She's given to blanket statements, maybe true but difficult to evaluate, such as "All nations have laws that hurt women and girls" and "Rape: the pogrom against the female body the punishment for being her, not him." Subsidiary subjects include, among many others, torture of female prisoners in Argentina the loathsomely racist and anti-Semitic "Turner Diaries," which inspired Timothy McVeigh the history of Israel's relations with the Arabs the meaning of Jewish exile Judaism's inherent sexism and its search for social justice the wearing of the veil the contempt of American Jewish writers for their mothers ("Honor requires knowing whose blood built your bones") and on and on. Dworkin really wants to make the reader feel the pain of the victims of pogroms, the Holocaust, institutionalized rape, widow burning in India. And the result is suffering and death on an enormous scale.ĭworkin drives this idea home in chapters drawing out the parallels and equivalences: "Jew-hate/Woman-hate," "The State/The Family," "The Chosen/The Evil," "Hate Literature/Pornography," "Zionism/Women's Liberation." Each equivalence is buttressed obsessively with example after example, the bulk of the evidence in the form of atrocity stories that quickly become almost unbearable to continue reading. Misogyny and anti-Semitism are interrelated they work the same way and reinforce each other. Men believe that women are dirty and inferior Nazism, a "masculinist" movement, feminized the Jews by labeling them as weak and filthy. Jews have been degraded, murdered, oppressed throughout history, notably during the Nazi era, to make, well, everybody around them feel superior and safe. Women are raped, murdered, prostituted (a trio of crimes echoed on what seems like practically every page) to make men feel superior and to externalize their secret fears about themselves.
Reading "Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation" is like being hit repeatedly on the head with a ball-peen hammer - allegedly for your own good.įeminist theorist Andrea Dworkin's thesis is grand, far-reaching and not entirely new, if never so elaborated before: that Jews and women play similar roles as scapegoats in a worldwide, timeless drama of colonization, oppression and brutality.
The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation By
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