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lizshayne 's review for:
challenging
medium-paced
I...am making a conscious choice not to rate this book because I cannot do so in a way that is fair to the author. Going too low undermines the really impressive close textual reading and often brilliant argument that he makes and going high ignores the upsetting depictions of autistic people and deficit (rather than strength) based approach that characterizes Levine's language.
The fundamental problem of this book is that it can't imagine an autistic person reading it. By which I mean descriptions of what Yosef did and the choices he made felt very true to an autistic neurotype, but the reasons for why Yosef did it and the ongoing descriptions of autistic people as self-absorbed and lacking empathy rather than acknowledging the ways in which the double empathy problem works (the brothers also consistently fail to understand Yosef, but it's framed as Yosef's problem) and the way that Yosef tries to communicate by autistic norms and is rebuffed. There is a version of this analysis that reads Yosef as autistic, meaning that he is principled even at high cost to himself, has a high level of altruism and so expects that in others, and also has sensory issues that would lead his father to give him a fine wool coat that won't upset him.
To put it another way, why is it that being דן לכף זכות (judging all favorably and assuming best intention) and righteous even in the face of temptation (he's called Yosef HaTzadik for a reason) is a problem when it's an autistic person? It's also extremely weird to me to talk about Yosef's unreasonable daydreams as a mark of his autism when he's right...
Credit where credit is due, the second half of the book gets much better and the way Levine talks about accommodations being necessary for success and also how the brothers themselves make the same social mistakes as Yosef when they are outside of their milieu and destabilized is just *chef's kiss*. But that analysis undermines a significant amount of his first part where he talks about "autistic people are like X" all the time. Are the brothers autistic also then? What's different that we account for trauma and situational stress in their case, but not Yosef's?
The other thing that feels lurking under the surface and like Levine can't bring himself to deal with (and here I am, imputing motives. No idea, maybe?) is what it says about Yaakov and the brothers and every single neurotypical person in this story if this analysis is right. Not, you know, that the brothers come out looking great no matter how you sell this 17 year old, but Levine is stuck in this position where he either tells the story that this autistic kid is so annoying that his brothers had to get rid of him or the brothers are so intolerant of difference that they had to sell the autistic kid rather than confront their own bias.
The perspective shift is dizzying because it makes everyone else in this book (except, interestingly, Pharaoh) way more terrible. Potiphar's wife's sexual assault of Yosef (and, it's true, autistic people do are sexually assaulted at a higher rate), the butler's choice to leave Yosef in jail because he's awkward in company, my previous comment about the brothers...
If you are neurotypical, you almost can't tell the story without saying that Yosef, as the inconvenient autist, brought it on himself through his behavior. Because it's such an indictment of those who build a world based on playing social games and then take pains to make others lose.
This, incidentally, is part of the argument for #ownvoices. It's not that Levine couldn't or ought not write this. It's that, like many people writing from a privileged position about a marginalized one, he makes assumptions and misses things that someone who has lived this would know. And it's also complicated because I *did* a version of this with Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus where I talked about how he reads as autistic to me and that reading resonated with some and others totally bounced off it, which makes sense. You can't write for everyone. But it still feels like an autistic sensitivity reader would have made a world of difference.
Which brings me back to my original point of not knowing how to rate this book. The analysis is so good, the language is so alienating, and the creeping horror that this is what neurotypical people THINK, which goes unacknowledged by the text except in a few places, made it a very complicated read. I don't usually write that many notes in the margins to hold my attention. A little under 2/3 of those notes are available, should you wish to read them. Anyway, this book did what it set out to do and is going to shape the way I read the Yosef story from now on. It's so good and I wish it had been so much better.
The fundamental problem of this book is that it can't imagine an autistic person reading it. By which I mean descriptions of what Yosef did and the choices he made felt very true to an autistic neurotype, but the reasons for why Yosef did it and the ongoing descriptions of autistic people as self-absorbed and lacking empathy rather than acknowledging the ways in which the double empathy problem works (the brothers also consistently fail to understand Yosef, but it's framed as Yosef's problem) and the way that Yosef tries to communicate by autistic norms and is rebuffed. There is a version of this analysis that reads Yosef as autistic, meaning that he is principled even at high cost to himself, has a high level of altruism and so expects that in others, and also has sensory issues that would lead his father to give him a fine wool coat that won't upset him.
To put it another way, why is it that being דן לכף זכות (judging all favorably and assuming best intention) and righteous even in the face of temptation (he's called Yosef HaTzadik for a reason) is a problem when it's an autistic person? It's also extremely weird to me to talk about Yosef's unreasonable daydreams as a mark of his autism when he's right...
Credit where credit is due, the second half of the book gets much better and the way Levine talks about accommodations being necessary for success and also how the brothers themselves make the same social mistakes as Yosef when they are outside of their milieu and destabilized is just *chef's kiss*. But that analysis undermines a significant amount of his first part where he talks about "autistic people are like X" all the time. Are the brothers autistic also then? What's different that we account for trauma and situational stress in their case, but not Yosef's?
The other thing that feels lurking under the surface and like Levine can't bring himself to deal with (and here I am, imputing motives. No idea, maybe?) is what it says about Yaakov and the brothers and every single neurotypical person in this story if this analysis is right. Not, you know, that the brothers come out looking great no matter how you sell this 17 year old, but Levine is stuck in this position where he either tells the story that this autistic kid is so annoying that his brothers had to get rid of him or the brothers are so intolerant of difference that they had to sell the autistic kid rather than confront their own bias.
The perspective shift is dizzying because it makes everyone else in this book (except, interestingly, Pharaoh) way more terrible. Potiphar's wife's sexual assault of Yosef (and, it's true, autistic people do are sexually assaulted at a higher rate), the butler's choice to leave Yosef in jail because he's awkward in company, my previous comment about the brothers...
If you are neurotypical, you almost can't tell the story without saying that Yosef, as the inconvenient autist, brought it on himself through his behavior. Because it's such an indictment of those who build a world based on playing social games and then take pains to make others lose.
This, incidentally, is part of the argument for #ownvoices. It's not that Levine couldn't or ought not write this. It's that, like many people writing from a privileged position about a marginalized one, he makes assumptions and misses things that someone who has lived this would know. And it's also complicated because I *did* a version of this with Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus where I talked about how he reads as autistic to me and that reading resonated with some and others totally bounced off it, which makes sense. You can't write for everyone. But it still feels like an autistic sensitivity reader would have made a world of difference.
Which brings me back to my original point of not knowing how to rate this book. The analysis is so good, the language is so alienating, and the creeping horror that this is what neurotypical people THINK, which goes unacknowledged by the text except in a few places, made it a very complicated read. I don't usually write that many notes in the margins to hold my attention. A little under 2/3 of those notes are available, should you wish to read them. Anyway, this book did what it set out to do and is going to shape the way I read the Yosef story from now on. It's so good and I wish it had been so much better.