A Cancellation Trilogy

Nothing stifles great art like censorship, whether through overt acts by government censors or through acts of pillow-smothering by conformist claques eager to display their virtue. As far as the pillow-smotherers are concerned, it’s no secret that the mainstream publishing houses only look to publish work that conforms to a few preset narratives while robustly censoring anything that tweaks their puritanical orthodoxy. Starting in 2020, when thought-policing in creative fields peaked, publishing houses were often the first to “do the work” of acquiescing to cancellation mobs and dumping writers who didn’t immediately kowtow to the party line of the day, or simply didn’t check off the right identity boxes. This is not a surprise for an industry that is overwhelmingly made up of affluent liberal arts college-educated tote bag-carriers living in coastal metropolises.

Any writer worth their salt opposes any movement that seeks to curb free artistic expression, and this includes what we now call cancel culture—a term that is now said to be “of the right” but which describes something entirely real. The old cliché offered to new writers is “write what you know,” and any writer minted in this new milieu surely knows about cancel culture. Thus, it’s not a surprise that a new wave of writers has begun to write, often in metafictional tones, about authors stifled by the specter of cancellation. And while some are indeed right wing (which didn’t seem to hurt the fiction of Saul Bellow and Mario Vargas Llosa), others are leftists and old-school liberals of a bygone time and place where free speech was held to be central to progressive intellectual life.

Three books published over the past year—Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, Honor Levy’s My First Book, and Matthew Davis’ Let Me Try Again—all exemplify in their own varied ways the new cancel-culture novel. All three blend the autofiction popular among younger writers with elements of metamodern internet culture-influenced irony. They also involve characters who are canceled, and who use their cancellations to voice opinions on that subject. Also, all three authors are ethnically Jewish. Matthew Davis described himself to me as such. Honor Levy playfully confirmed via a DM on X with an image of her DNA results. And Lexi Freiman’s mother is of Hungarian Jewish descent, and she refers to herself as a “Jew.”

Mentioning that all three authors are of Jewish heritage may seem like an odd thing to point out. While the protagonists of all three books are also of Jewish heritage, only Davis’ book makes Jewish identity a central motif. Yet it’s no surprise that Jewish authors would be particularly en garde against the encroachments of cancel culture. The history of world Jewry can be seen as a series of cyclical scapegoating and persecution, with Jews being blamed for everything from poisoning wells to the infamous blood libel, often suffering violent pogroms as a result. To be Jewish is to be perhaps uniquely aware of the human propensity for scapegoating and mob violence, and to see it a potential personal threat.

The first book, Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, barges out of the gate with a cancellation narrative in which the main character, Anna, is revealed to be a writer canceled via a scathing review by The New York Times for writing a novel with a “classist” portrayal of poverty in an opioid-ridden Appalachian town. Flush with her newfound infamy, Anna is invited to a “dissident soiree” in Manhattan, where she recognizes canceled figures of all stripes, from “Black libertarian Substackers” to “bisexual Zionist frat girls” as well as two young women “from a downtown scene that was vaguely socialist and acutely nihilistic” that “had a podcast and were famous for cooking spaghetti for war criminals and speaking the word ‘retard’ to power.” The disputatious duo are stand-ins for the real-life hosts of the Red Scare podcast, who are central figures in the countercultural Dimes Square scene, a lower-Manhattan-based movement that wraps itself in antinomian transgressive aesthetics.

Anna’s fall from grace has plunged her into so much despair that she turns toward the philosophy of Ayn Rand for assistance. Anna basks in the twilight of her idol, noting that

Ayn Rand had also been raised a middle-class Jew in a big, cosmopolitan city. In 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized her father’s pharmacy and twelve-year-old Ayn had stood by impotently, witnessing his humiliation. [...] And then I began to wonder how Ayn’s Jewishness had shaped her thinking. There was a strong sense of both individualism and collectivism within Jewish culture. If the Jews weren’t being blamed for capitalism, they were communist agitators.

