“Are Women Weak Jews?”

On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism

Sophie Lewis

May 27, 2025

The oeuvre of Andrea Dworkin, bellettristic avatar of the second wave, is comprised of twelve books, not counting the three on porn coauthored with Catharine MacKinnon. These include several little-known titles (such as the novel Mercy and the essay collection Life and Death), but one in particular, dwells in an obscurity that cannot possibly be incidental. While it is this book—her book about Israel—that most warrants revisitation in the present, her twenty-first century fans appear intent on entrenching its erasure from the cultural record; they celebrate, instead, her earlier fire-and-brimstone cultural criticism: Pornography, Woman-Hating, Right-Wing Women, and Our Blood.

Almost six hundred days have passed, at the time of writing, since the acceleration of a decades-long genocide in Palestine that many have justified in women’s name.¹ I have attempted elsewhere to articulate my concerns about Dworkin’s self-punitive pornophobia in a comradely way and on its own terms (that is, setting aside her Zionism).² The braver task would have been to recognize the settler-colonialism she advocated late in life as inseparable from the female cultural nationalism of her earlier work. After all, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, merely voices her remedy to the evils she’s lyrically explored for decades. It is Dworkin’s longest and longest-gestated labor. I believe it to be the despairing culmination of a life of the mind that began, in the late 1960s, with a brief moment of optimism diametrically opposed to the politics to which she tragically and self-loathingly turned after her marriage grew femicidal.³ Decades later, Scapegoat straightfacedly makes the case that an “Israel” must be established—by any means necessary—for women. Along the way, Dworkin plumbs the depths of the real Israel’s crimes with startling candor, but only to make clear that it had no other choice.

Many readers of Dworkin don’t, I think, know about Scapegoat. In 2023, the philosopher Natalie Wynn, or “Contrapoints,” joined a growing clutch of Dworkin revivalists when she recommended Right-Wing Women (1978) to her one hundred million followers on YouTube as the key to understanding the political trajectory of J. K. Rowling (another noted Dworkin-quoter) qua antitrans activist.⁴ Wynn made great use of the first chapter, “The Promise of the Ultra-Right”—as did the theorist Robyn Marasco on the Historical Materialism blog a couple of years prior—but the transfeminist YouTuber’s painstakingly logical and measured progressivism is otherwise far removed from the apocalyptic tenor of Dworkin’s thought.⁵ Right-Wing Women ultimately predicts with confidence that women will one day be “gynocided” en masse. (Perhaps Wynn didn’t get to the end.)

This year, Penguin and Picador have reissued the newly repopularized book along with two others, Pornography (1979) and Woman-Hating (1974), which are no doubt intended to capitalize on the splash made by a giant carmine-covered Dworkin anthology (sans Scapegoat excerpt) that MIT Press and Johanna Fateman (of “Le Tigre” fame) midwifed into the world in 2019.⁶ Encomiums in the New Yorker appeared, then a glowing new biography by Martin Duberman, and a biopic executively produced by Gloria Steinem, followed by an indie documentary (called Dworkin) in 2024.⁷

A short article published in 2020 by Dworkin’s devoted life-partner John Stoltenberg, promisingly entitled “Andrea Dworkin was a Trans Ally,” now circulates unceasingly among a new generation of radfems online even though its contents prove only that she, in 1974, was far more ambivalent about trans women qua “victims of medicalization” than was the archtransphobe Jan Raymond (whose transannihilationist book, The Transsexual Empire, Dworkin blurbed in 1978).⁸ Raymond, meanwhile, leveled a depressingly persuasive retort in 2021: Dworkin recanted her non-TERFism along with all the (probestiality, proincest) excesses of her early-seventies writing (whence Stoltenberg gets his evidence).⁹ I cannot say it surprises me that right-wing antitrans ideologues like the self-described “radical feminist conservative” Louise Perry—who wants to do away with no-fault divorce—celebrate Andrea Dworkin in 2024.¹⁰ What surprises (and pains) me is that several very brilliant contemporary socialist feminists appear to be doing so too.¹¹

