The New York Times also faced criticism for publishing the Color Purple author’s recommendation without qualification 
 
 The New York Times Book Review and Alice Walker have come under criticism for comments the celebrated writer made in an interview with the publication in which she recommended a work by someone accused of antisemitism. 
 
 How David Icke helped unite Labour's factions against antisemitism | Rachel Shabi Read more 
 
 Asked what books were currently on her nightstand, Walker, the author of The Color Purple, mentioned among others And the Truth Shall Set You Free, by the controversial British figure David Icke. Icke, an author and public speaker in his own right, has long propounded a series of conspiracy theories in his work that many see as antisemitic. 
 
 “The book is an unhinged antisemitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain’s most notorious antisemites,�? wrote Tablet magazine’s Yair Rosenberg, among the most strident critics of Walker’s comment. Rosenberg also faulted the Times for failing to react to or qualify the contents of the book to its readers. 
 
 Icke has long claimed that a shadowy cabal controls the world, a familiar antisemitic trope. 
 
 Dave Weigel (@daveweigel) Uh, have we talked about Alice Walker keeping a David "shapeshifting Lizard People control the universe" Icke book on her nightstand? https://t.co/5HMBOcggeb pic.twitter.com/4pojRibVeb 
 
 “And like many conspiracy theorists, Icke claims that this secret conspiracy happens to be Jewish,�? Rosenberg added. 
 
 Ideas in the book in question and much of his other work revolve around concepts expressed in the fraudulent antisemitic propaganda text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 
 
 This isn’t the first time Walker has expressed her affinity for Icke’s work or been accused herself of antisemitism. In 2013 Walker praised another Icke book in an interview for the British radio show Desert Island Discs. 
 
 Danny Gold (@DGisSERIOUS) Apparently this isn't the first time Alice Walker has publicly exposed her unhinged anti-Semitism? pic.twitter.com/vfMGXMwHw3 
 
 A poem of hers from last year called It Is Our (Frightful) Duty has also been derided as antisemitic as well. 
 
 “By the Book is an interview and portrait of a public person through the lens of books; it is not a list of recommendations from our editors,�? a New York Times spokesperson has said following the backlash. 
 
 Rebecca Pierce🕸 (@aptly_engineerd) This Alice Walker thing is really fucking sad and it makes me angry that she can’t see that the anti-Jewish conspiracies she uplifted and adopted are part of the same white supremacist power structure she so deftly fought through her written work in the past 
 
 “The subject’s answers are a reflection on that person’s personal tastes, opinions and judgments. As with any interview, the subject’s answers do not imply an endorsement by Times editors. Moreover, our editors do not offer background or weigh in on the books named in the By the Book column, whether the subject issues a positive or negative judgment on those books. Many people recommend books Times editors dislike, disdain or even abhor in the column.�? ||||| Over the weekend, the New York Times Book Review published a full-length interview with Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple. The very first question: “What books are on your nightstand?” Walker replied with four, the second of which was: 
 
 “And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke. In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true. 
 
 This passed without comment from the New York Times interviewer, and the publication passed it on to readers without qualification. This is rather remarkable because the book is an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain’s most notorious anti-Semites. 
 
 A former soccer player turned professional hate peddler, Icke is one of the most influential conspiracy theorists in Europe, and certainly in Britain. Today, he has over 777,000 followers on Facebook, and speaks to audiences around the world. Like many conspiracy theorists, Icke claims that a secret conspiracy controls the world. And like many conspiracy theorists, Icke claims that this secret conspiracy happens to be Jewish. In And the Truth Shall Set You Free, the word “Jewish” appears 241 times, and the name “Rothschild” is mentioned 374 times. These references are not compliments. Indeed, the book was so obviously anti-Semitic that Icke’s publisher refused to publish it, and he had to print it himself. 
 
 In the book and elsewhere, Icke draws liberally upon the infamous anti-Semitic pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a Russian forgery about an alleged global Jewish cabal that is widely considered one of the most influential anti-Semitic works in history. Magnanimously, Icke calls the hate tract by a different name. As he writes in the book promoted by Alice Walker: 
 
 In the very late 1800s, a controversial document came to light called the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion. I call them the Illuminati Protocols and I quote many extracts from them in The Robots’ Rebellion. Some say they were a forgery made public only to discredit Jews, and I use the term ‘Illuminati Protocols’ to get away from the Jewish emphasis. If they were a forgery, something that is quite possible, what were they a forgery of, and by whom? The authors of the best-selling book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, conclude that the original Protocols were indeed authentic. 
 
 Realizing that this may not convince readers of his good intentions, Icke attempts to head off charges of anti-Semitism by casting himself as a moderate in the reasonable debate over whether a Jewish conspiracy does in fact control the world: 
 
 I believe that researchers over the years who have blamed the entire conspiracy on the Jewish people as a whole are seriously misguided; similarly, for Jewish organisations to deny that any Jewish person is working for the New World Order conspiracy is equally naive and allowing dogma or worse to blind them to reality. 
 
