David Bernstein, by profession an officer in non-Orthodox Jewish communal organizations, spent much of his life working for such well-known groups as the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Public Affairs Council. In those positions he was forced to encounter the ideological trends in broader society and to think about how those trends affected Jews in America and around the world.

In Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, Bernstein clearly identifies what is meant by ‘woke’ rather than merely using that word as an epithet of disdain or disgust and shows how and why woke ideology is destructive of liberal (with a small ‘l’) values and harmful to Jews generally and to the Jewish community as a whole. This book was written before the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel but is particularly relevant today because the woke ideology feeds into the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments that are popular in some segments of society. Bernstein’s insight, even before Ocober 7, was that the extreme Left is as great a threat to Jews as once was the extreme Right.

When Bernstein uses the term ‘liberal’ he means nineteenth century liberalism as opposed to late twentieth century social-welfare-state-liberalism. To him ‘liberal’ means a cluster of ideas that includes at least open and free debate on matters of public policy and public interest, equal opportunity, fair and free elections and the rule of law. His liberalism looks very much like mid-twentieth century conservatism.

‘Woke’ on the other hand, means a cluster of ideas that includes that society is infected with hidden structural systems of oppression (not merely individual attitudes or instances of bad behavior) and that only persons who, because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or other characteristics have experienced that oppression have the right to define it for the rest of society and prescribe a cure. Wokeness also includes the ideas that members of oppressed minorities have to be represented throughout society in every profession and at every level, in the same proportion as they exist in the population. So, if fourteen percent of Americans are African-Americans, for instance, fourteen percent of America’s policemen, engineers and nuclear scientists ought also to be African-Americans.

Because wokeness divides everyone into categories of ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ and holds that the oppressed have special insight into structures of oppression, woke ideology does not allow free and open debate on matters of race, gender or sexual preference or the structure of society. This is sometimes called ‘viewpoint epistemology,’ that a person can only be knowledgeable about some things from personal lived experience.

To the woke, the opinions of straight white men on many matters of public affairs are therefore less valuable than those of gay, black women no matter how poorly informed the opinion of the latter nor how well informed the opinion of the former. It is the experience that gives this form of ‘knowledge’ its worth, not command of the facts and reason. In this way and others, wokeness smothers discussion of important social and policy issues and interpersonal actions. That train of reasoning also includes the idea that anyone who is not woke or who does not go along with the dogma of wokeness is a racist or bigot.

Why is this ideology bad for Jews?

First, because it identifies people who are successful as oppressors and asserts that success is itself the result of oppression. The relative success of Jews in America is therefore a marker of misconduct.

Second, because race is at or near the top of considerations in determining where one stands in the hierarchy of woke ideology and the gurus of wokeness have simplistically determined that because most Jews are ‘white’ they are oppressors and can not be oppressed.

(Bernstein, the son of an Ashkenazi father and an immigrant Iraqi Jewish mother has some fun pointing out that 23 and Me says that he is 50.4 percent Southwest Asian but he cannot bring himself to check the box for ‘Asian’ on a census forms.)

Third, since Jews are over-represented in the professions and among the middle and upper middle class they are benefiting from the structures of oppression, not from merit or hard work or a culture of striving, and need to admit that fact and make room for others who have been oppressed.

And, always important to Bernstein, wokeness stifles discussion and debate because disagreement with wokeist positions often results in the woke retreating to their supposed special expertise which ‘white‘ Jews cannot have. The claims of special knowledge are too often followed by accusations of bias which can end in a well-intentioned person being called ‘racist,’ ‘homophobe’ or other modern epithet for the unwoke.

What particularly troubles Bernstein about woke ideology is that it has moved from the fringes of society into the mainstream. What was once an esoteric teaching in university sociology departments has become a mainstream product in schools all the way down to the grade school level. It stifles critical thinking since there are not multiple and complex causes for social, cultural and demographic phenomena but only the monocausal explanation of structural oppression. Moreover, woke ideology has even moved into some liberal Jewish institutions with the younger staff of non-Orthodox Jewish institutions indoctrinated by their schools or society and holding wokeist views.

Bernstein argues that wokeness not only strengthens the illiberal Left but also drives those who don’t accept the illiberal Left towards the illiberal Right. His antidote to woke ideology is to strengthen and move towards the political and ideological center, not towards any extreme. The center has always been good for most Americans and good for America’s Jews. One ought to add, however, that today the center keeps moving. As the Left moves farther left, so does the center. Political centrists and perhaps the political Right on the other hand, seem to be trying to hold on to old fashioned values, like the classical liberalism that Bernstein admires.

This thoughtful, considered and well-written book is worth the reader’s time and attention as it explains much of the ideological basis for what is wrong on the left in America.

Woke Antisemitism: How a Progressive Ideology Harms Jews, David L. Bernstein, Wicked Son Books-Post Hill Press, 2022