A thoughtful, informative, and disturbing discussion about anti-Zionist propaganda with depressing currency.
A political book offers a comprehensive analysis of the virulent anti-Zionist conspiracy theories infecting today’s college campuses.
The two fringes of America’s political spectrum, the far right and the far left, have little in common. But, Shay writes, their agendas converge in their prolific trafficking in anti-Zionist propaganda. He focuses his “case study” on two professors at his beloved alma mater, Northwestern University, although he makes clear the problem exists across America’s campuses. Arthur Butz, an electrical engineering professor who has been a Holocaust denier for decades, claims that “Zionists conspired to create the ‘hoax’ that six million Jews died in the Holocaust to force the Allies to grant them Palestine.” In the 1970s, after receiving tenure at Northwestern, Butz published his vitriolic screed The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, filled with antisemitic tropes. Northwestern denounced the book, but Butz remains a faculty member today. Steven Thrasher, a more recent hire, hails from a journalism background. While not a Holocaust denier, he is a vociferous denouncer of Israel’s legitimacy. “I am so proud…of my colleagues,” Thrasher asserted during his 2019 New York University Doctoral Convocation, “for supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the apartheid state government in Israel.” Shay begins his treatise by explaining the difference between conspiracy and conspiracy theory. The former describes a collection of verified facts and/or actions; the latter shows willful disregard for legitimate evidence. In his meticulously footnoted volume, the author argues that anti-Zionist conspiracy theories are just old-fashioned antisemitism with contemporary monikers. He supports his argument with well-researched Jewish history through three millennia, pointing out that contrary to the claim that Zionists are imperial colonialists, Jews have always lived in Israel/Palestine. Whether as a majority or a remnant after forced diasporas, they have populated the land that is their enduring home. The book is sometimes a challenging slog. There is repetition, and it delivers a variety of digressions. But even the sections that feel ponderous contain enlightening historical gems. In this time of rampant conspiracy theories of all stripes, Shay issues an urgent call for a return to honorable, truth-seeking discourse, especially at the pinnacles of learning.
A thoughtful, informative, and disturbing discussion about anti-Zionist propaganda with depressing currency.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63758-092-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wicked Son
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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