Gerald Posner is not an aggrieved author settling scores. He has said publicly, and repeats in his new essay for The Free Press, that Simon & Schuster gave him exactly the kind of editorial backing serious investigative journalism requires: his last three books — Miami Babylon, God's Bankers, and Pharma — were commissioned by then-publisher Jonathan Karp and editor Ben Loehnen 'without knowing where the reporting would land.' That context matters, because what Posner writes now is not a grudge. It is a statement of principle from someone with standing to make it.
The trigger is a press release sent last week by Washington Square Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster's Atria Books, announcing it would republish two novels by Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa next month. Washington Square Press is not a minor outpost: it has published Jean-Paul Sartre, Pearl S. Buck, and Alice Walker, and Atria recently relaunched it as a curated imprint for serious literary fiction and nonfiction. Atria originally signed Abulhawa in 2020, before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
The problem, Posner writes, is not that Abulhawa is a Palestinian writer. The problem is her documented public record. Five days after October 7, she published a celebratory op-ed in The Electronic Intifada praising the attackers as 'brave Palestinian fighters' and 'freedom fighters,' according to Posner, without mentioning the Israeli dead. Through the second half of 2025, according to the same account, she called Israelis 'rootless, soulless ghouls,' described Israel as a 'cultureless, rootless human aberration' run by 'Jewish supremacist demons,' called a pro-Israel commentator a 'lying Jewish supremacist cockroach,' and referred to Israelis as 'demonic parasite[s].' Posner reports that most of this appeared on her X feed, under her own name.
'Either Simon & Schuster never checked her public posts, which would be gross negligence,' Posner writes, 'or it knew and did not care.'
He is careful to say the company has every legal right to publish whomever it chooses. But he draws a line: if Simon & Schuster stands by Abulhawa's stated views, he will look for another publisher, and he hopes others will do the same.
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The record here is not ambiguous, and the principle at stake is not complicated. Publishing houses routinely make editorial judgments about authors whose public conduct reflects on the imprint. The question Posner forces into the open is whether those judgments apply consistently — or whether certain kinds of dehumanizing language get a pass depending on who is being dehumanized.
Follow the incentive, not the press release. A major commercial publisher expanding its relationship with an author whose public statements include the phrases cited above is making a choice, not an oversight. Posner's decision to name it plainly — from a position of loyalty, not resentment — is exactly the kind of dissent that institutions need and rarely welcome. The market, as he implies, is the appropriate place to answer it.