My eyes have been widening in disbelief about all of this for over five years, as my heart again and again forms the pointless wish that the subject of the revival were a different (better) second-waver: someone like Pat Parker, Amber Hollibaugh, or Joan Nestle. Among the elements I take exception to is the “This is wildly unfashionable stuff! Can you handle it? Are you scared?” tenor of today’s Dworkin marketing. As the “4B” bubble of 2024 showed, there is clearly nothing unfashionable about separatism today.¹² Yet blurb-providers and show women for neo-Dworkinism often seem to imagine they are taboo-breaking, the gist being: look, this is unsexy, unpopular, canceled material, it’s radioactive, you probably won’t get it. Picador’s edition of Right-Wing Women comes with a foreword by the Guardian’s Moira Donegan, warning braggadociously that “not everyone” has the capacity to “stomach” Dworkin, which is to say, “to look levelly at the truth of what the world is.”¹³

Still, this arguably is more honest than the distinct note of disavowed enjoyment struck by those reviewers of Last Days at Hot Slit who reported being seduced despite themselves: the blistering prose of the old separatist feels “scarily persuasive,” as these enthusiasts frequently said. Confessions by liberals of their moments of affective recruitment into “scary” ideologies are not exactly an uncommon phenomenon right now, and digging Dworkin’s enmity towards women who make porn, who campaign to decriminalize commodified sex, or who love BDSM, is one thing. Another is New York Magazine’s “resident party girl” Brock Colyar volunteering, following a couple of days of partying with the Trumpist “new young right,” that the MAGA influence seeped in such that “I was unleashed: the R-word, fat jokes” and that it “felt freeing, empowering” to lose friends through “debating” (justifying) the annihilation of Gaza.¹⁴

It is correct to be “scared” of such “empowerment.” Dworkin begins Scapegoat’s preface with the following strange—and strangely banal—nationalist declaration: “I am an enemy of nationalism and male domination. This means that I repudiate all nationalism except my own.” Right away she follows this up with the acknowledgement that the government (Israeli) that represents what she incorrectly calls her “ethnic” group (Jews) has breached “the line between self-defense and aggression.” Then she adds “the line itself is not self-evident in that violent acts sometimes serve to head off enemy attack and are arguably a form of self-defense.” Two years later, American proponents of war on Iraq would say “preemptive defense” to vindicate the same thing, this being the so-called Bush Doctrine. Next up on this question of defensive aggression, Dworkin’s first association is to the inaugural female victim of the Marquis de Sade, who should have killed her tormentor; and the second is to her own ex-husband, whom she escaped “not because I knew that he would kill me but because I thought I would kill him.”¹⁵

…Dworkin delivers her chilling verdict: “the revenge rape of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of annihilation.” It’s her concluding point, and given that rape, for Dworkin, is the supreme justifier of bloody preemptive defense, there can be no mistaking what is being justified here.

This whole vertiginous chain of analogy, from Nakba to mariticide, has taken place in the space of one page, setting the tone for a tome that is quite sincere in tracing a link between anti-Zionism and “woman-hate.” From start to finish, in the classic fashion of Dworkin’s prodigiously scholarly prose, thousands of eyeball-searing references tumble forth, some at best loosely relevant to the argument: Jack the Ripper, lynchings, human medical guinea-pigs, coprophilic abuse by Hitler, The Turner Diaries, lampshades made from tattooed human skin, vivisections, incests, suicides, slavery, the boiling of dead girl-children (during famine in China) into soup, and on, and on. In light of what’s to come, the early provocative line about the logic inspired by her husband’s battering seems like a riff on prime minister Golda Meir’s infamous bon mot: “When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”

What fascinates me most about Scapegoat is the spectacle of Dworkin getting bitten so badly by all her own longstanding analogistic habits. Her love of the itself centuries-old “Woman is the n——r of the world” mode of feminist argumentation (developed by Wollstonecraft and famously popularized by The Beatles in 1968) began in Dworkin’s first book, where she narrates feminist coming-to-consciousness as the sudden revelation “that we were, as Yoko Ono wrote, the [n——r] of the world, slaves to the slave.”¹⁶ A 1976 essay stretched this absurdity further, describing female citizens “literally” becoming chattel in marriage, such that the “root cause” of the US slavery system should be theorized as the ancient practice of wife beating.¹⁷ By the time she published Scapegoat decades later, her entrenched habit of analogizing had evolved into thought-annihilating equations—all her chapter titles at this point are composites conjured with the forward slash: “Hate Literature/Pornography,” “Jew Hate/Woman Hate,” and so on.

