Waking up
Two new books reflect on the illiberal movement from woke
BY PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY
I n a 2022 National Review essay, Why I Keep Getting Mistaken for a Conserv- ative , my friend and Feminine Chaos pod- cast co-host Kat Rosenfield, an American novelist and cultural critic, recounts how, despite having always been a “free-speech and bleeding-heart” liberal, “conservatives so often mistake me for one of their own.” This happens, she writes, “not because I argue for right-wing policies or from a right-wing perspective, but because pro- gressives are often extremely, publicly mad at me for refusing to parrot the latest cat- echism and for criticizing the progressive dogmas that either violate my principles or make no sense.” This puts her in good company, she goes on to write: “There’s a loose but growing coalition of lefties out there, artists and writers and academics and professionals, who’ve drawn sympa- thetic attention from conservatives after being publicly shamed out of the progres- sive clubhouse (that is, by the type of pro- gressive who thinks there is a clubhouse, which is of course part of the problem).” If North American Jews pull our weight and then some in the coalition Rosenfield describes, this is more than incidental. Right-wingers tend not to be the biggest champions of religious or ethnic minor- ities. Jewish values often seem a better fit with the left, making many Jews see
In media circles, the L.A.-based Bowles is a big deal. A former New York Times reporter, she’s now at The Free Press , a media company founded by her wife, fellow former Times employee Bari Weiss, as a counterpoint to what they view as an overly reticent mainstream. Bowles, for her part, made her name with a 2018 Times profile of Jordan Peterson. Bowles and Weiss are both, in a non-derogatory sense, machers . Katherine Brodsky, by contrast is no macher . She is a Canadian freelance writ- er, her book published by a small press. In her newsletter “about” section, she presents herself as a little bit dangerous: “It’s only fair to warn you: Here lives a certain femme fatale trapped in the mind of a writer with an overactive imagination.” It is possible I am not the target audience for this mode of self-presentation. But No Apologies isn’t much about Brodsky. She has a background as a celebrity interviewer and is skilled at getting other people, famous and otherwise, to share their own stories. Her book is not the event that Bowles’s is, but it covers similar ground. Both authors come across as driven not merely by some abstract de- fense of free expression but by journalistic curiosity. And you do, at a minimum, want an author who seems curious.
the left as their natural political home. The American essayist Milton Himmelfarb famously said that we “earn like Episco- palians and vote like Puerto Ricans.” In the postwar period, some American Jews broke with their left-liberal origins in favour of a new brand of conservatism, one born of that particular political journey and therefore distinct from the thing usually called conservatism. This is roughly what neoconservative thinker (and Himmel- farb’s brother-in-law) Irving Kristol was getting at when he said that neoconserva- tives were liberals “mugged by reality.” Today’s dissident-liberal Jewish intellec- tuals are more likely to call themselves (ourselves) heterodox than neoconserv- ative, or to continue calling ourselves liberals, or to eschew labels entirely. Two new Jewish-authored books explore disillu- sionment with the left from the perspec- tive of thinkers who have partially fallen out with it: Nellie Bowles’s Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History , and Katherine Brodsky’s more clunkily titled No Apologies: How to find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Out- rage—Lessons for the Silenced Majority. Both books mix personal accounts of the authors’ own trajectories with broader reporting on what they (and, sometimes, I) see as progressive excesses.
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