Сотрудница PEN America, возглавлявшая центр защиты палестинских писателей, уходит в отставку

PEN America Staffer Who Led Work on Palestine is Resigning Liesl Gerntholtz headed the group’s Freedom to Write Center. PEN America’s co-CEO’s, Summer Lopez and Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, at the group’s annual gala in May. This article first appeared in the Jewish Currents news desk newsletter. Subscribe here. Liesl Gerntholtz, a top PEN America staffer who ran the organization’s PEN/Barbery Freedom to Write Center and led its efforts to support and relocate Palestinian writers, is resigning, Jewish Currents has learned. Gerntholtz told Jewish Currents that she is leaving her position as of September 11th. Gerntholtz served as the lead author of a PEN America major report that documented Israel’s destruction of Palestinian culture in Gaza, and called for that cultural destruction to be investigated as war crimes and “evidence of genocidal intent.” Her resignation comes amid an ongoing crisis at PEN America over its approach to Palestinian writers, Israel, and the genocide in Gaza, which led to a writer’s boycott of the organization and the resignation of its CEO, Suzanne Nossel, in 2024. Though the boycott ended in 2025, the turmoil has not subsided. This July, PEN America’s elected president, the novelist Dinaw Mengestu, resigned in protest of the group’s publication of “A Silent Moratorium,” a thinly-researched report that cited purely anecdotal evidence to assert that Israeli and Jewish writers face “rising isolation and exclusion” in the publishing industry. Gerntholtz, a human rights attorney, has served since 2022 as the inaugural head of the Freedom to Write Center, which publishes an annual tally of jailed writers worldwide and a database of writers and academics under threat globally. She spent over a decade at Human Rights Watch prior to working at PEN America, including as executive director of HRW’s women’s rights division. Mengestu told Jewish Currents on Wednesday that Gerntholtz was “one of the strongest” voices within PEN America for the organization to “act ethically,” including “with Israel and Gaza, where that was not the case on a number of instances.” He said that, “Liesl and a lot of the people that worked with her were consistently the voices in the room who challenged and opposed statements, reports, positions. And they did so over and over again.” Mengestu said that the Freedom to Write Center staff, led by Gerntholtz, had raised objections internally about the methodology and publication of the report on Jewish and Israeli writers. Gerntholtz and her team, Mengestu said, were “opposing it and criticizing it.” That report conflated allegations of antisemitism against Jewish writers with charges that American presses won’t publish Israeli fiction. “There is no rigorous analysis,” Mengestu told Jewish Currents in July. Mengestu also said that Gerntholtz had been an internal critic of a January 2026 statement by PEN America opposing the cancellation of performances by Guy Hochman, an Israeli comedian and pro-Israel provocateur who posted racist videos from Gaza during Israel’s invasion. PEN America later withdrew its statement in support of Hochman. PEN America’s leadership has held up Gerntholtz’s work in recent months as a defense against criticisms of the organization’s record on Palestinian writers and Gaza. After Mengestu’s public resignation in July, which drew significant media attention, the group’s co-CEOs published a letter saying, among other things, that PEN America had “directed half a million dollars in direct emergency support to Palestinian writers and artists in Gaza and in exile, including helping families relocate to safety”—work led by Gerntholtz. The letter also cited Gerntholtz’s 2025 report on cultural destruction in Gaza. Gerntholtz would not speak about her departure with Jewish Currents. Asked about her resignation, a PEN America spokesperson said that Gernholtz “will be transitioning to a part time role at PEN America.” Gerntholtz said that she will work as a consultant on Kronika, a digital archive project founded as a collaboration between PEN America and Bard College. I’m Arielle Angel, editor-at-large of Jewish Currents. Before you go, there’s something I need to ask.   We’ve seen over and over how the mainstream media falters in telling stories on our beats—whether it’s antisemitism, Israel/Palestine in American politics, Jewish identity, or the American left. At Jewish Currents we’re committed to uncompromising analysis and longform reporting on these issues and more—stories you won’t find anywhere else. In a media landscape that obscures injustice and flattens discussion, we’re changing the conversation. But we need you.   If you believe in this work, please consider making a donation—or even better, a recurring one—to ensure that we are able to keep publishing stories like this one. We can’t do it without you. Josh Nathan-Kazis is the news director at Jewish Currents. Previously, he was a senior writer at Barron’s, where he covered healthcare companies, and a staff writer at The Forward, where he investigated Jewish communal institutions.