But the deepest analogy she constantly flirts with, only to repudiate in a panic, is between the Shoah and the Nakba—a parity she most vehemently does not want to entertain. “The claim of moral equivalency is terrifying and wrong,” as she declares in response to the Palestinian writer Hala Deeb Jabbour’s use of the word “holocaust.”¹⁸ Why, then, belabor the continuities between Kahanism and the Brownshirts, noting (correctly) that “there is no antifascism gene that the Jews have but the Germans do not,” and musing that “there is an almost slapstick comedy in the reversals—Arabs fleeing, Holocaust Jews moving in”?¹⁹ Kahanist soldiers planning anti-Arab pogroms called themselves the “Mengele Unit,” she notes, but, hey, “soldiers are forced to walk a tightrope between militarism and fascist hate and behaviors. The line is very narrow and balance is precarious.”²⁰

Or take the third chapter, “Pogrom/Rape,” where Dworkin mashes together a lengthy discussion of Kristallnacht with a sudden reference to the Zionist paramilitary massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948. She is clearly saying, as though this were provocative, that the victims of ancient pogroms became pogromists. What she feels obliged to say next—having quoted an Israeli soldier’s testimony about being “filled with self-loathing” while blowing up Palestinian homes—is astonishing: We should take note that “Jewish conscience existed even in the militarist Israeli modality,” and appreciate the pogromist’s self-awareness, because “hate and violence had not yet destroyed him.” He at least knew “he had done bad, not good.”²¹ One might be tempted to ask what exactly is “Jewish conscience”? And what difference does such shooting-and-crying make to those facing the bombs?

We move on at once: only a section break sits between this and the next bit of whiplash— Scapegoat now states that women have no history but, if we did, it would be “a history of rape: the pogrom against the female body.²² The constant juxtaposition cuts short the breath that one would normally use to assess each claim, as it comes, before moving onto what follows. It turns my stomach in a way I suspect was not intended. A sudden comment on Chinese footbinding caps off, for instance, many paragraphs on the patriarchal oppression of women in Gaza. An abrupt swerve into Jew-on-Jew pimping follows many paragraphs on the pornographic core of National Socialism. A patronizing assessment of Palestinian women’s role in the resistance melts into yet another survey of state-sanctioned prostitution across the centuries. Dworkin has set herself the task to prove, inexorably—through a widening gyre of montage-based equivalences—that the “woman-hate” in men’s hearts really is everywhere, left and right. This hate will remain until women rise up across borders and draw new borders for themselves by seizing a homeland—an “Israel”—away from men. Her mission is carried out quite well. I just consider it fascistic, not least in its insistence on female innocence.

Dworkin’s account of history is dazzlingly erudite and stunningly stupid at once: men have wrought it all. Even if your definition of “history” is strictly military, this is unpardonable stuff: armed struggles have always featured women leaders, such as, in the case of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abla Taha, Latifa Howari, Sarah Joudeh and Leila Khaled. Dworkin doesn’t mention these or any other Palestinian women militants and reckons that feminism is not currently possible in the Arab world: “in the sensibility of contemporary Arab women, the Palestinian male is the romantic figure,” not the Palestinian woman.²³ Tellingly, the whole question of Palestinian women’s anti-Zionist struggle is dealt with only indirectly, merged with a discussion of “the heroism of Algerian women fighters” between 1954 and ’62 whose purpose is to ram home the lesson that national liberation movements always betray their women. Besides, when women participate in struggle, it’s “because they can be used and useful” and “get a temporary pass from complete servility.”²⁴ Also, “the subsuming of the individual in the nationalist struggle is an easy process for women, who have little experience with a social reification of a singular identity.”²⁵ These women are fodder for revolutionary movements, Dworkin misogynistically opines, because they have no self.

All the litanies of rape-related facts in previous Dworkin books like Intercourse have palpably been dress-rehearsals for the remix in chapter three. “Rape,” she raps here mid-infodump, “is murder’s heartbeat.”²⁶ It’s an undeniably dope line. What’s odd is how, while the wretched of the earth are always women, “Pogrom/Rape” rests on the leftfield assertion that “Israeli men get raped.” Dworkin alleges that “the rape of a defeated foe, soldier, male” is “part of the Arab code, coexisting with the obligation of the father or brother to kill the sister for sexual impurity.” She extrapolates further, on the strength of the book Arab and Jew (1987) by former New York Times Jerusalem Bureau chief David Shipler, that Palestinian men are engaged in a “revenge vendetta through male-male rape.”²⁷ It is in fact purely on this basis—that is, unevidenced testimony cited by Shipler from a former Haganah paramilitary veteran (and, later, IDF/IOF colonel) Rafi Horowitz, recalling the Arab Legion systematically gouging eyes and mutilating genitals—that Dworkin delivers her chilling verdict: “the revenge rape of male Israeli soldiers in captivity is part of the fear, part of the hate, that drives the Israeli fear of annihilation.”²⁸ It’s her concluding point, and given that rape, for Dworkin, is the supreme justifier of bloody preemptive defense, there can be no mistaking what is being justified here.

