Masha Gessen, the Jewish Russian-American journalist, author, and queer dissident of the Kremlin, has resigned from the board of PEN America, stepping down after the organization announced their cancellation of a recent series of talks. They had served on the board for years before their resignation on May 16th.

PEN, the international organization which protects free creative expression for authors and journalists, was scheduled to host a series of talks through the PEN World Voices Festival: one panel of Russian writers in exile, hosted by Gessen, and another event showcasing Ukrainian writers-turned-soldiers. Two of the Ukrainian writers, Artem Chapeye and Artem Chekh, announced they would be boycotting the World Voices Festival in its entirety due to the Russian authors’ inclusion on a separate panel, citing ethical and legal concerns regarding their status as Ukrainian soldiers. The Russian panel hosted by Gessen was promptly canceled without explanation, citing “unforeseen circumstances.” Gessen stepped down in protest of the decision to cancel the panel.

The Ukrainian authors’ decision to remove themselves from the forum, PEN’s subsequent decision to cancel the Russian author’s panel, and Gessen’s subsequent departure from the PEN board are closely related. Conversations regarding the geopolitical implications of promoting Russian art and artists, even those who dissent from Putin’s rule, have taken on a new urgency since February 24th, 2022, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. PEN America’s decision to cancel the Russian panel is not an isolated incident. It is part of a larger debate over whether or not Russian artistic works should be produced and celebrated by Western audiences. It is additionally part of a perhaps even grander conversation, one that has persisted for centuries, about the relationship of the individual artist to their home nations’ policies. Gessen’s departure from PEN is about artist versus art institution, colonial power versus subject, and the paradoxical notion of uplifting some voices by silencing others.

When does the banning of an aggressor nation’s cultural exports cross the line from legitimate economic pressure to a repressive act? No one really seems to know. Since the earliest stages of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Russian artifacts began to take on a taboo in the West. Elif Batuman’s January New Yorker piece, “Rereading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War,” explored this conflict in depth. Batuman describes her initial reaction to the new taboo of Russian works: sympathetic and understanding of the urge by Ukrainians to reject Russian culture as a political and emotional act, but with a larger feeling that these bans and boycotts are not “objective.” They are the legitimate emotional reaction of a people caught in the throes of a brutal, bloody massacre of their nation at the hands of a colonial power, but they are not necessarily morally or even intellectually valid.

Batuman scraps this notion early in her article. Though the beauty and influence of the works of writers such as Dostoyevsky are important, many Russian artists perpetuated Russian imperialist dogma in their art. Dostoyevsky’s work A Writer’s Diary, for example, contains rants of how Orthodox Russia will unite the Slavic nations under Christ. Russian artists are not immune from the history of their nation. But when Ukrainian artists remove themselves from an event series where Russian dissidents will be speaking, it is the responsibility of an association dedicated to artistic freedom to maintain that both should be given a voice. Gessen left PEN, not because they disagreed with the Ukrainian writers’ decision, but because they saw a disconnect in the organization’s actions. In an interview given to New Yorker, Gessen explained, “To disinvite [the Russians] is not just impolite, but it’s also basically saying, ‘Look, we thought your expression was legitimate and desirable until other people said it wasn’t.’ That, I think, violates the principles of free expression.”

Perhaps we American Jews, many of us with Russian and Ukrainian heritage, can turn to the Torah for guidance—as we so often do. Numbers 11:24-27 describes a circumstance in which two men named Eldad and Medad are scolded by Joshua for prophesying in a way he disagreed with. Joshua called upon Moses, “My lord Moses, restrain them!” But Moses did not respond agreeably. To this, Moses replied, “Are you wrought up on my account? Would that all the ETERNAL’s people were prophets, that the ETERNAL put spirit upon them!” Rather than complying with Joshua’s plea to silence the prophets, Moses poses a revolutionary idea: by way of exercising their right to speak freely, Eldad and Medad literally channeled the Eternal. Eldad and Medad’s controversial speech was not scolded by Moses, but praised. This passage of the Torah conveys a key value that anyone who has grown up in an outspoken Jewish home may relate to: freedom of speech must be honored to the same level that dissent to such speech is respected. In a difficult political situation, the solution is never to silence. The Ukrainian writers have a right to remove themselves from a larger conversation in which they deem their own participation to be an ethical dilemma. PEN, however, has the responsibility of a global cultural organization to both honor that decision and hold the event series featuring Russian dissidents regardless.

Masha Gessen wrote in their 2020 book Surviving Autocracy that “when something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality.” In this era of Russia’s war in Ukraine, we have a collective responsibility to describe. We must describe the war, the horror of the Russian invasion, and the reality of the devastation of Ukraine and its people. We must also describe the complex experiences of engaging in Russian culture, consuming Russian art, and fleeing Russia as a dissident. We must describe this, not solely because of our Talmudic responsibility to speak freely, but because we will only have the opportunity to cultivate a shared reality of this war if we describe: passionately, argumentatively, and without fear.