An unpublished novel has paved the way for the birth of a new Jewish fiction imprint, in the leading edge of a flurry of initiatives to combat antisemitism in the publishing industry by taking hold of the means of production.
Meg Keene had an enthusiastic agent with a long track record of sales when she submitted her novel, a romance with Israeli characters, to publishers in 2024. But she said heard over and over that her book seemed too Jewish to publish at a time when the war in Gaza had turned anything that could be perceived as pro-Israel radioactive. As has happened to an untold number of Jewish authors in recent years, her book did not sell.
Now, Keene is the eponymous tastemaker at the helm of a new imprint within Wicked Son Press, a 5-year-old publisher that has released mostly nonfiction that leans right.
Meg Keene Books will release four to six novels over the next year that she and Wicked Son’s founders believe will elevate Jewish voices and reconstruct a bygone communal Jewish literary conversation. She’ll also edit a forthcoming literary magazine designed to shape the Jewish book-buying audience.
“My goal is to make Jewish publishing feel really cool,” Keene told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“I’m planning to acquire books across genres — male authors, female authors, romance, thriller, literary fiction — you know, the works,” she added. “I also intend to put everything I have behind each book, and sort of ask the Jewish community to support these books and make the case for them.”
At the same time, she said, she has broad support from Wicked Son’s co-publishers to depart from the conservative and explicitly pro-Israel stance that has characterized most of their recent and forthcoming releases, which include the posthumous memoir of pro-Israel philanthropist and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson and a treatise on anti-Israel sentiment on U.S. college campuses by the activist and former professor Shai Davidai.
“I really dislike books that are where you can sort of hear the author tapping the mic to do an op-ed through fiction,” Keene said. She added, “Not only am I not going to publish quote-unquote conservative fiction, I’m not going to publish ideological fiction at all.”
David S. Bernstein, who runs Wicked Son alongside Adam Bellow, said he’s on board — though he notes the openness has limits.
“The one thing that we insist that our authors believe is that they’re Zionists,” he told (JR). But, he added, they also have to be good: “Are we going to do schlocky novels just because they have a Zionist message? Absolutely not.”
Zionist authors — and those perceived, correctly or not, to be among their ranks — have faced a broad backlash in the literary world since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. Intense pro-Palestinian activism that left some Jewish writers feeling intimidated and unwelcome in 2023 and 2024 has resulted in “widening cultural isolation,” according to a recent report from PEN America, the free-speech organization, that cited dozens of Jewish industry professionals. Keene, who was mentioned in the report and later critiqued it as being inadequately focused on issues facing Jewish writers, says her research shows that the chill has translated into a declining number of Jewish book deals.
Some efforts have sought to improve the situation within existing institutions, whose decades of cache and power to fill bookstore shelves remain an unassailable draw for many Jewish writers. The Jewish Book Council, for example, has advocated for Jewish authors to speak at industry conferences and launched grants meant to help writers promote themselves to potential agents and publishers.
But an increasing number of initiatives are based on the premise that the situation in the literary world is so dire that Jews need their own publishing houses and distribution pathways. (“I am really tired of us begging for acceptance and it not working,” Keene said.) In addition to Meg Keene Books, there are at least two other imprints on the verge of announcing themselves, one funded by the pro-Israel philanthropist Scott Shay and the other operated by a British publisher and writer named Jacky Klein.
Klein declined to comment about her initiative, which her biography on the website of the Jewish Literary Foundation, a British organization, says is “focused on Jewish and Israeli voices, due to launch in late 2026.”
But Howard Lovy, the editor of the press that Shay is funding, said he planned to release at least one novel a month starting early next year, sourced from the vast number of manuscripts that writers have sent him following a handful of online callouts and from his own roster of freelance editing clients, whom he has found himself increasingly unable to steer toward publication.
“After I’m done editing their books, the next question is, OK, what now? I really don’t have much to tell them because things are so bad right now for Jewish authors,” said Lovy, who also freelances for 70 Faces Media, (JR)’s parent company. “Even if they don’t write about the Middle East at all, agents and publishers are telling them that this is not the time for Jewish voices, and bookstores aren’t selling them.”
Lovy’s press has a name: Canary Publishing. “Jewish voices have long been the canary in the coal mine, the song that signals whether the air is still safe to breathe,” he told (JR) in a follow-up email. “When we are silenced, everyone should worry.”
Naomi Firestone-Teeter, the Jewish Book Council’s CEO, said all of the new initiatives have a place at a challenging time. The council has received hundreds of messages to an email hotline launched in 2024 for people in the literary world to raise concerns about antisemitism and anti-Israel exclusion.
“A healthy Jewish literary culture includes many publishers, authors and viewpoints,” Firestone-Teeter said in a statement to (JR). The Jewish Book Council, she said, “welcomes efforts that support readers and authors and contribute to the long-term vitality of Jewish books.”
Shay’s investment is enabling advances to authors, though Lovy declined to share any dollar figures. Meg Keene Books, meanwhile, is following Wicked Son’s profit-sharing model: Rather than being paid upfront for their work, they’ll split any earnings with their publisher — starting with the first sale.
Keene says she herself has taken on the marquee role “not for any financial gains at the moment” but is hoping to rally new investments in Jewish publishing. “We are going to need Jewish donors and investors to stand up,” she said.
Keene is in some ways an unlikely leader for Wicked Son’s new imprint. She has a track record in print and digital publishing — but as the editor of a wedding-planning media company, not of fiction. There, her credentials come mainly from the fact that she has spoken openly, starting on social media, about a demoralizing experience that many aspiring authors prefer to keep quiet.
“It will destroy any remnants of my career that I have left in publishing. There’s really a code of silence,” Keene said this week from Jerusalem, where she traveled from her home in Northern California, of her fears about revealing that she had tried and failed to publish through the “Big Five” publishing houses.
A turning point came earlier this year when she appeared on a podcast produced by the Canadian Jewish News, where she revealed that she had been collecting data that she said showed a marked decline in Jewish fiction deals announced in an industry-standard publication since Oct. 7, 2023. Soon, she was collaborating with the Anti-Defamation League, writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and (JR), and fielding calls from Wicked Son.
“It was kind of an instant click across all three of us,” Bernstein recalled. “The immediate response was, ‘Oh well, this is the person we need to kick off our serious literature program.’”
He said her lack of experience in fiction publishing was no deterrent. “She built businesses. She’s a voracious reader. She absolutely understands what readers respond to, which was the main thing that we really loved about her,” he said. “We’re 100% confident that she’s going to be successful in this role, more successful than somebody who has only worked within the structures of a large publishing company would be.”
Keene declined to share specifics about the books she’s already negotiating to publish, which she said would likely include previously unpublished novels as well as works that may have appeared abroad but not in the United States.
But she cited “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” the 2000 novel by Michael Chabon about Jewish cousins in the golden age of comic books, as an example of the kind of thickly Jewish story she hopes to elevate. (Chabon is a staunch critic of Israel who has described Israel’s operations in Gaza as a “genocide.”)
“We have moved away from the days of ‘Kavalier and Clay,’ where every sentence on the page feels Jewish, and we’ve been in this moment where the best we’re allowed is representation,” Keene said. “Jewish fiction is incredibly cool, and I want to make us all proud and excited of our tradition.”
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