In 2016, California passed a law mandating that ethnic studies become part of the high-school curriculum, and set a task force to work on developing such a course of study. Three years later, the task force came back with a 600-page document, that helpfully defined ethnic studies as the examination of “people whose cultures, histories, and social positionalities are forever changing and evolving,” as well as “mixtures, hybridities, nepantlas, double consciousness, and reconfigured articulations.”

Founded in 2004 by IDF veterans, Breaking the Silence aims to expose the supposed wrongdoings of the Israeli military in the West Bank. In her recent Hebrew-language book Who Do You Think You Are?, Yuli Novak, who served as the group’s director until 2017, reflects on the internal turmoil she has experienced in the ensuing years and explains how she came to reject Zionism altogether. Einat Wilf finds the book cliché-ridden and solipsistic, while the author comes across as a “petulant child.” Moreover, writes Wilf, Novak’s argument rests on false premises: