Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke is a wonderful little book. The kind more intellectuals need to write. Neiman’s prose is lively and refreshingly fearless. She does not rely on complicated sentences or passive voice to gloss controversy. She takes a stand and sticks to it. Nor does she suffer from the reverse-victimhood complex common to so many “anti-woke” writers. This is a book you can recommend to friends and family members, even those who disagree with her starting premise.

For Neiman, “wokeness” is not a project that can rightly trace its inspiration from the progressive political tradition. And while much has been made about the political liabilities of woke rhetoric, few critics of wokeness from the Left have offered a sustained argument for what defines the Left and why “staying woke” might be at odds with it.

Neiman’s argument, sustained over four big chapters, is that wokeness is not only alien to the principles of the Left, but antithetical to them. It’s an argument that has, expectedly, garnered her enemies — one reviewer called her book “a cringe-inducing screed.”