Most special thanks to Tony Horwitz, whose editorial eye, remarkable reporting, and gorgeous prose will be missed so very much.
Thanks to the ACLU fact-checkers: Mark Carter, Nusrat Choudhury, David Cole, Jennifer Dalven, Zeke Edwards, James Esseks, Jonathan Hafetz, Omar Jadwat, Olivia Langley, Lenora Lapidus, Dan Mach, Susan Mizner, Stephen Pevar, Hina Shamsi, Chase Strangio, Betty Vine, Ben Wizner.
Thanks to Cecillia Wang and Laurie Hobart.
When we put the call out for help with writing the case introductions, professors Ian Haney Lopez and Laurel Fletcher of UC Berkeley Law School, and Jeannie Suk of Harvard Law School, sent students our way.
We must acknowledge the herculean efforts of Griffin Brunk, who wrote close to half of the case introductions, despite being enrolled both in law school and in a PhD program. Kyle Tramont also did more than his share. Thanks to Alexander Andresian, Brittany Arsiniega, Alexandra Avvocato, Tyler Bittner, Simeon Botwinick, Kathryn Combs, William Dobbs-Allsopp, Zachary Fuchs, Victoria Hall-Palerm, Shermila Kher, Minjae Kim, Monica Kwok, Nicole Lindahl, Alex Mabanta, Marissa Medansky, Priya Menon, Mohsin Mirza, Sanaz Payandeh, Daniel Parino, Kevin Ratana Patumwat, Mary Ross, Natalie Ritchie, Dru Spiller, Victoria Tang, Michael Zhang, and Ayyan Zubair.
Thanks to Michael Marshall Smith, John H. Bracey Jr., Christian Gregory, Edward R. Schmitt, and Caroline Rule.
Thanks to C-SPAN, Professor Murray Dry, Lauren Heaton, Don Herzog, Niquelle Orr, Jesse Rothman, Kayla Rothman-Zecher, Scott Sanders, Norman Slutsky, Nadine Strossen, and Ben Wizner.
Thanks also to professors Ronit Stahl, Dylan Penningroth, Mark Brilliant, and Christopher W. Schmidt.
We are grateful to our remarkable editor Jofie Ferrari-Adler, who supported this project wholeheartedly, and to the entire team at Simon & Schuster: Carolyn Reidy, Jonathan Karp, Meredith Vilarello, Ben Loehnen, Jordan Rodman, Alison Forner, Richard Ljoenes, Julianna Haubner, Carolyn Kelly, Allie Lawrence, Morgan Hoit, Brigid Black, Amanda Mulholland, Julie Ficks, Erich Hobbing, Kayley Hoffman, and Beverly Miller.
Special thanks to Daniel Kirschen, agent extraordinaire, and to ICM, which represented this book without renumeration.
Above all, the writers would like to express their gratitude to the ACLU for all that they do to keep our country sane and kind.
The Contributors
RABIH ALAMEDDINE is the author of the novels Koolaids; I, the Divine; The Hakawati; An Unnecessary Woman; the story collection, The Perv; and most recently, The Angel of History.
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS is the author of The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She hosts the Writers with Drinks reading series in San Francisco and with Annalee Newitz cohosts a podcast, Our Opinions Are Correct.
BRIT BENNETT is the author of The Mothers. She earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, and her essays are featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and Jezebel.
GERALDINE BROOKS is an Australian-born author and journalist who has written five novels, including the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner, March. She was a Wall Street Journal correspondent for ten years, covering crises in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. Her nonfiction work on Muslim women, Nine Parts of Desire, has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010 and in 2016 was named an Officer in the Order of Australia.
MICHAEL CHABON is the author of numerous novels, among them Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which was awarded the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is the coeditor of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation.
BRENDA J. CHILD is Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of several books on American Indian history, including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (1998); Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community (2012); My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation (2014). Child was born on the Red Lake Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota, where she is a member of a committee writing a new constitution for the 12,000-member nation.
DAVID COLE is national legal director of the ACLU.
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM is the author of six novels, including The Hours, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and PEN Faulkner Award. He is a senior lecturer in English at Yale University.
SERGIO DE LA PAVA is the author of three novels: A Naked Singularity, Personae, and Lost Empress. He is also a career-long public defender and legal director at New York County Defender Services in Manhattan, where he represents indigent criminal defendants and advocates for large-scale criminal justice reform. He has taught at Seton Hall Law School and presented on criminal justice issues for the Guardian, MoMA PS1, Harvard Law School, Public Radio International, UK Sky News, New York Daily News, and other venues.
