Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation Hardcover – June 12, 2000

A remarkably well researched and written with depths seldom found. Wisdom supported with evidence utilyzing the full spectrum of disciplines and presented with a unique writers style that allows for an informed insertion of the personal with the objective. This is a difficult book to read because it examines the full human history of this specie's evident need to refuse acceptance of personal responsibility for their painful emotions and to project these unbearable feelings onto the most vulnerable group available. I can only stand in awe of both the scholarship and the author's courage.

Andrea Dworkin first opened my eyes in 1978 in the pages of Woman Hating, and she can still stretch my mind until it hurts!

Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel and Women's Liberation would have been better titled The Holocaust of the Jews and Violence Against Women: A Study of Comparisons.

There is no liberation for the women in this book, nor is women's liberation even defined - but violence against women certainly is, and nobody can put violence against women in context like Andrea Dworkin. The sad part is that her writing has become so academic that the very women who could benefit from this book couldn't possibly follow it - it's mind bending, as we used to say in the sixties. Poor, oppressed, exploited women don't have the time or the energy to untangle the philosophy and the logic Dworkin has taken such pains to evolve - only college professors do. They thrive on it.

Andrea Dworkin changed my life by showing me the nature of my own oppression, so that I could find my way out of it. The nature of oppression and exploitation is also known, in psychiatrist's terms, as projection. The perpetrator blames the victim for their own suffering even as he cracks the whip. So do survivors take on the role of perpetrator if they manage to avoid any effort at healing their own wounds. So does Israel take on the role of Fascist in the ever present PTSD of the history of their own suffering.

How do we end the violence? By breaking the cycle. How do we break the cycle? Certainly not by invasion, colonialization, and war. Dworkin names the violence no one dares to name, i.e. the use of prostitution in Nazi concentration camps by both Nazis and Jews alike. And yet, no matter how horrific the stories of suffering may be, only Dworkin had the courage to tell that one, which even the most articulate Jew would rather remained invisible, hidden in shame, those women and their courage and their suffering never counted.

This book should be mandatory reading in all upper level women's studies courses, with much food for thought, discussion and hopefully, action.

It appears Dworkin never learned about Project Monarch. One wonders what she would have said about that.

In "Scapegoat," Andrea Dworkin comes clean. For the better part of her career, she has been dropping hints about the connections, or parallels, or metaphorical affinities between the Holocaust and violence against women. These hints have always had a meretricious quality in the absence of a detailed argument. "Scapegoat" comes as a true surprise. This book is not "Intercourse" plus the well-worn Holocaust analogy as an indicator of oppression: it is a serious monograph on the comparative lot of stateless peoples, including women. Dworkin's quotes from Jewish and non-Jewish writers are respectful and attentive, though self-indulgent in sheer number. Her analysis of Jewish religion and culture is critical but fair and reflective of great pride. The apocalyptic kitsch which the reader has a right to expect from Dworkin is less often on display here, and though men don't come off too well, there is relatively little time spent on deconstructions of "male" sexuality as the root of violence. Dworkin here is far more pragmatic: she blames any form of entrenched power and its abuses. This book is the closest Dworkin has ever come to mainstream cultural studies. If there is any justice in same, she will receive the readership "Scapegoat" deserves: people who sit through 600 pages a throw of Lacan, Foucault or Donna Haraway ought to be able to stomach this book with no trouble at all. In a perfect world.
But though this is Dworkin's best, most lucid and readable nonfiction book, it finally suffers by promoting just that which it argues to defeat, and what its existence calls into question almost by definition: presumptions of the ontological "uniqueness" of the Holocaust. The comparison to the abuse of women is not meant to relativize either, though the book's anthology of quotes offers a good deal of evidence for doing so. It is, instead, meant to assign to women an ontological specialness equivalent to being Jewish. Quite apart from the morally problematic nature of any such specialness, Dworkin falters badly on the necessary follow-through. The specialness of suffering results from a landless status which Dworkin is right in assuming not to be uniquely Jewish. By her own admission, there is no equivalent in specific female experience to the Jewish religion, which she correctly identifies as the unifying factor that has allowed even secular Jews to experience themselves as "chosen." Her alternative may be feminist ethical consciousness, but the analogy suffers from the fact that this is by definition a consciousness meant to transcend national boundaries. Like many other Jewish feminists, she identifies with Zionism and offers a severe yet forgiving analysis of its treatment of the Palestinians. She makes a fascinating parallel between Jewish ghettoization of Palestinians and feminist disdain for sexually abused women. Yet this analogy finally does not wash either. After four hundred pages devoted to the concept of both women and Jews as stateless people, the reader must be skeptical about prostitutes as an ethnicity, or "Zionism for women." Dworkin wants the possibility to exist and her understanding of the uniquely pained Israeli consciousness earns respect; all the same, she is too invested in the idea of nationalism as masculine and statelessness as female to propose a feminist separatist nationalism in credible terms.
"Scapegoat," then, tries hard to break new ground, both for feminists and for diasporan peoples, but finally ends up exposing the author's terrible and very Jewish dilemma: unable to choose either nationalism or statelessness in good conscience and yet left with the inescapable sense of chosenness and its burdens. All the same, it is a memorable summa by this country's best-known Jewish feminist, sacrificing her often tendentious originality for a reiteration of the Jewish question that honors its often-ignored sexual politics. Whether it does justice to them is a whole other question. "Scapegoat" can be read as a tissue of cliches on the subject; but people do think in cliches, and Dworkin does an adequate, sometimes uncanny job of describing how people tend to think about things. She will tell us that it is up to us to decide if that is how they are--with deeds as well as words. And words, as she has so often said, are deeds. It is in its reflection of the power of words about crimes and their victims that "Scapegoat" is most valuable as word and deed.