Recently I’ve been holding a series of discussions with liberals and moderates on Jewish Institute for Liberal Values’ and The Speech Project’s Podcast, the SpeechCast, about the current challenges to freedom of expression. They’ve been fascinating, but some of the...

I’ve long been fascinated by the varied explanations of why woke ideas spread. Here are the ten that I find most compelling. There are three kinds of explanations among the ten: one looks at the contagiousness of the woke ideas themselves; a second looks at the...

The problem with "standpoint epistemology."   Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions. CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts...

Jewish organizations, like many other civic institutions, are embracing what’s sometimes referred to as critical social justice (CSJ), the idea that society is dominated by invisible systems of oppression. Given America’s legacy of racism, the Jewish community’s own...

My first encounter with Critical Race Theory (CRT) diversity training was in 1999. Yes, it’s been around that long. I doubt it was known as CRT training then but the underlying ideology was the same. I was a young non-profit executive participating in a leadership...

A few years into my American life, I took a class on western thought. The only philosopher on the syllabus familiar to me was Karl Marx, and he wasn’t why I’d signed up: I’d had enough of him in the USSR. Over the next two semesters, I read Adam Smith and Frederick...

“[I] f I were a Jewish child in a school using this curriculum,” reads a public comment from a clinical psychologist at UCLA about the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC), “would I feel called out, that I deserve to be shamed and isolated and that any...

A proposed, state-wide, mandatory Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum in California was open for public comment only until Thursday, January 21, 2021. The current draft of the curriculum celebrates figures who have promoted anti-Semitism (including leaders of the Third...