I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It

The book criticizes Edward Said, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Ibram X. Kendi, defends Noam Chomsky, Woody Allen, and Rachel Dolezal, and mocks transgender people.

For examples, Peace News criticized Finkelstein's use of the word "woke" and his treatment of transgender people but otherwise praised the book as a "powerful and much-needed critique",[1] and The Black Agenda Report criticized the book as a "temper tantrum that is so vulgar, vacuous, inchoate, and graceless that it could just as easily have been written by Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher or Sean Hannity" which moreover fails to grapple with settler colonialism.

[1] Contextualized by the Pew Research Center as being related to social phenomena in which people "go online and call out others for their behavior or words", the meaning of cancel culture is contested, variously described as accountability or censorship.

[6] The mythological narrative[a] of cancel culture generated substantial fear but as of 2023 had not caused meaningful consequences for significantly prominent politicians, business people, or institutions.

[2] The remainder of the book's first part takes the form of strongly worded polemics attacking public figures who address racism in the United States, including Kimberlé Crenshaw and Ibram X.

[1] I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It then sketches four historical cases about academic freedom involving Bertrand Russell, Leo Koch, Angela Davis, and Steven Salaita.

British pacifist newspaper Peace News praised the book as a "powerful and much-needed critique" that is "likely to infuriate or offend" the reader, who is still "encourage[d] to read it".

[7] The Black Agenda Report, an outlet for African-American leftism, criticized the book, calling it a "preening, patriarchal pity party" and a "temper tantrum that is so vulgar, vacuous, inchoate, and graceless that it could just as easily have been written by Tucker Carlson, Bill Maher or Sean Hannity", public figures of the American political right.

[3] Peace News criticized Finkelstein's use of the word "woke" as an "unfortunate decision" because of its association with right-wing politics as a pejorative against "everything that they don't like", such as "Black people in TV dramas".

[1] The Black Agenda Report argued that the Black vernacular phrase "stay woke" originated as a watchword to remind the community to avoid "being caught off-guard by white betrayal, such as that demonstrated by Finkelstein", and that while Finkelstein is "partly correct" in criticizing liberalism in the United States as elitist, he fails to recognize that settler colonialism, not multiracial liberalism, originated the white-unifying identity politics that undermine working class cohesion; the Report concluded that I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It has a "nativist tone", expresses "white insecurity", and is the "European settler's cry for help, and an exercise in white respectability politics".