 So, is Icke anti-Semitic? Well, here are some other things that he says in the book: 
 
 • The Talmud is “among the most appallingly racist documents on the planet.” 
 
 • B’nai Brith, the world’s oldest Jewish service organization, was behind the slave trade (an anti-Semitic canard popularized by Louis Farrakhan) and controls the Ku Klux Klan: “B’nai B’rith means ‘Sons of the Alliance’ (Ed: Actually, ‘Children of the Covenant’) and was established in 1843. Many of its speakers openly supported slavery during the American Civil War and it covertly supports and controls the Ku Klux Klan.” 
 
 • Racist far-right groups are actually Jewish fronts. “In Britain,” he writes, “I am told by an extremely reliable source very close to the intelligence organisations that the ‘far Right’ group, Combat 18, is a front for the sinister Anti-Defamation League, the United States and of the ‘Israeli’/Rothschild secret service, Mossad. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been operating in Britain and Europe since at least 1991 and its role is to brand as anti-Semitic anyone who is getting close to the truth of what is going on. What better way to discredit an investigator than to have a ‘far Right’ group like Combat 18 to praise them?” (The “18” in “Combat 18” refers to the first and eighth letters of the alphabet: A and H, for Adolf Hitler.) 
 
 • Jews are behind anti-Semitic attacks: “If you really want to discredit someone, you arrange for anti-Jewish or anti-whatever events such as the smashing of graves, assaults on people, even a terrorist bomb in the extreme. You then point the finger at your target person or group. You say they are either directly responsible or ‘incited’ the actions by what they are writing and saying.” 
 
 • Quotes and seconds the heinous assertion of Gary Allen—the John Birch Society spokesman and former George Wallace speechwriter—that Jews bankrolled their own extermination in the Holocaust: 
 
 The Jewish members of the conspiracy have used an organisation called The Anti-Defamation League as an instrument to try to convince everyone that any mention of the Rothschilds and their allies is an attack on all Jews. In this way they have stifled almost all honest scholarship on international bankers and made the subject taboo within universities. Any individual or book exploring this subject is immediately attacked by hundreds of ADL communities all over the country. The ADL has never let the truth or logic interfere with its highly professional smear jobs … Actually, nobody has a right to be more angry at the Rothschild clique than their fellow Jews. The Warburgs, part of the Rothschild empire, helped finance Adolf Hitler. 
 
 • Equates the anti-Semitic Nazi media of the Third Reich with a company that closed down a publication after it printed Holocaust denial: “What is the difference between the controlled anti-Jewish media under Hitler and the way the Japanese magazine, Marco Polo, was closed down by its parent company in 1995 because of a campaign by the global Jewish hierarchy to stop its advertising revenue after it published an article questioning some of the official stories of the Nazi concentration camps?” 
 
 • Calls on schools to teach the controversy about whether the Holocaust really happened: “Why do we play a part in suppressing alternative information to the official line of the Second World War? How is it right that while this fierce suppression goes on, free copies of the Spielberg film, Schindler’s List, are given to schools to indoctrinate children with the unchallenged version of events? And why do we, who say we oppose tyranny and demand freedom of speech, allow people to go to prison and be vilified, and magazines to be closed down on the spot, for suggesting another version of history?” 
 
 (Icke never does explain how Jews could have funded the Holocaust if the Holocaust didn’t actually happen.) 
 
 As can be seen from these extracts, and the chapter titles of the work (“Master Races,” “The Hidden Hand”), anti-Semitism is not incidental to Icke’s book, it is essential. It is impossible to miss it. (And we have not even touched on Icke’s climate change denial, 9/11 trutherism, and anti-vaccination misinformation.) 
 
 This is the book that Alice Walker recommended to New York Times readers. 
 
 That a celebrated cultural figure like Walker would promote such a self-evidently unhinged bigot might seem surprising at first glance. But this is only because the cultural establishment has spent years studiously looking away from Walker’s praise of Icke and his work, and her repeated expressions of anti-Semitism. 
 
 Back in June 2013, Walker wrote an effusive blog post showering accolades on Icke and his book Human Race Get off Your Knees. “It’s an amazing book, HUMAN RACE GET OFF YOUR KNEES,” she enthused, “and reading it was the ultimate reading adventure. I felt it was the first time I was able to observe, and mostly imagine and comprehend, the root of the incredible evil that has engulfed our planet.” 
 
 In May 2013, Walker told the BBC’s Desert Island Discs that if she could have only one book, it would be Icke’s Human Race. 
 