Indeed, Anna reveals the long history of Jews being scapegoated and canceled no matter what they did. While the Red Scare (the original one, not the aforementioned podcast) involved falsehoods about “Judeo-Bolshevism,” actual Bolveshiks often went after Jews like Rand’s father. Thus, the overarching arc of The Book of Ayn—Anna’s escape to Rand’s philosophy after being canceled—can be read as an allegory for the way Jews have had to unite after being scapegoated throughout history. In Blake Smith’s essay in this magazine on Hannah Arendt—that other prominent Jewish female philosopher in 1950s America—he notes that Arendt’s Zionism was rooted in the idea that an individual could only be free to think, cloistered away from the risk of being scapegoated, in a “world” of people united by a common culture. Rand’s objectivism can also be interpreted from a proto-Zionist angle, especially as expressed in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, in which “the men of the mind,” persecuted by a socialist American dystopia that sought to level the tall poppies, escape to their promised land of Galt’s Gulch in order to think and trade freely.

Yet despite Anna’s ethnic and philosophical connections to Rand, her attempts to live out Rand’s philosophy turn into a comedy of errors as she commits faux pas after faux pas at various social events. After a series of mishaps where Anna fails to employ Rand’s philosophy to her benefit, Anna tries to give up on Rand. Instead, she takes off to a Greek island retreat, where people are free to express themselves. At the retreat, a joke was told “about Haimy, who couldn’t get it up for his long-suffering wife, Leah. The joke played on some stereotype of the sexually neurotic Jewish male, but that didn’t stop me from laughing. I recognized the minor transgression and laughter came rushing up.” Of course, Anna isn’t the first Jew to get worried about laughing about stereotypes of the “sexually neurotic Jewish male”—the most famous being Philip Roth, who despite weathering years of being accused by fellow Jews of being a shanda fur die goyim for his frank and oft-abrasive portrayals of American Jewish life, still released his novel Portnoy’s Complaint with a protagonist not unlike Haimy. But pushing the envelope can only be done in a world where people don’t have to worry about being canceled.

The second book, Honor Levy’s first book, is a short story collection aptly titled My First Book. Levy was propelled to literary notoriety when she debuted in The New Yorker with her story “Good Boys” after graduating from Bennington College, becoming a voice of the Zoomer generation. As a Zoomer, I tried to answer the question of whether Honor Levy speaks for my generation by turning to the story that offers a Zoomer perspective on cancellation, aptly titled “Cancel Me.” The story begins with a roll call of canceled celebrities: “Roman, Louis, Woody, Kanye, Mario, Avital, Richard, Lana, Jia, Lorin, Luc with a ‘c.’” But the main cancelees the story focuses on are the unnamed narrator’s friends Jack, Roger, and Piggy, who were rendered personae non gratae when their names were put on a list of people accused of sexual misconduct. The narrator is in Manhattan where “It’s pouring rain, uptown acid rain, hot Columbia rainforest rain, jungle rain.” Columbia is a clever deliberate misspelling, as the narrator compares the muggy rain in the forests of the country of Colombia to the acrid atmosphere of cancellation at Columbia University, where the narrator is hanging out with Jack and Roger at a nearby pizza place.

The narrator is a Nabokov of the nursery, prattling in preschool patois about her conflicted feelings vis-à-vis the negative reputation of the men versus her own friendship with them: “Jack and Roger get so drunk. Jack and Roger are canceled. Jack and Roger make me so horny. Sometimes they make me laugh, but mostly they make me cry. I like laughing, but I love crying. Uptown, upstairs, and on the internet, Jack and Roger are the bad guys, but they are not bad guys. They are just guys.” In just a few scrawls of scribble-speak, the narrator perfectly puts to words the complex and contradictory feelings people have when their friends and loved ones are accused of something heinous, setting up a dichotomy between laughing and crying like a pair of ancient Greek theater masks.

The narrator suffers from her friendship with the canceled men. She herself is canceled-by-association, and denied access to a nearby party. While standing outside in the rain, she sees that “the skinny silhouettes of Barnard girls take no notice.” The image of the “Barnard girl” serves as a foil for the narrator, where “Barnard” is a metonym for “that woman-to-woman thing, that strong, knowing wide-eyed look of MSNBC solidarity, that nod and tight-lipped smile” that the narrator rejects in favor of due process for her accused friends.