ANTHONY DOERR lives with his family in Boise, Idaho. His most recent novel, All the Light We Cannot See, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
JENNIFER EGAN is the author of several novels, most recently Manhattan Beach.
TIMOTHY EGAN is a contributing op-ed columnist for the New York Times, where he shares a Pulitzer Prize for the series, “How Race Is Lived in America.” He won the 2006 National Book Award for nonfiction and the Carnegie Medal for a nonfiction book. His most recent book of nonfiction, The Immortal Irishman, was called “one of the finest Irish American books ever written,” and was a New York Times best seller.
DAVE EGGERS is the author or coeditor of many books, including The Circle; The Parade; The Voice of Witness Reader: Ten Years of Amplifying Unheard Voices; and Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated.
LOUISE ERDRICH’s most recent works include The Round House and LaRose. She owns a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Birchbark Books.
WILLIAM FINNEGAN is the author of five books, including Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for autobiography. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987.
NEIL GAIMAN is the Carnegie Medal, Newbery, Hugo, and Nebula award-winning author of American Gods, The Graveyard Book, Neverwhere, and The Sandman. Most recently he was showrunner for his adaptation for Amazon and the BBC of Good Omens, which he and Terry Pratchett wrote together. A passionate believer in the First Amendment, he is professor in the arts at Bard College and a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for Refugees.
ANDREW SEAN GREER is the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of How It Was for Me, The Path of Minor Planets, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, The Story of a Marriage, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and Less. He lives in San Francisco.
LAUREN GROFF is the author of five books, including the National Book Award finalists Fates and Furies, a novel, and Florida, a story collection. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.
YAA GYASI was born in Mampong, Ghana, and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her first novel, Homegoing, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Award, and an American Book Award. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and one of Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in New York.
DANIEL HANDLER is the author of seven novels, including All The Dirty Parts and Bottle Grove and, as Lemony Snicket, far too many books for children.
ALEKSANDAR HEMON is the author of The Lazarus Project and This Does Not Belong to You/My Parents: An Introduction. He has written for film and television, most recently for the Netflix show Sense8. He teaches at Princeton University.
MARLON JAMES is the winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel is Black Leopard, Red Wolf.
VICTOR LAVALLE is the author of seven works of fiction and a comic book. His most recent novel is The Changeling. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives with his family in New York.
ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC is a journalist who lives in New York City. She is the author of Ran
dom Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx, and is finishing a book about stand-up comedy.
JONATHAN LETHEM is the author of Dissident Gardens and ten other novels. He lives in Los Angeles and Maine.
YIYUN LI is the author of seven books. Her most recent novel is Where Reasons End.
VIET THANH NGUYEN won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel The Sympathizer. His other books include Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and The Refugees, a short story collection. He also edited The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives and is University Professor at the University of Southern California.
STEVEN OKAZAKI, an independent filmmaker, produced the 1986 Academy Award–nominated documentary Unfinished Business: The Japanese American Internment Cases, which told the stories of Min Yasui, Gordon Hirabayashi, and Fred Korematsu. He has produced numerous documentaries for HBO and PBS, including the Academy Award–winning Days of Waiting (1991), the Primetime Emmy–winning White Light/Black Rain (2007), and Heroin: Cape Cod, USA (2015).
MORGAN PARKER is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Magical Negro, and a young adult novel, Who Put This Song On?
ANN PATCHETT’s latest novel is The Dutch House. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.
MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER is an Israeli-American novelist and poet. He is the recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Honor. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, won the Ohioana Book Award and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Paris Review’s Daily, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Moriel lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with his wife, Kayla, and their daughter, Nahar.
SALMAN RUSHDIE is the author of fourteen novels, a collection of short stories, and four works of nonfiction. He is a past president of PEN America.
GEORGE SAUNDERS is the author of ten books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the Man Booker Prize. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.
ELIZABETH STROUT is the author of seven works of fiction and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge. Her most recent work is Anything Is Possible, a pick of President Obama’s best books for 2017.
MOSES SUMNEY is a performer and writer from Southern California by way of Accra, Ghana.
HECTOR TOBAR is the author of four books, including the novels The Barbarian Nurseries and The Tattooed Soldier. He is a native of Los Angeles and an associate professor at UC Irvine.
SCOTT TUROW is a writer and attorney. He is the author of eleven best-selling works of fiction and two nonfiction books about his experiences in the law, and his novels have been the basis of several films, including the movie Presumed Innocent. A former federal prosecutor, he served on a number of public bodies, including the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment to recommend reforms to the Illinois death penalty system.
AYELET WALDMAN is the author of novels including Love and Treasure; works of nonfiction including A Really Good Day; and the coeditor of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation and of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women’s Prisons.