 In December 2013, Walker offered end-of-year thanks to an array of “beloved humans who’ve stuck their necks out for the collective.” One of them was David Icke, whose Human Race Get off Your Knees book also got its own entry. 
 
 In July 2015, Walker shared an interview between David Icke and Alex Jones, his American analogue. The account that posted the video has since been banned from YouTube. 
 
 In September 2016, Walker promoted a lecture of Icke’s to her readers, writing, “I decided to find, among Icke’s numerous videos, one lecture that might offer an introduction that wouldn’t be too scary for folks leery of being nudged in a direction of inquiry that might upset, destroy possibly, their worldview. I think this one might fit the bill.” YouTube has since taken down that lecture. 
 
 In November 2017, Walker posted an explicitly anti-Semitic “poem” on her blog titled, “It Is Our (Frightful) Duty to Study the Talmud.” The composition blames all the world’s ills, from Israel to America, on the ancient Aramaic compendium of Jewish law and lore, and checks nearly every anti-Semitic box, from attacking Jews as Christ-killers to claiming that Jews view gentiles as “sub-human.” A representative excerpt: 
 
 For the study of Israel, of Gaza, of Palestine, 
 
 Of the bombed out cities of the Middle East, 
 
 Of the creeping Palestination 
 
 Of our police, streets, and prisons 
 
 In America, 
 
 Of war in general, 
 
 It is our duty, I believe, to study The Talmud. 
 
 It is within this book that, 
 
 I believe, we will find answers 
 
 To some of the questions 
 
 That most perplex us. Where to start? You will find some information, 
 
 Slanted, unfortunately, 
 
 By Googling. For a more in depth study 
 
 I recommend starting with YouTube. Simply follow the trail of “The 
 
 Talmud” as its poison belatedly winds its way 
 
 Into our collective consciousness. Some of what you find will sound 
 
 Too crazy to be true. Unfortunately those bits are likely 
 
 To be true. Some of the more evasive studies 
 
 Will exhibit unbelievable attempts 
 
 At sugar coating extremely disagreeable pills. 
 
 But hang in there, checking 
 
 And double checking, listening to everybody, 
 
 Even the teachers with the twisted pasts 
 
 That scare you the most, 
 
 And the taped rants of outraged citizens that sound 
 
 Like madcap characters on Car Talk 
 
 Except they are not laughing 
 
 But are righteously outraged. Study hard, with an open 
 
 If deeply offended mind, 
 
 Until you can sift the false 
 
 From the true. Is Jesus boiling eternally in hot excrement, 
 
 For his “crime” of throwing the bankers 
 
 Out of the Temple? For loving, standing with, 
 
 And defending 
 
 The poor? Was his mother, Mary, 
 
 A whore? Are Goyim (us) meant to be slaves of Jews, and not only 
 
 That, but to enjoy it? 
 
 Are three year old (and a day) girls eligible for marriage and intercourse? 
 
 Are young boys fair game for rape? 
 
 Must even the best of the Goyim (us, again) be killed? 
 
 Pause a moment and think what this could mean 
 
 Or already has meant 
 
 In our own lifetime. 
 
 Anti-Semitic slanders of the Talmud’s contents are almost as old as the Talmud itself, and are one reason why Albert Einstein advocated that it be translated into English, “in order to cut the ground from under certain malevolent attacks, of anti-Semitic origin, which borrow countenance from the obscurity and inaccessibility of certain passages in the Talmud.” Clearly, Einstein did not anticipate the likes of YouTube-educated Talmud scholars like Alice Walker. 
 
 And yet, despite all of this, Walker has never been held accountable by elite cultural critics for repeatedly promoting Icke and anti-Semitism. In fact, this is not even the first time the New York Times helped give her a coveted and uncritical platform: in 2015, New York Times theater reporter Michael Paulson interviewed Walker at the New School to mark the premiere of The Color Purple musical revival on Broadway. He did not ask her about anti-Semitism, despite collecting questions in advance on Twitter, several of which raised the issue, likely because it would have been too uncomfortable. 
 
 Normally, this is where I’d say that it was good that the Times published Walker’s Icke recommendation because it lets us know who she is. But we have known who she is for many years. It is rather the Times and other cultural elites who have opted to ignore this inconvenient fact. Thus, the only thing that is accomplished by uncritically disseminating Walker’s bigoted book bon mots is ensuring that the racism is disseminated to more people. 
 
 Why has Walker escaped accountability for so long? Perhaps it is due to her Israel politics, which have been used to confuse the issue. Walker is a prominent supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, famously forbidding The Color Purple from being translated into the language of Hebrew. Because Walker—like Icke—is a strident critic of Israel, her defenders—like Icke’s—have dismissed allegations of anti-Semitism by claiming they are merely an attempt to quash her criticism of the Jewish state. 
 
