This is a classic case of the progressive left eating its own.
For 30 years Toronto resident Hal Niedzviecki ran a successful offbeat, alternative magazine he’d founded.
It was called Broken Pencil and featured writers, stories and books that may never have seen the light of day otherwise.
In a recent interview, he described it as a mini-magazine which included reviews of small press literature, comics, art and features on “subversive figures doing things out of the norm.”
It evolved into a digital edition with a couple thousand subscribers and 3000 to 5000 stopping by the website per week. Pretty good for a “pretty eccentric” magazine, he says.
Then the atrocities of Oct. 7 hit and the Jewish publisher and author — who always considered himself part of the progressive left — soon found himself a pariah within his own close-knit publishing community.
Niedzviecki became the victim of identity politics and the absolute sheeplike behaviour of the progressive left to target Israel and anyone who supports the Jewish state.
In the last several months, he was the target of online harassment and — get this — a petition demanding he resign from the very publication he founded!
He decided he could take it no more and with “profound sadness” — as he says in a recent statement — he decided to shut down Broken Pencil as of year’s end.
Niedzviecki said his Jewishness became an issue after he started speaking out post Oct. 7.
”I was very upset by things like the Occupy UofT and people going up to the Jewish communities in Toronto and flying Hamas flags,” he said.
He said the left thought this was the way it should be and became more and more obsessed with identity politics.
It was all too much for him that people were calling for the eradication of the only country in the world that is Jewish.
He started posting on his private X account after Oct. 7 until it was brought to his attention that people were getting upset about it.
They screenshotted his tweets, he said, and circulated them on Instagram, vocalizing that this was “unacceptable” for someone associated with Broken Pencil.
They soon ramped up their abuse.
Everything he put up social media was accompanied by comments like “Get rid of genocide-denying Hal Niedzviecki.”
As their Zine fall festival approached, people were being told not to participate and advertisers and sponsors were being pressured to withdraw their support.
Soon a petition and an accompanying website appeared demanding that he resign from his own magazine and in order to “get back in the good graces” of the arts community, he should adopt a cultural boycott of Israel and devote an entire issue to Gaza.
The cowardly author or authors remained anonymous and no one spoke to him “directly,” he said.
“It was the equivalent of the masked terrorist sympathizers running around in the streets,” he said. “If you’re really committed to this, show yourself.”
To make matters worse, he knew most of the people who’d signed the petition and many had benefited from being featured in the magazine.
Writers started withdrawing their articles, he said.
Even though he had an issue in the works, he decided to pull the plug.
Niedzviecki said the “literary activists” will “stop at nothing” to get rid of you even if they have to destroy what was essentially their own magazine.
“My feeling is that I can no longer support this community by putting in the time to make this labour of love,” he said.
He feels the arts scene in Canada has been put under “unprecedented demand” for ideological conformity and he has never seen anything like it.
“It is unquestionably an attack on the right of Jewish Canadian artists and writers to support their culture and the only Jewish country in the world and still be in the arts,” he said, sadly.
“They don’t want us there. It’s an unprecedented silencing.”
Nevertheless don’t count him out.
The author of 10 books is now in the midst of writing a memoir about his family post WW2.
And he’s starting a Dubstack focussed on the need for free speech, free expression and content silencing.
Still he conceded it was horrible what happened.
“There was no reason for Broken Pencil to be attacked in this way and forced to shut down,” he said. “The magazine was doing great…so it literally is something that was completely unnecessary.
“It’s a terrible loss for the Canadian arts scene.”
