In her serious approach to other perspectives, Klein reminds me of Talia Lavin. Like Lavin, Klein is an actual leftist, not a liberal, and maybe that has something to do with it; maybe there's something in the Jewish intellectual tradition in this country that makes Jewish leftists writers more willing than others to say, "No, actually, people really believe this stuff that seems ridiculous to us, so we have to take it seriously."
I've read neither book, just your writeups, and I think there possibly is just a Jewish mindset to this, where you are always aware that you have a different perspective/culture from the dominant one and so you're already oriented to "no, yeah, those people believe those things", whereas I think people who start from being the dominant culture have a harder time. It's something I've run into in various places, including for instance in fannish discords where someone who was speculating about a fandom that takes place 700+ years into the future would naturally and of course have all the same cultural touchstones and importance and morality as that person's current life, and all I could think of was "you have never been any kind of minority, ever, if your life". It's something I encounter randomly all the time in fandom spaces, and in political spaces it's even more stark. For instance, in the West Wing, there was this constant problem where Sorkin would never take Republicans seriously for actually believing in what they say they believe, and I do think that is partly to blame for politicians who I might deragtorily describe as "having watched The West Wing too much"; as someone who has watched the West Wing too much, I feel qualified to make that judgement call ;)
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I've read neither book, just your writeups, and I think there possibly is just a Jewish mindset to this, where you are always aware that you have a different perspective/culture from the dominant one and so you're already oriented to "no, yeah, those people believe those things", whereas I think people who start from being the dominant culture have a harder time. It's something I've run into in various places, including for instance in fannish discords where someone who was speculating about a fandom that takes place 700+ years into the future would naturally and of course have all the same cultural touchstones and importance and morality as that person's current life, and all I could think of was "you have never been any kind of minority, ever, if your life". It's something I encounter randomly all the time in fandom spaces, and in political spaces it's even more stark. For instance, in the West Wing, there was this constant problem where Sorkin would never take Republicans seriously for actually believing in what they say they believe, and I do think that is partly to blame for politicians who I might deragtorily describe as "having watched The West Wing too much"; as someone who has watched the West Wing too much, I feel qualified to make that judgement call ;)