Scapegoat, the Jews Israel and women's liberation

by Andrea Dworkin

On Yom Kippur, Jews of antiquity would sacrifice two goats: one as an offering to a harsh and judging god, the other turned loose in the wilderness as a carrier of the group's sins. But throughout history, says Andrea Dworkin, women and Jews themselves have served as society's scapegoats. From the Inquisition, when women were targeted as witches and Jews as heretics, to the Nazi assault on Jewish and female bodies, these groups have been doomed to the twin fates of slaughter and exile.

In Scapegoat Dworkin draws on history, literature, philosophy, and politics to create a series of pairings -- homeland/home, pogrom/rape, Palestinians/prostitutes -- that elucidate the misogyny and anti-Semitism of the past millennium's atrocities. Sure to incite debate, Dworkin presents a startling new view of how Nazism waged war on the female body. She offers a profound indictment of Israel's "scapegoating" of the Palestinians and critiques the supremacy Israeli men exert over Israeli women. Most provocatively, she imagines a world in which women betray the men of their ethnic/racial groups to fight for their own rights. Dworkin's exploration of when and how scapegoats themselves use violence will shock and disturb -- and no reader will look at the world the same way again.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, History, Jewish, Politics, Womens, Judaism

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women.

An anti-war activist and anarchist in the late 1960s, Dworkin wrote 10 books on radical feminist theory and practice. During the late 1970s and the 1980s, she gained national fame as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography - Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), which remain her two most widely known books.

Reviews

[Tea S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

genuinely kind of incredible how dworkin can go from fawningly writing about the women who challenged soviet rule to then, in another chapter, writing about how the sex trade in eastern europe rapidly expanded after the fall of the USSR. in general this book is enamored with the myths of anticommunism.

also for all her talk about the crimes of zionism she sure loves to emphasize just how bad "palestinian terrorism" is, dear lord, not to mention the following sentence, which is ultimately a justification of zionism: "The death of the Jewish state would mean the death of the Jewish people".

fucking garbage.

[Amy Layton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before anyone freaks out over Andrea Dworkin comparing women and Jewish folks, I’ll just use this first sentence to remind everyone that Andrea Dworkin is also Jewish, and thusly definitely has a voice in this discussion. The points that she brings up–historical oppression, lack of space and place, their scapegoat status, how they are viewed in media–are eloquent and divided into chapters, and further divided into a section that discusses Jewish folks, women, and then the two together for a further comparison and analysis.

This is such an important read, I think, especially as we are in the midst of the fight over Palestine and Zionism. It shows us a real history, and where tensions were 20 years ago, and how they may have even been a precursor to what’s happening currently.

With her usual punchy tone and piercing word choice, Andrea Dworkin makes a convincing argument as to why Jewish folks and women have been society’s scapegoats, and the horrors that have come from such a designation. Her analysis is steadfast, and definitely thought-provoking (as Dworkin often, if not always, is).

Review cross-listed here!

[Rita · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Goodreads summary of this book of 2000 is accurate; one's views on rape, sexism, racism will be altered. It is certainly a disturbing book to read. Every page has new and provocative insights, draws unusual parallels. Enough food for thought for a lifetime, I would say.

This view of humans as having an almost universal need to denigrate and humiliate groups of people 'inferior' to them is alarming and depressing, and I have to say it voices what have become my views [and much more].

I'm at a loss to select just one topic out of the hundreds Dworkin [1947-2005] raises.

[Jemma · Rating 5 out of 5]

While definitely very specific on subject matter and probably a bit obscure - I think Dworkin does a fantastic job with this. Easily agreeable for a very specific set [radical feminist, jew, not necessarily pro-militant-zionist], could be problematic, confusing or anger-inducing in parts for pretty much everyone else… but that’s what I liked about it. I recommend though also think you kind of need to care about subject matter in order to get through the denser (but still engaging) quote-heavy academic prose.

[βαβυλών · Rating 3 out of 5]

andrea dworkin is, uh, challenging to read for like a whole slew of reasons. graphically blunt presentation of horrifying statistics and anecdotes, an aggressively second-wave feminist (i don't believe the movement should be completely disregarded in light of newer, more intersectional conceptions of feminism [por que no los dos?]), and wildly disorganized ideas, quotes, and citations. that said, i find her ideas worth parsing and all of those points just add up to the visceral urgency that she felt writing this book and indeed we should all feel as misogyny, anti-semitism, islamophobia, colonialism and militant zionism gain more footing every day!

