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 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 top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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