A passionate reinterpretation of antisemitism.
Moving beyond “blind spots and biases.”
Shabi’s potent book explores the nature of Jewish identity from the personal perspective of a British woman of Iraqi Jewish heritage. Her central argument is that race is a social construct, that the association of skin color with race is a cultural convention, and that “racism itself creates race—and not the other way around.” The book pivots around what Shabi, a journalist and author, calls a “category error.” She writes, “The history of Jewish people in the West, persecuted, killed and then, finally, absorbed into white majorities, is not only a story of antisemitism. It is itself a story about the fakery of whiteness. That we can’t agree on whether or not Jews are white does not tell us that Jewish people are hard to categorise. It tells us, again and again, that racial categories are specious.” Building on this idea, the author draws on her experience as someone who sometimes presents as white and sometimes is taken for a person of color. This is less a book about antisemitism itself than a book about how charges of antisemitism have become the weaponry of both right- and left-wing politics. The author spends much time reviewing the academic critique of “settler colonialism” as it applies to Israel. We should recognize, she writes, the origins of Zionism in the long-standing antisemitism of Europe while at the same time condemning “the injustices perpetrated by the state of Israel.” Then again, she writes, “antisemitism is not surfacing because of ever-growing and justified criticisms of Israel. It is coming up because [of] centuries-old patterns and structures of antisemitism.” While this is not a subtle book, it may help us understand how we have learned to talk the way we do about Jewish identity in the 21st century.
A passionate reinterpretation of antisemitism.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780861548378
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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