A timely and accessible political commentary that draws on Talmudic wisdom.
A Jewish American activist looks to his faith for ways to remedy America’s political divisions.
Daniels made national headlines during the 2016 and 2020 presidential election cycles with his distribution of tailor-made red and blue kippahs (also known as yarmulkes) for supporters of the Republican and Democratic candidates. Careful to reach out to all sides, including supporters of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the author sought to spread a message of peace and reconciliation; the inside of each kippah featured a nonpartisan prayer for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to “weed out hate.” They were part of a national movement that Daniels led, which he surveys in his previous book, Weed Out Hate: Plant a Rose (2020). The author is the grandson of the inventor of the Ross Root Feeder, a popular horticultural tool, and he uses the invention as an extended spiritual metaphor throughout both books. Just as his family’s business centered on nurturing rosebushes and trees “at the deepest roots,” so, too, does Daniels see his kippah-distribution movement as one that has spread nutrients of peace and cooperation. At its best, the book blends an account of the author’s spiritual vision with a campaign memoir that recounts his interactions with some of the nation’s leading politicians. Vice President Mike Pence, Daniels notes, posted a picture on Twitter of himself hugging the author, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, he says, insisted on calling him “Rabbi,” despite his insistence that the title didn’t apply to him.
The author also openly admits to the initial naïveté that infused his movement, noting that he’d long been “fascinated” by Trump as a fan of his NBC TV show The Apprentice. During Trump’s first run, Daniels presented the Republican candidate with 50 gold hats that featured the words “Donald Trump 2016” in Hebrew and English; Trump said “I love it” and asked that Daniels give them to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The author now describes his interactions with the Trump campaign as “dancing with the devil,” and he relates his appearances at Trump’s campaign rallies as reminiscent of his own visits to the Dachau concentration camp; he also compares one of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ speeches and “today’s right-wing ideologies.” In this book, he offers an alternative vision (“Making America Kosher Again”) that blends Kabbalah mysticism and the “deepest roots of the Torah” to offer a spiritual vision that turns Trump’s campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, “on its head” by encouraging civic prayer and collective intentions for “cultural unification.” Despite the book’s dire assessment of contemporary Republicans, the author is relentlessly positive in his belief in civic transformation. This belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity may be refreshing to readers tired of cynicism, but it may strike others as overly optimistic. Still, Daniels is effective at making his argument, and he approaches this brief book with an enthusiastic writing style. The engaging narrative is complemented by a wealth of full-color photographs of political figures, credited to various photographers. A timely and accessible political commentary that draws on Talmudic wisdom.Pub Date: July 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781977261502
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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