Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’ father, W. Paul Coates has won a prestigious National Book Award despite claims his company published an openly anti-Semitic novel.
The National Book Foundation, a literary nonprofit, has since defended its decision to give Coates its Lifetime Achievement Award.
“The National Book Foundation condemns anti-Semitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism and hatred in all forms,” Ruth Dickey, the foundation’s executive director, told The Post in a statement.
“The National Book Foundation also supports freedom of expression and the right of any publisher to make its own decisions about what it wants to publish.”
The National Book Foundation said Coates was “instrumental in preserving the legacy of remarkable writers and advancing the works that have shaped our individual and collective understanding of the black experience within the borders of the United States and around the world.”
Coates was featured as this year’s honoree in the foundation’s September announcement, which faced backlash after Jewish Insider reported that Black Classic Press, Coates’s Baltimore-based publishing house, was publishing “The Jewish Onslaught Was republishing “.
The 1993 title was written by Tony Martin, then a tenured professor at Wellesley College, who sparked controversy after assigning students to read an excerpt from “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.”
The book – which was reportedly published by the Nation of Islam – exposed Jews for their role in the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in the Americas, according to one. Archived excerpts from 1995 at The Atlantic and a book published by the late Harold Brackman, a historian specializing in African American-Jewish relations.
According to the book review, to defend himself, Martin wrote “The Jewish Onslaught”, in which he claimed that Jews owned more slaves than the entire white population.
At the time of its publication, Wellesley College and anti-Semitic organizations strongly criticized the book and its arguments.
Black Classic Books did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Coates’ son, Ta-Nehisi Coates, is a prominent journalist known for his books on race relations. His latest book, “The Message”, is a controversial essay collection partly about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
He came into limelight after a CBS interview in which he defended the book Co-anchor Tony Dokoupil accused him of extremism,