Levy makes good use of three-dimensional space here: The narrator is standing in the rain, weighed down by her soaked clothing, while the Barnard students are both literally and figuratively above her and “on the inside” both in the physical sense and in the sense that the students are part of the hegemonic culture while the narrator is the literal outcast. In addition, the students are represented not as humans, but as shadowy silhouettes, who use their ghostlike mobility to manage their cancellation cabal from above and indoors while the all-too-human narrator is left outdoors in the rain.

While the plot of “Cancel Me” specifically deals with the social climate a few years out from #MeToo, its overarching theme—that cancel culture has often gone too far into scapegoating territory—is still relevant today and likely forever, because the human desire to scapegoat and cancel will always remain. It’s no surprise that earlier this year, Columbia University—the same institution featured in “Cancel Me”—erupted into “Hysterics for Hamas,” where hundreds of Columbia students, many from Barnard, turned the campus into a raging climate of cancellation for any Jew who dared to support the only Jewish state’s “right to exist.”

Many of Levy’s other stories traffic in material that would make any sensitivity reader sitting in a Brooklyn brownstone spontaneously combust. One story’s narrator gets splashed by a squirt gun after she makes one too many rape jokes at a party, leading to a water-spraying war that is compared to the Columbine massacre. Another story’s narrator snorts so much Vyvanse that she ends up remembering Torah portions she had to recite as a child, and muses that she wants to be “Dachau liberation day-skinny for spring break on Little Saint James.”

Whether such provocative material is simply intended to shock for shock value’s sake or the vanguard of an edgy post-cancel-culture world is open to debate, but Levy has proved that she indeed possesses a distinctly Zoomer voice, playing the part of an extremely online edgelord with a deeply contemplative core buried under layers of irony.

The third book is Matthew Davis’ Let Me Try Again, the most explicitly Jewish of the three. The main plot focuses on the narrator, Ross Mathcamp, a sexually neurotic Jewish male (sound familiar?) NYU graduate living in New York City who wants to rekindle the romantic relationship between his ex-girlfriend Lora Liamant, all while getting into various sitcom-style escapades in the meantime. There are many Roth parallels, made explicit in one scene where he looks through a first date’s e-reader library and is excited to see the name “Roth”—only to be disappointed when he realizes that the book is actually by the fantasy author Veronica Roth. On his own bookshelf, Ross shows off “trilogies like White Noise (1985), White Teeth (2000), and White Fragility (2018)” and “My Leonhard Euler, My Lauren Oyler. My John Stuart Mill, My Jon Stuart Leibowitz.” Such whimsical wordplay makes the book an entertaining Easter Egg hunt, where snappy references elicit chuckles.

After his parents die in a helicopter crash, Ross inherits millions of dollars and uses his riches to pursue his ex-girlfriend full time in ways that are sometimes comedic and sometimes creepy: taking steroids and lifting weights, buying elevator shoes to look taller, taking special lactose pills called “GoyishGut” so he can impress Lora with his ability to digest pizza, and hiring a private investigator to track Lora’s movements. Ross’ personality and behavior reminded me of another book published earlier this year titled Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, where author Ronnie Grinberg describes how secular American Jewish men in the 20th century—those with parents that went from the shtetl to the States—forged a new masculinity that defined itself not only against the Old World trope of the Talmudic scholar but also against the genteel Anglo-Protestant athlete that dominated Ivy League campuses at the same time those same colleges set strict quotas on Jewish enrollment. Instead, like Ross, many went to Columbia, NYU, or CCNY, where they developed a new Jewish masculinity based on intellectual combat.

In addition, Ross links his desire to get buff with trying to repudiate Jewish stereotypes, stating that “The problem, as far as I see it, is I am a Shylock, a shyster. A nickel nose? A yid? A hymie? Do you understand what I’m saying? That I am the archetypal weak and pathetic Jew?” This comment is reminiscent of the “muscular Judaism” of Max Nordau and Theodor Herzl, an idea many American Jews took up after Israel’s stunning victory in 1967’s Six-Day War. Thus, Ross’ journey from intellectual to bodybuilder resembles the trajectory of many 20th-century American Jewish men.

