The Talmud and the OT

Michael Wex is a Jewish author descended from some notable rabbis.  His specialty is Yiddish, and his book Born to Kvetch was a bestseller in 2005. This quotation was brought to my attention by Michael Rydelnik, and I checked the book out recently and verified it.  The statement is surprising given its source.

Contrary to the usual "people of the book" shtik (the phrase, incidentally, comes from the Koran), Judaism is a Talmudic, not a biblical religion; without the interpretive guidance of the Talmud, the Hebrew Bible can lead to Jesus on the cross as easily as to me at my bar mitzvah. The Talmud is even called the Oral Torah and is considered to have been given to Moses along with the Written Torah. In the Jewish system of belief, you can’t have one without the other: Judaism relates to the Bible only as it is refracted through the Talmud and Talmudic ways of thinking. Public-relations-minded anti-Semites who claim to dislike only "Talmudic" Jews are saying that they don’t like any Jews: no Talmud, no Jews. It’s like saying that they love everything about Christianity except for the skinny guy on the cross (pp. 13-14).