On March 5, the small literary magazine Guernica published From the Edges of a Broken World, a brilliant first-person essay by Joanna Chen, a British-Israeli author and translator, about violence and humanity in the Israel-Hamas war. Several days later, Guernica pulled the story from its website after members of its staff resigned in protest over the piece. One wrote that Chen’s article “attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide.”
The retraction made global news, including in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and European, Arab, and Israeli publications. Much of the coverage was highly critical of the retraction, which the magazine said it would explain at a later date.
Matthew Cooper, the Monthly’s executive editor for all things digital, reached out to Chen to see if she would be interested in running the piece in the Washington Monthly. She agreed, and yesterday, we did just that.
I asked Matt to share a bit of detail about that decision. Here’s what he said:
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I was doomscrolling on Twitter (X) when I saw that Guernica had retracted the essay. It was still available on the Wayback Machine, so I read it—a measured, beautifully crafted set of observations about the carnage in Gaza and Israel—and I reached out to the author to say that the piece deserved a real home and not just as samizdat in a corner of the internet.
As a center-left magazine of ideas but without an extensive history of taking sides in the Mideast, the Monthly was, I said, a natural home for the piece and one with a long history of editors who had written beautifully about racial and ethnic conflict—Taylor Branch, Katherine Boo, Robert F. Worth, and Jon Meacham among them. Chen, her agent Jessica Kasmer-Jacobs, and I traded WhatsApp calls and messages from Israel, Washington, and London. Eventually, we decided to run the piece as it appeared in Guernica with some minor changes for style.
Fights at little magazines may seem obscure and irrelevant, but they often echo and influence politics in a big way. The mid-20th century fights at Partisan Review over Communism reflected the battle between Cold War liberals and those still warm to Marxism. Likewise, the rightward shift at Commentary in the 1970s augured and sped the rise of the neoconservatives and constructed the intellectual scaffolding of Ronald Reagan’s administration. For over a century, The New Republic, where I used to work, has been riven by ideological battles (and dueling egos) that helped define liberalism since the Progressive Era.
At the Monthly, we have our differences but no gaping chasms, perhaps because we are driven less by ideology than by a pragmatic hunger for policies and politics that work. Like Branch or Boo, Chen shows how humanity persists amid war and madness through the example of her own grace as a translator and driver of Palestinian children who are from the occupied territories to Israeli hospitals. Her empathy stands in contrast with Guernica’s decision to retract this beautiful essay, and the agitprop statements on both sides of the “Green Line” designating Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.
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Best,
Bill
