New Delhi: “Sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse,” writes Anne Boyer in her now-viral resignation letter as the poetry editor of The New York Times Magazine.
In a statement Thursday, the 50-year-old minced no words in condemning the “tone” used by NYT in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, which has had catastrophic repercussions in the Gaza Strip.
“The Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone… This is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is the ongoing devastation of the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.”
“There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers. The world, the future, our hearts — everything grows smaller and harder from it,” read the letter.
Adding that she “won’t write about poetry amid the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering,” Boyer wrote, “I refuse. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more sanitized hell-words. No more warmongering lies.”
The Pulitzer Prize winner, who had been with the paper for over a year, ended her letter with the line: “If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present.”
While many appreciated her stand, Bill Kristol, former chief of staff to Republican vice president Dan Quayle, wrote on X that Boyer’s resignation was “effectively a pro-Hamas statement”.
On 3 November, another editor of The NYT Magazine Jazmine Hughes had put in her papers. According to the Times, Hughes violated journalistic regulations by signing an open letter from Writers Against the War on Gaza, criticising Israel’s actions.
In India, Mumbai-based author and curator Ranjit Hoskote resigned from the selection committee of the upcoming 16th edition of Documenta – the world’s most prestigious art exhibition in Kassel, Germany – after a German daily accused him of “anti-Semitism”.
“Opposition to Zionism, the state ideology of Israel, does not amount to anti-Semitism,” Hoskote wrote in his letter of resignation.
(Edited by Tikli Basu)