When Publishers Pick Sides

Simon & Schuster published my last three books, Miami Babylon, God’s Bankers, and Pharma. Tracing the Vatican’s hidden finances and exposing the pharmaceutical industry’s capture of American medicine were particularly large, expensive, yearslong investigative projects. Jonathan Karp, then Simon & Schuster’s publisher, and my editor, Ben Loehnen, commissioned both without knowing where the reporting would land. That is no small thing in publishing, and I’ve said so publicly before. I say it again now because it’s relevant to what follows: This is not a grudge piece from an author Simon & Schuster wronged. It’s the opposite. It’s a piece from an author who has had the exact experience Simon & Schuster likes to say it offers about editorial risk-taking. But I am writing now about a case where I believe the company’s stated principle broke down.

Washington Square Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books, sent out a press release last week announcing it would republish two novels by the Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa next month. Washington Square Press is not some obscure corner of the Simon & Schuster empire. It has published Jean-Paul Sartre, Pearl S. Buck, and Alice Walker over the decades, and Atria relaunched it recently as a curated imprint for serious literary fiction and nonfiction.

Simon & Schuster’s decision to expand its relationship with Abulhawa is troubling to me, not because she is a Palestinian writer, but because of what she has said in her own voice. Atria originally signed her in 2020—long before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. By the time of the recent decision to reissue her novels, Abulhawa’s inflammatory public record was not obscure. Five days after the attack, in a celebratory op-ed for The Electronic Intifada, a radical pro-Palestinian online publication, she praised the attackers as “brave Palestinian fighters” and “freedom fighters” and never once mentioned the Israeli dead. Then, through the second half of 2025, she called Israelis “rootless, soulless ghouls”; described Israel as a “cultureless, rootless human aberration” run by “Jewish supremacist demons”; described a pro-Israel commentator as a “lying Jewish supremacist cockroach”; and referred to Israelis as “demonic parasite[s].” Most of it was on her X feed, under her own name, available to anyone who looked. Either Simon & Schuster never checked her public posts, which would be gross negligence, or it knew and did not care.