Wolf’s public excommunication for questioning Zionism may explain her later radicalization

Evidence

All of this went very badly for Wolf. “Naomi Wolf’s Allegations of an Israeli Genocide Fuel Anti-Semitism” was a typical headline in the Israeli press. In the United States, one prominent rabbi in particular, Shmuley Boteach, seemed to make it his mission to take her down. Wolf told The Guardian she lost her university position over the issue. “I was [teaching] at Barnard, and the trustees said they were not comfortable with my politics being the face of the university,” she said. “All I ever wanted was to teach and do this kind of research.” She also received “some serious threats online”—enough that she consulted a private security company, and that’s where she met her husband, a former U.S. special forces officer who founded Striker Pierce Investigations. … Having run afoul of many of the same guardians of official Jewry over the past three decades, I have no doubt that these events were both frightening and painful for Wolf. These were her friends, family members, and colleagues turning on her. Zionism, moreover, had always been a plank in her political home. Now that plank was giving way. Which raises a possible question: Did that experience—followed by the public excommunications—contribute to how unmoored she became in subsequent years? Does losing her political home partially explain how far she would stray to find a new home? — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 998

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Klein’s central method: the doubling device turns Wolf’s trajectory into a mirror for Klein’s own political homelessness, echoing the thesis that the Mirror World metabolizes the left’s abandoned grievances.