In the opening paragraphs of the Introduction to Woke Antisemitism: How Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, David Bernstein, the founder and CEO of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values (JILV), recalls a time when the political liberals he lived and worked with were not ideological. “They just thought it was everyone’s responsibility to help the less fortunate, no matter what the cause of the disparity.”
After decades of service in the upper echelons of important Jewish organizations, ultimately, becoming President and CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Bernstein came to understand that American Jews were succumbing to an ideology that hurt Jews and other Americans, and he wanted to change this. He left the JCPA to start JILV.
The problem, he argues, boils down to this:
“Dogma begets ever more extreme dogma. The more we defer to an irrational set of beliefs, the more extreme and more dangerous those beliefs become over time…. My book shows how the woke absurdities have piled on each other from the ideology’s earliest form on campus to where we find ourselves today. I demonstrate that we are here, cowering in fear of being canceled for saying the wrong thing, because we acquiesced – often in the name of empathy – to woke ideological demands. And if we remain where we are today, I argue, we will enable more and more hostility toward Jews, and undermine our democratic system.”
Bernstein poignantly argues that the woke way goes against thousands of years of Jewish culture and tradition in which ideas are freely debated using critical thinking. He reminds us that, “Debate is so central to Jewish life that it is enshrined in the Mishna, the foundational texts of the Jewish oral tradition, in the concept of Makhloket l’shem shamayim—‘arguments for the sake of Heaven.’” As Bernstein describes it, and we are witnessing, “For woke ideologues, all debate over social issues is over and everyone should fall in line with the prescribed dogma.”
Given rising levels of antisemitism in the U.S. on both the political right and left—with much of the left’s hostility driven by a global campaign to criminalize and ultimately eliminate Israel—Woke Antisemitism, to me, is an important book that should be widely read and discussed by Jews and our allies. But, most especially, by Jews. For, in offering an honest look at how woke ideology sometimes compromised his ability to be true to himself and, at times, even to fulfill the missions of organizations he worked for, Bernstein opens the door for the whole of the Jewish community to do the same: to understand how embracing this ideology, rather than challenging it, has made space for antisemitism to re-emerge on the right and to take hold on the left—a situation once naively deemed unimaginable by some.
What Bernstein describes in Woke Antisemitism is an alarming state of affairs within long-established organizations that once served the Jewish community well but now seem disoriented, struggling to fulfill their missions. The Jewish community, and the U.S. as a whole, is being challenged as never before. Woke Antisemitism proposes useful strategies to restart productive discourse, including rebuilding a Jewish and American political center.
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Top reviews from other countries
Peter White
I wish I could've enjoyed this book more than I actually did.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 10, 2023