[Momina Makin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling book.

[Rosie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

In discussion with Ramin Jahanbegloo, published as Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, Berlin does the hard work of defining equality: "Equality is always specific. Let me give an instance, if you have ten children, and you want to give each a piece of cake, if you give one child two slices and the next child none, for no good reason, this offends against the principle of equality. That is what 'unfair' means." The failure, then, of liberal feminism is transparently clear: some have two slices, some have none; some have the money to pay for an abortion, some do not; some have shelter, even homes, some do not; some have food, some do not; some have health care, some do not; some can read, some can't. Actor Peter Coyote in his memoir of the sixties, Sleeping Where I fall, examines what he calls "the insufficiencies of liberalism: the generosity toward others that is predicated on first sustaining one's own privilege." Some have enough, some do not. (p. 245)

If women even consider the questions of aggression and identity that implicate violence as a political strategy, won't I, asks woman after woman, be just like them? As Jonathan Shay writes in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character: "...I shall argue what I've come to strongly believe through my work with Vietnam veterans: that moral injury is an essential part of any combat trauma that leads to lifelong psychological injury. Veterans can usually recover from horror, fear, and grief once they return to a civilian life, so long as 'what's right' has not also been violated." Women have combat trauma without fighting; women are fought against and "what's right" is always violated: thus, women live with horror, fear, and grief. Suppose that in the United States twenty men were killed on the same day. Each one had raped or incested or beaten or tortured or pimped or killed one woman or girl or many. Some of the targets were famous—pornographers, for instance—but most were not. There were police reports or hospital reports on the violent acts committed against a woman or women; or there had been a trial from which a transparently guilty man had walked away free. Could women commit even such a small and thoughtful (seriously considered) act of earned retribution? What would happen to the impunity from consequences men count on? How seriously would this violence be taken by the FBI and local police? Would there be a collective heart attack and fierce efforts to find and convict the killers? Could women bear the taking of life as a step toward freedom from systematic and often intimate male violence? As Sofsky says in The Order of Terror: the Concentration Camp, "Just as there is no collective Guilt, there can be no collective innocence." He defines collective crimes as "individual crimes in a collective." (p 247)

Could women fight for the liberation of women? Why has sexual liberation existed without context as a practice and a goal: without the context of poverty or homelessness or unwanted sex or unwanted children; why will an orgasm make poverty or homelessness or unwanted sex or unwanted children all right; how does sexual liberation free women from material deprivation or illiteracy or bad health care or the insult of being subordinated, including in consensual sex? Should African American men in urban ghettos in the United States just fuck more and then they will be free or have what they need: education or jobs or civil dignity?
Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground? henry Kissinger says: "What is a revolutionary? If the answer to that question were without ambiguity, few revolutionaries would ever succeed. For revolutionaries almost always start from a position of inferior strength. They prevail because the established order is unable to grasp its own vulnerability." Male dominance does not comprehend its own vulnerability—with genitals on the outside, easy to attack; men do not understand how their own dominance works—but women do, or can. Can women analyze male dominance? Can women attack it where it is vulnerable? Can women make use of men's vulnerability not to marry but instead to destroy male power? Can women decide that rape will be stopped? Can women strategize to stop rape Can women organize across lines of male enmity to stop rape and battery and incest? Israeli and Palestinian feminists try hard to work together: there is one battered women's shelter that in 1988 was the only place in Israel that Palestinian and Israeli children were being educated together: beautiful children, dispossessed— child and mosher, Arab and Jew—by violent men; and there was one rape crisis center that employed a plastic surgeon to restored the hymen for Palestinian girls and women who had been raped; otherwise, the girls and women risked death. Surely if it can happen there it can happen anywhere. (p. 248)