 But it should not surprise anyone that the world’s only Jewish state, home to half its Jews, would attract the attention of anti-Semites, who would use the legitimate debate over its conduct to smuggle in their anti-Jewish bile. Anti-Zionism may not be anti-Semitism, but plenty of self-described anti-Zionists are anti-Semites. A progressive left that is serious about anti-Semitism will call it out not only when it comes from a white supremacist and is presented as “race realism,” but when it comes from their own camp and is presented in the righteous guise of “anti-Zionism.” 
 
 Not publishing anti-Semitic book recommendations unchallenged in the New York Times would be a good place to start. 
 
 Yair Rosenberg is a senior writer at Tablet. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. ||||| Viet Thanh Nguyen, Arundhati Roy, Yaa Gyasi, Aida Edemariam, Joseph O’Connor, Helene Cooper, Chris Hedges and Elizabeth Gilbert are a few I think of! 
 
 What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? 
 
 That though captured while in Africa, Africans became slaves only during the long crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, when they were treated so horrifically that those who could manage it jumped into the sea. They had no place in their psyches to fathom their abuse: Subjected to every kind of depravity and horror, during the passage and after, they arrived to be forced onto platforms and bid on, a process that could drag on and on, as plantation owners rejected those for whom they had no use. Africans were “broken in” physically, and broken down spiritually, to such an extent they became what they had not been in their homelands or halfway through the voyage: slaves. This treatment, deliberately calibrated to destroy their inner sovereignty, was called “seasoning.” In Daniel Black’s extraordinary book “The Coming,” we have an unprecedented opportunity to be with ancestors who probably never dreamed a scribe would one day appear to make their descendants not only imagine their plight but also, by being brought to tears by the narrative, gain access to an emotion that makes us one with them. Shamanic work. 
 
 What moves you most in a book? 
 
 The witnessing of a great soul. A magnificent spirit in action. A warrior whose mental weapons seem to come equally from heart and air, and whose soul is nourished by solitude and dreams. In other words, the writer’s courage. 
 
 Did you read poetry as a child? 
 
 We owned two or three thick volumes of English literature called “Prose and Poetry.” I wish I knew where they are now! They were the foundation of the family’s literacy and love of literature. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.…” The refrain was: “You’ll be a man, my son.” But I ignored the “man” part. I knew I was being spoken directly to, and this has turned out to be true. I have gone my own way, because of that early impression that it is right to do so. Poetry is that kind of gift. 
 
 I was also strengthened by the love the people in my community had for poetry. They appreciated my first poem: “Easter lilies pure and white, blossom in the morning light.” Their praise, when I was 3 or 4, gave me permission to be a poet, with all the intrigue and adventure that would later involve. Well, if only they knew! 
 
 Was there a book of poems or a poet in particular that inspired you to write? 
 
 I loved Emily Dickinson. Robert Frost. T. S. Eliot. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Langston Hughes. Margaret Walker’s “For My People” moved me deeply. Also her poems “October Journeys” and “We Have Been Believers.” But no, I think sorrow more than poets inspired me to write. That and the most rapt love of nature all around me, that seemed to require something creative from me to attempt to match — a gold and crimson leaf, perhaps, or the way a turtle’s shell fits perfectly, or the notion that horses, though heavy, could swim! The wonder of it. I felt from a very young age that somehow we had, as humans, emerged into a magical world, a true wonderland, for which my deepest sadness was no match. 
 
 Which poets continue to inspire you? 
 
 Taoist poets. “The Activist’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for a Modern Revolution,” by William Martin, is a recent inspiration. Rumi, always. Among modern poets, I like Mary Oliver.
– The New York Times is standing by its Q&A with Pulitzer-winning author Alice Walker despite complaints about her comments on a book by an accused anti-Semite. The 74-year-old author of The Color Purple told the newspaper's By the Book column that was she was currently reading David Icke's And the Truth Shall Set You Free and called it "a curious person's dream come true." At Tablet, Yair Rosenberg writes that the book referencing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a text accusing Jewish people of a plot for global domination, "is an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain's most notorious anti-Semites." The Washington Post highlights this quote: "I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War." A Times rep says the column is a "portrait of a public person through the lens of books; it is not a list of recommendations from our editors," who might "dislike, disdain or even abhor" the books mentioned, per the Guardian. But Amy Russo at HuffPo notes the paper failed to provide context in an editor's note, "thereby allowing [Icke's] name to be promoted unchecked." Rosenberg argues the column only ensures "racism is disseminated to more people." Walker also said this of the book: "In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about." Her comments are "especially corrosive because the anti-Jewish conspiracies she uplifted and adopted are part of the same white supremacist power structure she so deftly fought through her written work in the past," adds Jewish filmmaker Rebecca Pierce. (Walker once blocked an Israeli publisher from printing her book.)