Book Reviews
Gelernter's book Mirror Worlds (1991) "prophesied the rise of the World Wide Web." Bill Joy, founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, says Gelernter is "one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time.” The New York Times called him a computer science "rock star".
Gelernter's book, Judaism (2009), is "one of the most original interpretations of Judaism I have ever read" (Michael Novak) and "a new Psalter" (Cynthia Ozick).
Gelernter argues that American higher education has become more leftist, "thrusting", and "belligerent", due to "an increasing Jewish presence at top colleges".
Gelernter's most recent book is America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats). Stephen Daisley wrote in Commentary Magazine that Gelernter portrays Obama's presidency as a symbol of the failure of American education and the success of its replacement with a liberal indoctrination system. As a solution, Gelernter proposes moving all of human knowledge to online servers so that the in-person college experience can be replaced by user-driven self-education. Daisley wrote, "America-Lite is lean, incisive convincing, delightfully indelicate, and, in a break from the conventions of the literature on education, honest. It is a fine dissection—de-construction, if you must—of the corruption of higher education and the resulting debasement of political culture. If it makes its way on to a single college reading list, Hell will have frozen over."
Russell Jacoby was sharply dismissive in his review of Gelernter's book America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats). Among other criticisms he made, Jacoby said that Gelernter blamed intellectuals for causing the breakdown of patriotism and the traditional family but never explained how that came about.
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“The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes—McCarthy and Stalin—that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)