Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, and Divine, professor emerita of Jewish Studies and Government at Smith College, have assembled leading scholars to consider the debate over October 7. They collectively establish how it unleashed a wave of antisemitism, ideological distortion, and moral collapse that spread across politics, media, academia, and global culture.
Sections of the book explore Hamas’s motivations, Islamist antisemitism, and Israel’s military strategy; offer an analysis of how international organizations and foreign powers amplified the conflict; trace how academic and activist movements justified Hamas’s violence under the guise of “decolonization”; and examine the war’s impact on Israel’s leadership and social cohesion.
The opening chapter rebuts accusations that Israel lacks a “postwar vision” for Gaza, showing instead that its goals—to dismantle Hamas’s military capacity, rescue hostages, and prevent future attacks—have more coherence than Western experiments in nation-building. The second essay scrutinizes how Hamas–generated casualty data, uncritically repeated by major media outlets and political leaders, including President Biden, shaped public opinion and policy to Israel’s detriment.
Franck Salameh’s contribution anchors the collection’s moral argument. He indicts the intellectual decay of the West, where “woke” ideology has replaced reason and history with emotion and grievance. He shows how antisemitism has been recast as moral virtue under the guise of “Palestinianism,” thereby transforming Jew-hatred into a marker of progressive authenticity.
Subsequent chapters dissect Hamas’s annihilationist ideology, the limits of Israeli deterrence, and the complex political and psychological toll of October 7. Others explore US–Israel relations, warning that generational shifts threaten the alliance’s traditional bipartisan support. The volume details how ideological conformity, foreign funding, and the merging of far left and Islamist currents have turned Western universities into engines of anti-Israel activism.
By the closing chapters, which trace the Soviet roots of today’s anti-Israel propaganda and examine Israel’s fraught internal politics, the editors have succeeded in making a serious indictment of the post–October 7 discourse.
The collection stands out for its intellectual rigor. It represents a critical academic contribution, providing the necessary tools to combat the profound moral inversion that has been infecting Western discourse since October 7. That said, some essays provoke more than persuade, such as those drawing tenuous links between Arab donations and campus radicalism or interpreting artistic symbols like the watermelon as cultural battlegrounds.
Mitchell Bard
Executive Director of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE), Chevy Chase, Maryland
