In the basement beneath their home in Jerusalem, Ishai Menuchin and his wife pore over manuscripts and prepare them for market in Israel. The tiny independent outfit publishes just two to three books a year, but November Books has become the publisher of choice for a growing roster of authors from across the world.
It is the only Israeli publisher that meets the criteria set out in a boycott of Israeli literary institutions deemed complicit in the dispossession of Palestinians. The list of authors includes winners of the most prestigious literary prizes, who have published tens of millions of books between them.
“Basically it’s my wife and I,” said Menuchin in an interview. “It’s a basement publishing house”.
November Books is now preparing for its biggest launch yet: Sally Rooney has sold more than six million copies of her novels in more than 47 languages worldwide, but her fourth book has yet to be published in Hebrew. The Irish author, whose first two novels were published by Israeli publisher Madon, refused to keep working with it in 2021 because it did not comply with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement. November Books will publish Intermezzo next month in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call.
November Books does not sell, print or distribute books in occupied Palestinian territory and receives no funding from the Israeli state. It explicitly recognises the international legal rights of the Palestinian people, including their right of return to ancestral homes and properties inside what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories.
By publishing authors who have boycotted other Israeli publishers, November Books also seeks to unpick the conflation of anti-Semitism with condemnation of the Israeli state and its policies.
“The Israeli government, [like] many other super-nationalistic or fascist governments, push the idea that if someone is attacking Israel and its policies, it means that he’s against Israelis,” Menuchin said. “For us, it was important to show that people who believe in universal values and oppose the Israeli policies of apartheid, of occupation, of war crimes, of human rights abuses, are against that: not against Israelis as individuals or against Hebrew as a language”.
If November Books is now home to authors who snub most Israeli publishers, it emerged out of the opposite problem. Menuchin and his wife established it because most Israel publishers refused to touch the kinds of books they wanted to see published. In 1985, the couple struggled to find a publisher for a book they had edited about Israelis who refused to take part in the war in Lebanon. Another book Menuchin wrote about civil disobedience as a democratic obligation was also rejected.
“That’s why we decided in the beginning of 2000 to start something that will let us publish books on an ideology that most Israelis do not share,” Menuchin said.
November Books has since published The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, in which Israeli historian and political scientist Ilan Pappe argues that the displacement of Palestinians during war 1948 was an objective of the Zionist movement and necessary for the establishment of Israel as a Jewish state. “No Israeli publishing house was willing to publish it,” said Menuchin.
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The best-selling book they have published to date was Apeirogon, by Irish author Colin McCann, about a friendship between two men on opposite sides of the conflict who both lost their daughters: one in a Hamas suicide bombing on a shopping center and the other in a shooting by an Israeli sniper on her way home from school. It sold 2,000 copies, while most of the titles November Books has published sell between 500 and 1,000.
But Israel’s campaign in Gaza has resulted in the largest boycott of Israeli cultural institutions in history. The Palestinian Festival of Literature, which describes itself as a cultural initiative devoted to dismantling colonialism in the 21st century, said Israel’s publishing industry had failed to speak out about the killing of Palestinian writers and scholars, and the destruction of Palestinian libraries, printers, and publishing houses, it said. “In several cases there was not only silence, but support for the Israeli military’s actions.” It conducted research into 98 Israeli publishers, concluding that November Books was the only one signatories could work with in conscience.
Some pro-Palestinian activists go further, arguing that authors shouldn’t publish their books in Israel at all.
In response, more than 1,000 figures from the literary and entertainment industries signed a letter rejecting the boycott. “Art is the antithesis to a political party. It is a meeting place not an echo chamber,” said Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson. “Precisely where a door should be forever open, the boycotters slam it closed”.
Ari Ingel, the executive director Creative Community for Peace, a non-profit organisation dedicated to countering the cultural boycott of Israel, said authors, writers and literary groups had faced “non-stop harassment” since October 7, 2023 by a dedicated group of “illiberal activists” seeking “to bully and threaten anyone who refuses to condemn Israel”.
By the end of last year, the boycott of Israeli literary institutions had swelled to more than 7,000 writers, editors, translators, illustrators, agents, librarians and other book industry workers, including Israeli authors and winners of the Nobel, Booker and Pulitzer Prizes.
Among them was Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message draws direct parallels between the Jim Crow-era American South and the infrastructure of segregation he saw in the West Bank. November Books published it.
In a conversation with Irish Palestinian artist and activist Samir Eskanda published in the Guardian, Rooney expressed regret for selling the translation rights to her first two novels to an Israeli publisher she later learned had links to the military.“How could my actions be so inconsistent with my beliefs?”
Intermezzo has already been published in Arabic with the Palestinian publishing house Tibaq.
November Books is facing some challenges getting Intermezzo to market. A campaign on Israeli crowdfunding platform Head Start which allowed customers to purchase the book in advance had raised 70% of the target for when it was suspended. Menuchin said a complaint had been made because of the company’s refusal to dispatch books beyond the Green Line – the internationally recognised boundary between Israel and the Palestinian territories as demarcated after the Arab-Israeli war in 1948.
“Right now we have a problem with selling the books in advance,” he said. “But we will sell it in shops, independent shops and little book fairs during June.”
Photograph by Ellius Grace/New York Times/Redux/eyevine