She couldn’t define ‘woke,’ yet she claims it's destroying America. Newsweek rewarded her with an entire op-ed.

Whitney Alese
ZORA
Published in
5 min readMar 20

Bethany Mandel

Bethany Mandel sputtered and stalled. When asked by journalist Briahna Joy Gray to define what the word “woke” meant, Mandel, in a viral clip, seemed to struggle to define the word. A word she wrote an entire chapter on in her book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a

Whitney Alese
ZORA
Writer for

Whitney Alese is a writer & podcaster, featured in WIRED Magazine (Sept 2020) & I-D Magazine (Dec. 2021), and NBC (Jan 2023). She is based in Philadelphia.