Besides inheriting millions, Ross gets custody of his teen sister Emily, who, to Ross’ chagrin, converts to Catholicism. His sister even claims that she is more Jewish than Ross, despite her being Catholic, because while Ross is a secular Jew, Emily now believes in the historical accuracy of the Tanakh. It is through Ross’ discomfort with Emily’s newfound faith that leads him to critically examine his own Jewish heritage. Shortly after Emily’s conversion, Ross meets a woman on a dating app. He argues so much with her that he then refuses to have sex with her. So, she leaves and slams his door so hard that his mezuzah falls and shatters. But while Ross mourns the loss of the mezuzah, as it was given to him by his bubbe, he exclaims that “I don’t even know what a mezuzah’s for!”

His hunt for a replacement mezuzah leads him to a store called the Judaica Entertainment Warehouse, where he has a long conversation about faith with the rabbi working there. When the rabbi, who is also a spirit medium, offers Ross the chance to communicate with his dead parents, Ross questions this, saying, “I’m pretty sure it’s forbidden, like by Moses, to try to talk to the dead. Like I was raised pretty secular, but even I know about this rule.” The rabbi replies that there are 613 commandments in the Torah, and if Jews expelled other Jews for every infraction, there wouldn’t be much of a Jewish people at all:

I mean, that’s what being Jewish is about, Ross. It’s about doing what you can to survive. Doing what you can to survive in a world where everyone hates you for what you are. You have to adapt to modern times. Simply ignore the parts of divine commandments that are no longer convenient to abide by. That’s what religion is all about.

Such is the rabbi’s message: Jews shouldn’t be canceled by fellow Jews over small infractions, considering that goyim are more than willing to scapegoat and cancel all Jewry.

Ross does indeed get scapegoated and canceled later in the book. The trouble begins when his friend, a paranoid professor of philosophy, calls Ross and tells him that his students are trying to cancel him over a misinterpreted bad joke, and asks him to teach a few classes until the controversy blows over. Ross teaches a class titled “Intro to Thought Experiments,” and attempts to get students to critically examine the meta-ethical grounding of their morality by raising a simple question: “I’m assuming most of you are atheists, and my question is this, why is it wrong to be racist?” Ross attempts to make the students realize that morality is arbitrary without any grounding in objective truth—a point similar to the argument for objective truth Leo Strauss makes in Natural Right and History.

The next day, Ross wakes up to find that the college newspaper has misconstrued his remarks on race and is calling him a white supremacist. Ross’ professor friend then calls him and announces that it’s actually Ross’ big break, as “Now you can cash in! Go on speaking tours, the podcast circuit, talk about how you were a victim of the mob.” Indeed, the entire episode parodies contemporary cancel culture, from the bad-faith interpretation of Ross’ words that the cancelers use to scapegoat him, to the angry news articles getting him fired on trumped-up accusations, to the friend that now encourages him to become a cause célèbre of a countermovement against cancel culture. Such is the trajectory of a phenomenon so common that there are now parodies not just of cancel culture but also of reactions to being canceled. Ross makes various throwaway references throughout the book to famously canceled figures like Woody Allen, Don Imus, Charlie Sheen, and Mel Gibson, so Ross’ cancellation can be read as him joining the new pantheon of the canceled.

These three books trace the many different ways people can join such the cancellation pantheon, how they deal with being canceled, and the personal aftermath of public trauma. Not everyone copes the same way: Anna falls in and out of love with Ayn Rand’s philosophy, the narrator of “Cancel Me” brims with anger over being canceled but simply ends up drenched in the rain, and Ross sees his cancellation as a fleeting picaresque episode in his even wilder life. These new exoteric critiques of cancellation show that Jews have been mostly free to write in recent years without fear of persecution, although rising antisemitism in the publishing world, which now includes putting “Zionist” on lists like the men in “Cancel Me,” may change that. It is no accident, then, that the recent upsurge of books critiquing cancel culture is being spearheaded by those who have the most experience with it: Jews.