National Book Awards defends lifetime award for influential Black publisher of antisemitic book

(JTA) — As the National Book Awards gears up for its annual literary awards show this Wednesday, the foundation is defending its decision to honor someone who recently republished an infamous antisemitic tract from the 1990s.

Paul Coates, founder of the pioneering Afrocentric publishing house Black Classic Press and father to journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates, will receive this year’s Literarian Award, which the National Book Foundation says “is traditionally presented to an individual for a lifetime of achievement in expanding the audience for books and reading.” Past recipients have included Jewish librarian and activist Nancy Pearl and Oren Teicher, the Jewish retired CEO of the American Booksellers Association.

But Coates’ selection became mired in controversy following a recent Jewish Insider report that Black Classic Press had quietly republished “The Jewish Onslaught,” a self-published 1993 essay on Black-Jewish relations by then-tenured Wellesley College professor Tony Martin that employed a series of antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

In the book, subtitled “Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront,” Martin gave his account of a public feud between himself and Jewish colleague Mary Lefkowitz after she discovered that Martin, an Africana Studies professor, had assigned his class to read the Nation of Islam’s infamous book “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews,” which exaggerated the role Jews played in the slave trade.

“The long arm of Jewish intolerance reached into my classroom,” Martin wrote in his book, attacking the campus Hillel, the Anti-Defamation League, and other Jewish groups that mounted a public campaign against him. He then expanded his argument outward to assert that Jews have “great ownership or control of the major media” and declared, “One of the more successful Jewish tactics has been their ability to find ambitious or alienated Black persons to do their bidding.”

The book was enough of a lightning rod that Wellesley publicly distanced itself from Martin over his authorship at the time, and Kristen Clarke, President Joe Biden’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, had publicly apologized for having hosted Martin when she was a Harvard student. (Martin died in 2013.)

Recognized for his work

“Even if the books’ quality did not disqualify Coates from a National Book Award, one would expect that the antisemitism would,” the Jewish author and journalist Mark Oppenheimer recently wrote. 

Black Classic Press did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment. Coates’s son, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has made waves this fall with the publication of his latest book, “The Message,” which compares Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to the Jim Crow South.

Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation, told JTA that Paul Coates was being honored “not for the publication of any particular authors or titles” but in recognition of his work publishing Black and African diaspora authors. 

“The National Book Foundation condemns antisemitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, and hatred in all its forms,” Dickey said in a statement. “The National Book Foundation also supports freedom of expression and the right of any publisher to make its own determination on what it chooses to publish. Anyone examining the work of any publisher, over the course of almost five decades, will find individual works or opinions with which they disagree or find offensive.” 

Since the publication of the Jewish Insider article, “The Jewish Onslaught” has been removed from Black Classic Press’s online catalog. Another book still being offered by the press, “We the Black Jews,” by Yosef Ben-Jochannan, trains its focus on Jews of African origin and purports to dismantle “the ‘White Jewish Race’ myth.” In the book, Ben-Jochannan draws a distinction between Africa’s lost Jewish tribes and “Talmudic Judaism,” which he writes “coopted the theosophical and philosophical works of the Nile Valley Africans.”

The Coates controversy comes a year after a Jewish sponsor pulled out of the National Book Awards ceremony over objections to a planned statement that nominated authors intended to make calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. This year’s National Book Award finalists include two poetry collections about the Palestinian experience.

Last year’s objecting sponsor, Zibby Owens, has since published her own book on antisemitism, “On Being Jewish Now,” in partnership with Artists Against Antisemitism, a new nonprofit advocacy group focused on antisemitism in the arts and publishing spaces. Artists Against Antisemitism declined to comment on the Coates award to JTA. 

The National Book Awards won’t be the only literary prize ceremony closely watched by Jews this week. The Giller Prize, a prestigious Canadian literary award, will host its own ceremony on Monday following months of protest over its sponsors’ ties to Israel. Protesters against the Giller Prize have included last year’s Jewish recipient of the award.