Women of all races and in all places also need to be beautiful, but the contradiction is built into the demand: her body may be foul, loathsome, stinky, dirty, bloody, and her genitals may suggest an unbearable internality, a viscous, muscled tunnel; but she can remake that repulsive body by breaking some bones, removing body hair, soft- or hard-core mutilation or surgery. These procedures along with various kinds of segregation and absence make her body, finally, ownable: but not by her; never by her. What kind of shame is there in wanting to survive in such a body? Is there enough self-punishment to match the ever present male-inflicted punishments: can she wish her body away by starving or, alternatively, make the men go away by fat—these being the strategies that are culturally Western? With the woman, as with the black, as with the Jew in the Nazi era, crimes are targeted against the body simple because it is perceived to be female; it is a body already disdained; it brings punishment on itself because of its inescapable nature. The shame is in wanting to live and therefore submitting. The shame is in endlessly negotiating incursions into one's own body: all surrender. The shame is in restriction, belittlement, insult. The shame is in being complicitous even if one is fighting for one's own life; the more endangered one is, the more complicitous one feels: the more ashamed. The shame is in having an invisible life even as the body itself can be appropriated by visual colocalization: the so-called male gaze, often with accompanying verbal aggression. The complicity is in being watched and at the same time never hurting back; or, being internally invaded by force and never hurting the invader(s) in self-defense, revenge, or retaliation. (255-256)

Debased men need to degrade women, so that the struggle to subordinate women becomes a basic struggle for male identity as such; in liberation movements, women get a temporary pass from complete servility, because they can be used and useful in any subversion or underground fighting. Once the liberation struggle is won, the women are recolonialized, as happened in Nicaragua, Israel itself, or Algeria. Every time an oppressed group gets state power through which it can express its integrity as people, it destroys the sovereignty of women over their own bodies, so that state power is built directly on the violation of women's integrity. Once debased men become powerful men, the degrading of women becomes a state-protected right; and power most often also requires the demeaning of a racial or ethnic or religious other. Empowered masculinity gets its vitality and arrogance from its newest victory over women, a victory enhanced by the resources and mechanisms of state power. (p. 302)

[fausto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is a very intense reading, overwhelming, Andrea compile a huge ammount of information of jewish-hating and misoginy and the relation between them. Is a highly scholarly and well-research book, I found very clarifying her analysis on the sexual politics of hate and the creation of the scapegoat.
My inconvenient with the book is the (truly amazing) erasure of jewish-womyn perspectives, when Andrea write about jews she seem to be speaking of jewish men, jewish women are addressed in a distinctive way throughout the book, but only sporadically (specially when she speaks abou rape) the role of jewish womyn in the feminist and lesbian movements is virtually never addressed, I think that her main analysis of the sexual politics of violence and scapegoating could be more meticulous with an emphasis on jewish womyn and jewish feminist activism and herstory.

[Neo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, hard to read at times, but this will change your view of how the world sees women, of the pros and cons of the establishment of Israel and brutality of men. Dworkin is Jewish and grew up around Holocaust survivors. She was also a survive of sexual assault. She would have first hand experience of the analogies she offers.

Now that anti-feminism and anti-Zionism are at all time high, if you are an ally (feminist or Jewish or both) please read this book. It's still 100% relevent.

[Stéphane Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most difficult books I have read. Not due to its use of complex words but due to its harsh, truthful and honest depiction of tragedies that highlight the complete disregard of humanity toward women and the Jewish people throughout history. I learnt a lot by exploring this book and it has certainly left a mark. A dark tone indeed but it also allows the reader to focus on the light that the World needs to show the way out of this evil.

[Mia Holiday · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! This is a must read. Meticulously and thoroughly researched to an almost unbelievable degree. Her well developed arguments come through loud and clear thank to her blunt matter-of-fact approach.

The research I did in preparation of this read definitely led me to believe that she was a Zionist. However anyone who holds this belief after reading has definitely missed the point because I did not get that impression at all. Quite the opposite actually. Sure there could have been a little more contextualization on the side of the Palestinians before the holocaust, but I feel the Jewish contextualization is much more relevant to her overall message.

My greatest takeaway from this book is that in times of unrest and political violence, women will always be targeted first and receive the worst treatment. A concept I never considered due to ‘women and children first mentality’. I could honestly go on for a while typing the great takeaways this book delivered (there are at least 50 post it notes sticking out from my copy) but I digress.

[Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been looking for literature that would address (admittedly) a very niche topic of how to be a Jewish woman (or rather how to Jew while being a woman). This work, broken into chapters, sets to showcase Jewish women’s experiences against a backdrop of Jewish history, from pogroms and physical violence to Zionism and feminism in modern Israel. I laud the idea but the writing seems disparate and less coherent. While it provides interesting insights on both feminism and Judaism, to me, it failed to create a coherent narrative.

[Mark Tranter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Andrea Dworkin's books. Her fiction and her non-fiction. In this she explores the Holocaust, the history of Israel and the treatment of women there and in other parts of the world. She's amazing.