JESMYN WARD is the author of the novels Where the Line Bleeds; Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award; and Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won the 2017 National Book Award. She is also the editor of the anthology The Fire This Time and the author of the memoir Men We Reaped, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received the Strauss Living Award and a MacArthur grant. She lives in Mississippi with her family and is a professor of creative writing at Tulane University.
MEG WOLITZER is a novelist whose many books include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, and The Wife. She was guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017 and is a member of the MFA faculty at Stony Brook Southampton. She lives in New York City.
JACQUELINE WOODSON’s books include Brown Girl Dreaming, Another Brooklyn, and Red at the Bone. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
More from the Authors
Navigate Your Stars
Sadness Is a White Bird
It Occurs to Me That I…
Where the Line Bleeds
Manhattan Beach
Sing, Unburied, Sing
About the Authors
MICHAEL CHABON and AYELET WALDMAN are the editors of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation. Chabon is the author of many books, including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Moonglow, and Pops, and Waldman is the author of the memoir A Really Good Day, as well as several novels including Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. Chabon and Waldman live in Berkeley, California.
TWITTER: @ACLU, @michaelchabon, @ayeletw
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ALSO BY MICHAEL CHABON AND AYELET WALDMAN
Kingdom of Olives and Ash
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Copyright Credits
Foreword copyright © 2020 by David Cole
“No More Flags” copyright © 2020 by Viet Thanh Nguyen
“Scottsboro, USA” copyright © 2020 by Jacqueline Woodson
“The Dirtiest, Most Indecent, Obscene Thing Ever Written” copyright © 2020 by Michael Chabon
“The Brother-in-Law” copyright © 2020 by Ann Patchett
“Victory Formation” copyright © 2020 by Brit Bennett
“The Nail” copyright © 2020 by Steven Okazaki
“A Short Essay About Shorts” copyright © 2020 by Daniel Handler
“They Talk Like That” copyright © 2020 by Geraldine Brooks
“Rocket City” copyright © 2020 by Yaa Gyasi
“One Will Be Provided for You” copyright © 2020 by Sergio De La Pava
“Legal Counsel at the Moment Most Crucial” copyright © 2020 by Dave Eggers
“How the First Amendment Finally Got its Wings” copyright © 2020 by Timothy Egan
“Your Mail Belongs to Us” copyright © 2020 by Yiyun Li
“Protection” copyright © 2020 by Meg Wolitzer
“Ernesto’s Prayer” copyright © 2020 by Hector Tobar
“Loving” copyright © 2020 by Aleksandar Hemon
“The Black Armband” copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Strout
“Crowd Work” copyright © 2020 by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
“The Right to Offend” copyright © 2020 by Rabih Alameddine
“On Jews, Blacks, the KKK, Ohio, and Freedom of Speech” copyright © 2020 by Moriel Rothman-Zecher
“Disturbing the War” copyright © 2020 by Jonathan Lethem
“Secrets and Lies” copyright © 2020 by Salman Rushdie
“The Ambivalent Activist, Jane Roe” copyright © 2020 by Lauren Groff
“A Nondangerous Person” copyright © 2020 by Ayelet Waldman
“Father Sues for ‘Mother’s Benefits’ ” copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Egan
“Spending Money Isn’t Speech” copyright © 2020 by Scott Turow
“Bob Jones Builds a Wall” copyright © 2020 by Morgan Parker
“Some Gods Are Better Than Others” copyright © 2020 by Victor LaValle
“Queer, Irish, Marching” copyright © 2020 by Michael Cunningham
“ ‘Be
cause Girls Can Read as Well as Boys’ ” copyright © 2020 by Neil Gaiman
“We Gather” copyright © 2020 by Jesmyn Ward
“Stateside Statelessness” copyright © 2020 by Moses Sumney
“The Way the Law Leads Us” copyright © 2020 by George Saunders
“Live from the Bedroom” copyright © 2020 by Marlon James
“Habeas, Guantánamo, and the Forever War” copyright © 2020 by William Finnegan
“Who’s Your Villain?” copyright © 2020 by Anthony Doerr
“You’ve Given Me a Lot to Think About” copyright © 2020 by Charlie Jane Anders
“Relative Sovereignty” copyright © 2020 by Brenda J. Child
“We Love You, Edie Windsor!” copyright © 2020 by Andrew Sean Greer
“Surveillance Capitalism Versus Indigenous-Led Protest” copyright © 2020 by Louise Erdrich
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Compilation copyright © 2020 by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman
Introduction copyright © 2020 by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman
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