The big-picture question that animates this column and my podcast The Jewish Angle is about the relationship between the progressive ideology of the past 15 years (the one that now generally goes by the shorthand, “wokeness”), and the strange and unpleasant spot Jews are in these days, in Canada and beyond. I don’t see this as clear-cut, which is why I’m so interested in how others address the connection (or as some see it, the lack thereof).

In a recent article, Quillette founder Claire Lehmann makes the case that, per the piece’s subhed, “Wokeness has not retreated—it has simply shapeshifted.” Her Exhibit A is New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a politician who has combined redistributive promises with anticolonial—and antizionist—messaging. And who, incidentally, has the support of many New York Jews.

Lehmann—who is Australian—is concerned not specifically with the fate of New York City, but with that of Western capitalism. Nor is she writing about Jews, except incidentally, when she describes the way what she sees as shapeshifting wokeness has come to define a young, progressive take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

“Rooted in critical theory, this worldview organises reality into a binary of oppressors and the oppressed, assumes that social outcomes are driven by powerful structural forces, and assigns moral virtue to ‘dismantling’ those forces…. Within this framework, because Palestinians are cast as the ‘oppressed’ and Israelis as the ‘oppressors,’ even mass murder can be reinterpreted as morally defensible.”

Lehmann is concerned that there’s a neo-wokeness afoot that is more broadly appealing than Wokeness 1.0, that is harnessing class war (with its broad appeal) to culture war (with its niche, elite appeal, or, at least, niche and elite origins). She is concerned. Should Canadian Jews share her misgivings?

She does not use the term “omnicause,” but this is what Lehmann’s describing when she writes of a young activist left with a joint focus on “woke” and traditional-left causes: trans rights, environmentalism, tenants’ rights, anticapitalism, and freeing Palestine: “As Mamdani’s ascent reminds us, hyper-progressivism is a shapeshifting force: When one cause loses steam, another emerges to take its place. Beneath the surface lies not a static list of political positions, meant to be taken literally, but a moral grammar that divides the world into good and........

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