Both Juliana Pilon and Alexander Riley, Senior Fellows of The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), have a lengthy list of publications to their credit. Each list reflects a wide range of intellectual interests. Dr. Pilon, in a recent review for Law & Liberty, praises Marc Gerson for his empathy and eloquence in The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life (St. Martin’s 2021). Professor Riley, in a recent review for Chronicles, commends Abigail Shrier for her insight and courage in writing Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery 2020).
Dr. Pilon calls Gerson’s book “different from every other book about Passover, Judaism, and yes, the meaning of life.” Gerson, a businessman and philanthropist with a degree in law from Yale University, is married to a rabbi. His best-selling book focuses on the Haggadah, an ancient Jewish text that contains the story of the Exodus. Few books, Pilon observes, have done a better job [than Gerson’s] of explaining the meaning of Passover. He has a compelling “humanist vision” that makes him “thoroughly Jewish and quintessentially American.”
Professor Riley congratulates Shrier for exposing the faulty science, sleight-of-hand politics, and propaganda campaign behind the transgender movement, how it has not only endangered children but furthered our country’s cultural rot. “Gender theory scholars will tell us,” Riley point out, “that gender is inherently nothing more than performance, and that biological males and females are performing too. But then why is it that their performances are more authentic? Why are their behaviors not immediately interpreted as fictions by those who observe them, but rather as a reflection of something true?” The transgender movement, at core, Riley writes, “ask[s] whether individuals should be subject to any cultural authority, scientific, familial, or religious. Or, will individuals under the not-so-gentle pressure of ‘woke’ elites be the sole arbiters of their identities?”
Law & Liberty, an online website sponsored by Liberty Fund, publishes writings devoted to the “classical liberal tradition of law and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons.” Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture publishes on “the prevailing currents of both politics and a civil society in Western Civilization with a focus on defending the traditions and history of America and the West.”
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