Furious blast at anti-Semitism and the liberals who tolerate it. Wisse (Yiddish Studies/McGill Univ.) casts her study as a love letter to a fictional ``B'' in order to overcome the ``humiliation'' and ``exhaustion'' she feels when writing about anti-Semitism—but this device does nothing to soften her rhetoric or to cloak her rage. Anti-Semitism, which Wisse calls ``the most durable ideology of the twentieth-century,'' seems to be on the rise in America (see William Buckley's In Search of Anti-Semitism—reviewed above) and the world. Who's to blame? Among the most culpable, says Wisse, are non-Jewish liberals who ``sacrifice Jews to liberal pieties.'' Because of their belief in rationality and progress, Wisse argues, these liberals find anti-Semitism ``unthinkable'' and thus fail to see it when it appears in modern form, such as in opposition to the state of Israel (i.e., the ``demonization'' of Israel in the liberal media). Liberal Jews are guilty as well, for playing ostrich or, even worse, for self-hatred that leads to abetting the enemy: Noam Chomsky's anti-Israel stance is cited as ``a sublimating attempt to get beyond the condition of Jewish specificity once and for all.'' Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, and Irving Kristol win Wisse's approval for giving anti-Semites no ground, while Amos Oz is the most prominent Jewish writer to suffer her wrath. But Wisse saves her strongest venom for the Arabs, whom she accuses of ``holding Jews responsible for the crimes they intended to commit against them.'' She scores points when noting Arab mistreatment of Palestinian refugees and PLO diplomatic duplicity, yet too often her own crude anti-Arab bias clouds her arguments (for instance, in stereotyping Arabs as ``an imperial people contemptuous of weakness''). Well-argued agitprop but tainted by the very sort of bigotry that Wisse decries. Nonetheless, an important book, likely to generate intense discussion.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-935434-X
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
23
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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