I’ve been a liberal all my life: I went to my first protest march by myself when I was 13 and cast my first vote for George McGovern. I’ve also been an academic most of my life, studying and teaching at multiple colleges and universities. Over the last decade I’ve watched the animating principles of both academia and liberalism – the spirit of free inquiry and the willingness to debate ideas – descend into an authoritarian conformism that brooks no dissent. I hope that these books can persuade people to fight against these trends before it’s too late: “Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
I wrote
Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law
This book persuaded me that the “woke” movement (which McWhorter calls “Third Wave antiracism”) is not a political movement but a religion in the fullest sense of the term.
It has articles of faith and a common language, and it goes after heretics with the vengeance of the Spanish Inquisition. Since it’s a religion we can’t defeat it with arguments or reason. It’s also dangerous; as McWhorter writes: “Make no mistake: these people are coming after your kids.”
But he isn’t fatalistic or pessimistic. He gives specific, sensible suggestions for defeating the new religion andfor better ways of moving forward on racial equality. Two things make this book unique: McWhorter’s writing is a joy to read, and because he’s Black and politically liberal, he can’t be easily dismissed.
People of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race gone so crazy?
Bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting black communities and weakening the social fabric.
We're told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is 'appropriation.' We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we'll be seen as unwoke,…
If McWhorter focuses on how woke ideology harms Blacks, Bernstein shows how it harms Jews and inevitably fosters antisemitism.
Like McWhorter, Bernstein provides very specific examples of wokeness in action, both on and off campus. Jews were asked to leave an LGBT Pride event because their flag – a Pride flag with a Star of David on it – “made people feel unsafe”; a Jewish organization that issued a public statement condemning George Floyd’s murder was lambasted because the statement had not been drafted by a person of color; and more.
Bernstein and I are both liberal Jews, but we both fear the consequences of an ideology that divides the world into the non-privileged oppressed and the privileged oppressors – Jews, by virtue of their current success, are automatically considered privileged oppressors despite the long worldwide history of antisemitism.
Woke Antisemitism is a firsthand account from a top Jewish leader about how woke ideology shuts down discourse, corrupts Jewish values, and spawns a virulent new strain of antisemitism.
“David Bernstein has written an important book which deserves to be read widely and be thoroughly discussed in our community. This book is a powerful defense of liberal values….Bernstein’s treatment is nuanced and respectful, showing understanding for the goals even as he critiques the methods of woke culture and shows us cases where it leads to antisemitism.”
–Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, American scholar, author and rabbi
If you want to know how we got here – where college students and young adults consider speech and ideas they dislike to be “violence,” and use tools that include everything from getting people fired to actual violence to defeat those they disagree with – this is the book for you.
Things have only gotten worse since the book’s publication in 2018, but the authors convincingly show how overlapping trends in parenting, politics, and education have produced a generation that is fearful, quick to take offense, and unable to think critically and independently. That in turn created a perfect environment for wokeness to thrive.
Like both McWhorter and Bernstein, the authors don’t stop at description and criticism: they provide solutions, ways to “help parents and teachers to raise wiser, stronger, more independent children,” as well as suggestions for improving universities.
New York Times Bestseller * Finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction * A New York Times Notable Book * Bloomberg Best Book of 2018
"Their distinctive contribution to the higher-education debate is to meet safetyism on its own, psychological turf . . . Lukianoff and Haidt tell us that safetyism undermines the freedom of inquiry and speech that are indispensable to universities." -Jonathan Marks, Commentary
"The remedies the book outlines should be considered on college campuses, among parents of current and future students, and by anyone longing for a more sane society." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
This book is not actually about wokeness. Instead, it helps us see the dangers inherent in that ideology.
Perilous Times is a partial history of the American government’s censorship of speech and thought from the 1790s to the early 2000s. Stone is a fabulous storyteller. Even though I’ve studied – and taught – constitutional law and constitutional history for decades, some of what he recounts was new to me, and all of it was newly fascinating in its detail and its focus on people as well as events.
In a way, this is a “be careful what you wish for” warning to both the woke and the unwoke: once it becomes widely accepted that it’s OK to restrict harmful speech, anyone who disagrees with whatever the majority or the government happens to favor is at risk.
Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times incisively investigates how the First Amendment and other civil liberties have been compromised in America during wartime. Stone delineates the consistent suppression of free speech in six historical periods from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Vietnam War, and ends with a coda that examines the state of civil liberties in the Bush era. Full of fresh legal and historical insight, Perilous Times magisterially presents a dramatic cast of characters who influenced the course of history over a two-hundred-year period: from the presidents-Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Nixon-to the Supreme Court justices-Taney, Holmes, Brandeis, Black,…
Like Stone’s book, this is a book about history, not wokeness. It’s not an easy read, but it’s worth the effort.
It recounts the triumph of scientific reasoning and liberal tolerance over several decades in the mid-twentieth century. That triumph was largely brought about by the “secularization” of American culture, spearheaded by Jewish intellectuals.
I read it long before wokeness was a thing – it was published in 1996 – and found it interesting but not particularly relevant to anything I was thinking about. But when wokeness came along, it suddenly hit me that this new religion was taking us backwards, back to the beginning of Hollinger’s story.
If that trend continues, we are in danger of losing the gains that science and tolerance have produced.
This remarkable group of essays described the "culture wars" that consolidated a new, secular ethos in mid-twentieth-century American academia and generated the fresh energies needed for a wide range of scientific and cultural enter-prises. Focusing on the decades from the 1930s through the 1960s, David Hollinger discusses the scientists, social scientists, philosophers, and historians who fought the Christian biases that had kept Jews from fully participating in American intellectual life. Today social critics take for granted the comparatively open outlook developed by these men (and men they were, mostly), and charge that their cosmopolitanism was not sufficiently multicultural. Yet Hollinger…
In the 1990s, critical race theory (CRT) was a fringe idea trendy in elite law schools. Over the decades, it grew and escaped the ivory tower. CRT and the related movements it has spawned – anti-racism, diversity-equity-and-inclusion (DEI), and the “woke” culture – are now pervasive in American society. Beyond All Reasonwas the first book to describe in detail the animating principles of CRT and warn readers of its dangerous implications and consequences. The twenty-first-century movements that CRT begat are animated by the same principles, and create the same dangers. Anyone worried about the “culture wars,” the divisiveness of identity politics, or the problems besetting universities (and now spreading to corporate America) must read this book.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
