JP Yim/Getty Images for Girls Write Now

Navigate to Community section

A New Chapter in an Old Story

With a new anthology, author and publisher Zibby Owens brings together dozens of writers to talk about Jewish life after Oct. 7

by
Judy Bolton-Fasman
October 15, 2024

JP Yim/Getty Images for Girls Write Now

Just a few weeks ago, writer and publisher Zibby Owens weighed in on Instagram about the latest antisemitic incident in the literary world. Writer Elisa Albert was invited to be on a panel in September at the Albany Book Festival with novelists Lisa Ko and Aisha Abdel Gawad. The program was canceled when Ko and Gawad refused to share the stage with a “Zionist.”

“THIS IS NOT OKAY AND SHOULD NOT BE TOLERATED,” Owens wrote in all caps on Instagram. She went on to exhort: “Pay attention, world. We are being targeted and if you don’t object to this in some way, you’re enabling the escalation.”

This was not the first time Owens has taken a public stance on antisemitism in the literary world since Oct. 7. She was one of the founding members of Artists Against Antisemitism, a nonprofit organization with a mission “to raise awareness of antisemitism, promote education about Jewish history and culture, help those experiencing Jewish hate to fight against it, and work to help build a kinder, brighter, more understanding world within the arts.”

Owens’ Jewish activism was on full display the day before the November 2023 National Book Awards ceremony, when she withdrew her sponsorship of the event, citing the nominees’ decision “to collectively band together to use their speeches to promote a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli agenda.” Owens further wrote to the National Book Foundation’s Executive Director Ruth Dickey: “I am not comfortable bringing my authors and my team into a politically charged environment like this one, one that will make many of us feel uncomfortable—including myself as a Jewish woman. It’s one thing to gather to celebrate literary accomplishments and reward books well-written. It’s quite another to be subsidizing an event that’s being used as a platform to fuel hate and divisiveness.”

As Owens knows, advocacy has its risks. “From a personal standpoint my hackles are up,” she told me in a recent interview. “But I have been very aware, and straddling the line of being smart about safety and being an advocate for my people.”

This past summer, her advocacy continued when Owens took on a passion project prompted by her personal response to Hamas’ genocidal attack of Israel on Oct. 7: a new anthology called On Being Jewish Now that she edited and released through her publishing house, Zibby Books. She recruited 75 Jewish authors to contribute essays, including Caroline Leavitt, Daphne Merkin, Rabbi Steve Leder, Rabbi Sharon Brous, and Joanna Rakoff.

All hands were on deck at Zibby Books to get the anthology done in eight weeks, rather than the typical 10 months it takes to produce a book. (Anne Messitte, the publisher of Zibby Books and president of Zibby Media, points out that On Being Jewish Now is, in publishing parlance, a “drop-in title,” and thus not disrupting the monthly publishing schedule already in place through 2025.)

Owens and Messitte say there was a sense of urgency in publishing the anthology, which came out as an e-book and audio book on Oct. 1, and will be released in paperback on Nov. 1.

Both women expect the multiple perspectives the anthology presents will spark thoughtful conversation that transcends slogans and vitriol about an emotional and difficult issue.

On Being Jewish Now is aligned with our mission of supporting writers and readers,” said Messitte. Building community is central to Owens’ work ethos, “and publishing the essays on Jewish identity in a single book explicitly addresses how many American Jews are seeing themselves in a post-Oct. 7 world.”

Several of the contributors to the anthology felt that their world was distinctly cleaved into a before and after post Oct. 7. Daphne Merkin’s essay, “Passion and Pain,” addresses Jewish communities rearranging themselves after traumatic events. Her powerful and poignant piece braids together her family history, the history of the Holocaust, and the fallout she experienced as an American Jew after Oct. 7.

In her essay she writes, “[t]hese days, I feel lost even unsafe without an intact homeland to protect me. I don’t trust some of my non-Jewish friends and have wondered whether anyone would take me in if the need arose.” In a recent interview, Merkin told me that some intellectuals transformed Hamas’ “barbarism and sickening hatred” into the notion of understandable resistance, which Merkin finds “horrifying.” “The fact that it was converted so quickly and so spuriously and managed to be recolored with such success could not have happened other than with the victims being Jews,” she observed.

“Antisemitism remains the oldest of stories,” said Rabbi Steve Leder, another contributor to the anthology. “American Jews are shocked when I talk about this new chapter in an old story. But America is just a new setting.”

Leder is the senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles and the author of five books. Considering the Oct. 7 attacks, Leder told me: “murder and killing are not the same things. Murder is premeditated and unprovoked and unnecessary. Killing is the response that murder requires. Hamas terrorists are murderers and the IDF are killers. If you disambiguate these two things—that is remove any ambiguity—it becomes morally clear in terms of choices.”

He further says the Palestinian people deserve a much better fate: “They deserve better from their Arab brethren. They deserve better from Hamas. They deserve better from Israel and the United States. They deserve better, full stop. And here is where disambiguation comes into play. Hamas’ mission has nothing to do with Palestinians or improving their lives. Their mission is dead Jews. Not Israelis, Jews.”

Owens’ life in literature began when she was 9, when her grandparents published two of her short stories as a miniature book. The moment she saw her name on the spine, she knew she wanted to be an author. She finally realized her childhood dream of being published when she was 47. (She has published a memoir and a novel, Blank, which came out last spring, and has another novel due to be published in October 2025.) Then she brought together her dedication to all things literary and her business acumen to found a publishing house.

The origins of Owens’ publishing enterprise go back to 2018 when, at her husband’s suggestion, she started a podcast called Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books. The podcast quickly caught on as it garnered an impressive roster of writers including Jennifer Weiner, Dani Shapiro, Jamaica Kincaid, and Rebecca Makkai. Many debut authors have also landed a guest spot. In keeping with her stalwart support of Jewish authors, she recently featured Michael Frank’s superb Holocaust memoir, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World.

Owens told me that when she began the podcast, “I didn’t have a platform, and I wasn’t on social media. I built up Zibby Media by getting to know authors and seeing what they needed.”

Owens founded Zibby Books in 2021. Her reach grew to include Zibby Media and Zibby’s Virtual Book Club, and she recently opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Santa Monica, California.

Owens and the books she has championed have had their share of press, in outlets like the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Publisher’s Weekly. “We like to get our books and people together,” she told me. “Our tagline is ‘Stories Are Best When Shared.’ That is what we believe in and that is what we do.”

Kathleen Schmidt, who writes the Substack Publishing Confidential, has had various roles at Penguin Random House and Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Currently the president and CEO of Kathleen Schmidt Public Relations, she describes Owens as a “book publicist’s dream.” She says Owens’ podcast has provided a great outlet for book publicity, noting: “There are so few places that we can pitch to get books promoted.”

Schmidt also notes that queries to literary agents from Jewish authors have become more challenging, and securing bookstore readings for Jewish writers has become more difficult, since Oct. 7. “Zibby is probably looking at the industry, disappointed like a lot of us are,” she said. “It’s a great thing that she is publishing On Being Jewish Now because there must be community now more than ever and the publishing world has let their Jewish authors down.”

As Leder writes in his essay in the book: “On Erev Rosh Hashanah [last year], three weeks before Oct. 7, I warned my congregation that Nazis brought Jews to the ovens, but now our enemies can bring ovens to the Jews. I have never been sorrier to be right. To be a Jew today is to live the newest chapter in the oldest of stories.”

Judy Bolton-Fasman’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Forward, The Jerusalem Report, and other venues. She is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets.