Arthur Shapiro

Being familiar with McWhorter from the "New Yorker" and the "New York Times," I began this book with interest. But I found it tedious and repetitive NcWhorter is a professor of linguistics, but "Woke Racism" is not well-written and actually contains grammatical and syntactical errors (that should have been caught in routine editing). McWhorter seems to delight in ostentatiously using $5 words where 50c ones would do. And he loves to drop names of authors, academics, and even crime victims as if everyone would be familiar with them. I count myself as well-informed, but more than a few were unfamiliar to me. Infuriatingly, there is neither an index nor a proper bibliography--only suggestions for further reading dropped into the text, as if in conversation Most infuriating of all is McWhorter's oft-repeated claim that "Wokeism" is a religion. It has some of the attributes of a religion, but any competent logician will tell you that possessing SOME of the attributes of something cannot be used to claim it IS that thing. For such a claim, ALL of the necessary and sufficient conditions must be fulfilled. There may somewhere be a definition of religion that would allow McWhorter to make his claim, but he never invokes one and I do not know one! This could be considered an example of the logical fallacy known in the trade as "affirming the consequent," If you can make it to Chapter 4 the book becomes more tolerable. Its overall poor quality is all the more regrettable if one is largely sympathetic to his point of view, as I am One can at least take comfort in the fact that "White Fragility" is quite a bit worse.

Human beings are predisposed to creating rankings and hierarchies and distinguishing between "us" and "them." In this respect, Jews are no different from everyone else. Historically, German Jews had a reputation for looking down on other Jews as uncultured bumpkins--"litvaks," "galizianers," etc. When the State of Israel was created, a whole new set of intra-Judaic prejudices arose with it. As a refuge for the displaced and persecuted, Israel received waves of immigrants from Europe--some highly sophisticated, others from the underclass. But it also received waves of "Oriental" Jews, many of them displaced from largely-Muslim states as a reaction to Zionism. Their customs and languages were by and large utterly alien to the Europeans. It constituted a great irony that the Zionist longing for the ancient homeland in Palestine led to so profound a culture shock; the Zionists craved the Levant but found they did not know or understand it. This book is a professional study of the problem of culture shock and "ethnicity" in a newly-created but poorly-integrated Israeli polity.

The big problem with this book is that, except for a fairly superficial treatment of Buddhism, it acts as if the God of the Abrahamic religions is THE God. We know from, say, the work of Elaine Pagels that the inferred or "revealed" nature and properties of the Judeo-Christian God have a complex, tortuous history. But the concept of "god" or "gods" is much older and more complex than that (viz "God: A Human History" by Reza Aslan (2018).) The unique property of science is its claim to universal objectivity, transcending the historically transient contingencies of religion. It would be interesting and informative to examine the fundamental, underlying disagreements between science and any and all concepts of a god, some of which posit direct creation while others do not. Still a useful, if limited, exercise at the interface of philosophy and apologetics.