92NO: The Writers' Boycott That Won't Let the 92nd Street Y Look Away

In October 2023, the 92nd Street Y cancelled a scheduled talk by Viet Thanh Nguyen after he signed a letter calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The institution's CEO, Seth Pensky, defended the decision, then proceeded to host a roster of pro-Israel speakers including former Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid, Bari Weiss, and Bret Stephens. In July 2024, the Y issued an internal policy banning political expression for all public-facing employees. The sequence of events was, to put it charitably, clarifying.

Now a collective called 92NO has formalised the response. The group's stated mission is to prevent writers and artists from allowing their names and work to launder the reputation of an institution it considers complicit in cultural suppression. It has compiled a list of alternative New York venues aligned with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The Literary Hub piece detailing the collective this week is the latest sign that 92NO is not fading away.

What is interesting about this particular fight is how precisely it illuminates a tension that cultural institutions have been trying to paper over for years: the gap between their stated commitments to free expression and their actual behaviour when that expression becomes inconvenient. The 92Y has long traded on its reputation as a place where ideas compete openly — a venue that has hosted everyone from Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin. Cancelling a Pulitzer-winning novelist because he signed a letter is not a minor administrative decision. It is a statement about whose speech the institution is actually prepared to protect.

Nguyen, for his part, has not been quiet about it. His memoir A Man of Two Faces — published in late 2023 — is in part about the experience of being Vietnamese-American in a culture that asks its minorities to perform gratitude while restricting their politics. The cancellation fitted rather too neatly into that argument.

Whether boycotts of this kind change institutional behaviour is genuinely unclear. They rarely produce visible capitulation. What they do produce, increasingly, is a record — a public account of what happened that does not disappear even when the institution would prefer it to. For a place that has spent decades curating its own prestige, that may be the more uncomfortable outcome.