modan Publishing House, which had released her previous two novels. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, “when Modan approached Rooney’s agent in an attempt to sign another translation deal, the agent announced that Rooney supports the cultural boycott movement on Israel and therefore does not approve translation into Hebrew.”
In Rooney’s own words, “The Hebrew-language translation rights to my new novel are still available, and if I can find a way to sell these rights that is compliant with the BDS movement’s institutional boycott guidelines, I will be very pleased and proud to do so. In the meantime I would like to express once again my solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom, justice and equality”, she said.
Rooney’s larger ideological commitments should mute any sense of shock at what otherwise seems to be a bizarre example of punching down against a language that is hardly a linguistic hegemon. She is an avowed Marxist, and so are nearly all of her characters: she shares with them the bad political thinking you might find on leftist Twitter or at your local Democratic Socialist of America chapter meeting. In these precincts of the left, relentless hostility to Israel is just as canonical as Das Kapital.
Rooney also emerges from a radical Irish milieu that has been an incubator for particularly nasty expressions of anti-Semitism, one of the latest installations in Europe’s long running disordered thinking about the role of Jews in the world. In the words of a recently released report, “the spread of anti-Semitism throughout the Irish mainstream is clearly worse than in almost any other Western nation. It requires a massive educational drive to even begin to unravel some of the damage.”
All of these are explanations, not excuses. Every reasonable person, and certainly anyone who has enjoyed Rooney’s books, should feel outraged. Rooney’s war against Hebrew in the name of opposition to Israeli policy mistakes a language for a government, and culture for an army. It revives ugly precedents where both radicals and revanchists were repulsed not only by what Jews did, but how they spoke. Not just who they were, but the sounds they made. To refuse contamination by Hebrew is to erect a ‘Jews not welcome’ sign. Just because it is an intellectual doing it doesn’t make it any less egregious. It makes it worse.
This boycott is aimed at the Jewish State, but it is a blow to the humanistic heart of translation itself, which is premised on the idea that comprehension and connectivity can travel across difference, and that even if moving meaning across alphabets is always fraught, it is still worth doing. The fewer hard borders in the republic of letters, the better. When we become provincial and narrow, our imagination shrinks.
Rooney and her fellow BDS travelers would object and maintain that Rooney is boycotting only an Israeli publisher, not Hebrew: presumably, if a Hebrew press could be found in Guatemala, she would be enthusiastically on board. Putting aside the laughable absurdity of trying to cleave apart Israel and Hebrew, which were born together and remain conceptually inseparable, this benefit of the doubt reading of Rooney’s stance is the opposite of exonerating. Targeting Israel alone is hardly less defensible than attacking Hebrew by itself. It is the classic myopic tic, seeing wrongdoing only when it pledges allegiance to a blue and white flag.
It is tiresome but essential to note that neither the totalitarians in Beijing nor the despots across the Arab world sufficed to disqualify translation into their languages. The frequently heard argument that Israel deserves to be boycotted not because it is the worst but because it will be uniquely hurt by the disapproval is akin to saying that the school bully should target the classmate who is easiest to brutalize. It is logic that empowers the mob.
I don’t think it really matters whether you have read Rooney’s novels, or whether you enjoy them, or whether you’ve even heard of her. What you need to know is that this is another example of a trend: a hardening consensus of the progressive elites that the Jews are different, that the Palestinian cause is a veto over real and deep empathy with Jews anywhere in the world, and that even as Israel makes strides in peace with its neighbors and political representation in its government, it is condemned to be an eternal pariah.
The silence of a literary world that is otherwise driven to distraction by the specter of prejudice speaks deafeningly about what and who matters. But there is no need to accept this state of affairs. All of us, especially those who love to read and write, need to speak out.
When it comes to Hebrew, Sally Rooney has lost the plot. That is entirely her loss.
A