Los Angeles Public Library staffers have begun circulating and signing onto a letter seeking an apology from library administrators after the cancellation of a Read Palestine Week event that had been set for Dec. 6. They’ve collected more than 100 signatures as of Friday, Dec. 19.
The cancelled event was to have been a virtual, online talk between Palestinian American children’s book author Jenan Matari, and young adult author Nora Lester Murad, who is Jewish. Matari said she learned about the cancellation not from library officials initially, but from some people in her online audience. In a detailed account posted to her Instagram page, she described what happened as the library caving to “Zionist bullying.”
The two authors spoke to The LA Reporter earlier this month about the cancellation. Both described it as censorship, while library officials, have responded by pointing to those authors’ books being available in their collections to be checked out. Initially library officials said some procedures were not followed in planning the event.
This week, the city’s top librarian, John Szabo, pointed to social media posts by Matari as the reason the event was cancelled, in a letter issued after the staff letter began circulating.
According to the “LAPL Staff Solidarity Letter,” the planned talk between Matari and Murad came out of an effort to “organize a display and program highlighting Palestinian voices” that had been “overwhelmingly” approved by the teen council at the Central Library’s Teen’Scape center, which is the young adult section of the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library location.
The staffers’ letter detailed some of what went on behind-the-scenes. “Library staff developing programs and resources that uplift Palestinian voices have had their work subjected to scrutiny, review processes, and restrictions at levels unheard of in our organization,” the letter reads.
The letter now has 103 signatures from staffers at the Los Angeles Public Library, as of Friday, Dec. 19, and it began circulating as early as Monday. It calls on library administrators to “offer Teen’Scape their full support for another program highlighting Palestinian voices.”
The letter demands that library administration “apologize to Teen’Scape teen council, both guest authors, all staff, and the public for the program cancellation.”
The letter also says that on Dec. 1, staffers who organized the event “were verbally instructed by administration acting on behalf of City Librarian John Szabo to cancel the program.” The letter says that “administrators verbally cited a 2023 social media post supporting Palestinian resistance by one of the guest authors as justification.”
The LAPL Staff Solidarity Letter can read in full here.
While library officials initially gave few details about the reasons for the cancellation — only that it was due to issues with the approval process — on Tuesday, City Librarian John Szabo sent out a letter to library staff that stated that they called off the event due to Matari’s social media posts. Library communications staff provided Szabo’s letter when The LA Reporter sought a response to the staff solidarity letter.
The city librarian’s letter said that “as a department of the City of Los Angeles, the Library has a responsibility to remain nonpartisan and apolitical.”
“All Library programs must also align with our core values, including welcoming everyone and affirming that all people have dignity and deserve respect. We became aware that Matari’s social media posts related to October 7, 2023 did not meet these requirements,” Szabo’s letter read. “Cancellation of the program was necessary to uphold the Library’s commitment to an inclusive environment free of hate, discrimination, and harassment.”
City Librarian John Szabo’s letter can be read here.
Library officials pointed The LA Reporter to two social media posts that library administrators took issue with. One post on Facebook, from Oct. 7, 2023, by Matari showed an image with the words RESIST, accompanied by a Palestinian flag and the fire emoji. The post also read, “Until freedom.” The second was an Instagram post put up a year later, on Oct. 7, 2024. Library officials cited the caption, which reads, “one year + 76 of genocide and I don’t give a f*ck about what anyone says or how anyone feels about how we fight and rid our land of vicious colonizers. free Palestine. 🇵🇸 from the river to the sea.”
The LA Reporter sought some further details about why library officials felt those posts would have led to the library to be unable to create an “inclusive environment free of hate, discrimination, and harassment," and asked for more details on what steps were taken to address different perspectives on whether having this event would have led to the library being unable to uphold that stated commitment. Library officials responded that they didn’t have anything more to add.
Matari’s posts refer to an attack by Hamas fighters in southern Israel that took place after 56 years of Israeli occupation that started in 1967 amid a violent displacement of Palestinians. The attack also happened amid what was, by then, a 16-year-long blockade by Israel.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas fighters attacked “army bases, farming communities and an outdoor music festival, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, including women, children and older adults,” according to Associated Press article about an event marking the two-year anniversary since this attack, considered the worst in Israel’s history.
Israel responded to the attacks in “southern Israel by fighters from the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, and other Palestinian groups,” by beginning a campaign of genocide in Gaza that has killed at least 67,000 Palestinians, and injured another 169,000 people, according to the two-year anniversary report from Al Jazeera.
This September, a United Nation’s commission was just the latest to declare Israel’s retaliatory campaign of attacks in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory, a genocide. A blockade by Israel that intensified during the genocide has also plunged Gazans into a state of famine that was only recently declared to have lessened, with more aid making its way through, with one and eight people in Gaza still short on food.
When The LA Reporter shared the letter Szabo issued to staff this week, Matari responded that she was "offended that John Szabo and the library administration view Palestinian life as so fickle and meaningless that we are to just lay down and die — and that those of us in exile are to accept it quietly or speak on it neutrally. How offensive.”
Matari said she believed the library could have approached her involvement in a more sensitive way. She pointed out that the social media posts library officials said prompted the cancellation were from an article in The Washington Free Beacon.
Library staff who were coordinating the event told her, in emails sent in late November, that they were experiencing internal pushback. They pointed to the Free Beacon article, when Matari asked what specifically administrators had taken issue with, according to a redacted copy of the email exchange that Matari shared with The LA Reporter. In those emails, the library staffers coordinating the event had asked if Matari could help them with crafting a public statement to accompany the promotion of the event.
Matari said she was happy to assist coordinators with a statement. She also responded that “as a Palestinian, my content doesn’t ‘both sides’ a genocide,’” and her posts were “all pretty self explanatory” and that they “very clearly discuss topics of colonialism and Zionism. And I do not conflate Zionism with Judaism.”
She further explained that she views Israel as a settler colony and that what happened on Oct. 7, 2023 was “a clear example of oppressed peoples carrying out their international human right to resist an oppressor/occupier by any means necessary,” rather than as an “unprovoked attack,” as portrayed by “western media and propaganda.”
Matari added that she understood “the concern of backlash from this community,” and that it was ultimately in the “hands of the library” as to whether to “stand against” a form of “white supremacy … during the time it is most difficult to do so.”
Two library staffers also offered to share personal thoughts about what was taking place. They asked that their identities by kept anonymous, to protect them from retaliation.
One staffer wrote, “it’s been hard to see my colleagues and patrons so deeply affected by this cancellation. Some of the library’s most brilliant and passionate advocates are watching our administration systematically silence the voices of people experiencing genocide. For staff, it makes us question why we’re even here.
“The library has hosted plenty of programs with authors, Israeli or otherwise, who support violence against Palestinian people,” the staffer wrote. “Is that really ‘affirming that all people have dignity and deserve respect’? Szabo says the library has to remain ‘apolitical.’ But what are the apolitical, inclusive, acceptable ways for communities experiencing genocide to express themselves at LAPL?”
The other staffer wrote, “as a Jewish person, I reject the conflation of Zionism and Judaism. Jewish faith teaches us to practice Tikkun Olam, building a more equitable, caring, and just world that centers accountability as a core value.
“I am tired of my employer weaponizing Jewish identity and safety as justification for silencing Palestinian voices amidst Israel’s genocide,” the staffer wrote. “Censoring Palestinian voices contributes to a larger Zionist and colonialist project that makes Palestinian AND Jewish community members unsafe. I am still waiting for my employer to take accountability and demonstrate genuine support for Palestinian people and their culture.”
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