Thursday Jul 17, 2025
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
Join us for a talk between Norman Finkelstein, Nadine Strossen, and Cornel West in honor of O/R Book’s new edition of Norman’s I’LL BURN THAT BRIDGE WHEN I GET TO IT!
About the Book.
America’s most canceled intellectual exposes “woke” identity politics as an elite ruse and a betrayal of the radical left tradition.
Norman Finkelstein made his name debunking Israel’s apologists and exposing the cynical weaponization of Jewish history. In this work, Finkelstein trains that same forensic eye on identity politics writ large.
After methodically parsing the canonical identity-politics texts, Finkelstein concludes that they’re lacking in intellectual substance. Instead, the real purpose of identity politics is to derail a class-based movement bent on radical change.
Finkelstein shows how the cult surrounding Barack Obama used identity politics to burnish a status quo president’s radical sheen. When a truly progressive movement cohered around presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, these “woke” liberals mobilised identity politics to discredit him.
Along the way, Finkelstein recalls his own life in radical politics and his close encounters with cancel culture, which left him unemployed and unemployable. He situates his personal story within broader debates on academic freedom and poignantly concludes that, although occasionally bitter, he harbors no regrets about the choices he made.
“If I can’t laugh, I don’t want your revolution,” Finkelstein declares. Laced with his signature wit, readers of this book will get to laugh along with him.
This revised edition of Finkelstein’s instant classic features a new chapter dissecting the Supreme Court’s landmark decisions on affirmative action. In a bracingly original analysis, Finkelstein shows the stark limits of affirmative action discourse in the face of an economic system that is fundamentally rigged.
About the Author.
Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is the author of a number of books, among them Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom; Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza; Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End; What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage; “This Time We Went Too Far”: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History; and The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.
About the Moderators.
Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law School and was the national President of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. With more than 40 years of experience in First Amendment law, Strossen is a leading expert and frequent speaker/media commentator on constitutional law and civil liberties, who has testified before Congress on multiple occasions. She is a Senior Fellow at FIRE and serves on the advisory boards of the ACLU, Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and National Coalition Against Censorship. Strossen is the author of several books, including HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship (2018) and Free Speech: What Everyone Needs to Know (2023). Her many honorary degrees and awards include the American Bar Association’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award (2017), and in 2023, the National Coalition Against Censorship selected Strossen for its Lifetime Achievement Award for Free Speech.
Dr. Cornel West, affectionately known to many as Brother West, is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr. West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.