While she knows that fascists should and must be violently confronted—indeed she trumpets the necessity of liberatory violence—she also excoriates any violence directed at any woman, full stop. The only way to square this is by treating “fascist women” (a phrase she can’t bring herself to say) as an oxymoron; the most we may have is “pro-Nazi” women.

Lilith magazine’s 2001 review headline for Scapegoat was: “A complicated view of Israel.”²⁹ It isn’t. In Chapter Nine, “Zionism/Women’s Liberation,” Dworkin glowingly quotes words spoken to the Israeli army in 1955 by Israel’s minister of “defense” Moishe Dayan about setting “a high price on our [Jewish people’s] blood.” Reprising the self-styled “prophetic” tone of her own 1976 essay “Our Blood,” Dworkin follows up her gloss on Dayan’s strategic vision by adding an innovative possibility: “Is that a good idea”—for women?. “Could women execute men who raped or beat or tortured women?” “Could women fight for the liberation of women?” and so on.³⁰ Most of the end of the chapter consists of coyly rhetorical questions like this, predicated on the necessity of Israel and, therefore, of a female version of the same. The format is, as ever, relentless litany: “Must women become like wolves?” “Do women need land and an army?”

Dworkin is just asking questions. Her point is that a successful fight for women’s liberation would necessarily resemble that which she calls in her preface, “the Jewish liberation movement called Zionism.”³¹ Meanwhile, in Chapter Eleven, entitled “Palestinians/Prostituted Women” despite dealing overwhelmingly with the centrality of prostitution to Nazism, she asserts—based on extremely dubious reporting on the period 1987–93 by one Judith Miller (future Bush administration shill and New York Times Islamophobe)—that “Hamas is executing women” to the tune of one hundred accused “prostitutes” a year, simply for being “not veiled or wearing slacks.”³²

Last year, the Israeli President Isaac Herzog racistly characterized Hamas—the political party elected in Gaza—as a “rape machine”; following suit, the government spokesperson Eylon Levy called it “a rape regime.”³³ I have little doubt as to where Dworkin would be standing in this context vis-à-vis Gaza today. When, in 2023, previously unrecognized radical feminists like Benjamin Netanyahu began hammering the world’s “women’s rights organizations” for their supposed silence regarding the alleged rapes of Israelis on October 7, I heard echoes of Dworkin’s rhythms and logics: sliced-out fetuses, forty beheaded babies, breasts cut off with box-cutters. According to one professor in the Jerusalem Post, the jailbreak out of Gaza was a “trampling of feminism’s very foundations,” infusing “new relevance to [Simone] de Beauvoir’s legacy,” because IDF/IOF female tank-squadrons “vindicated de Beauvoir’s theory” of what women are capable of (as though the anticolonial communist would have signed off on the genocide of Palestinians as a war of sexual justice).³⁴ Just as the state-mandated femicide factoid and Islamophobic “feminist journalism” mentioned above helped manufacture consent for the walling-off of Gaza in 1994, the since-debunked charge of systematic (sexualized) violence against women and girls on Hamas’s part during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood quickly became a pretext for the collective punishment of the Strip.³⁵

Concerned but skeptical pro-Palestinian feminists were told in 2023 that the almost complete dearth of evidence for these rapes was normal in a war-zone.³⁶ By the time the lurid claims in the New York Times exposé “Screams Without Words” were fully discredited the following year, the Gazan life-world had been reduced almost entirely to ash and rubble.³⁷ Zionist feminism’s jingoistic revival in this period aptly revealed a point I emphasize in my book, Enemy Feminisms: just because a given form of feminism is a classic nineteenth-century formation, predicated on the promise of a colonial utopia that will resurrect the long-lost sex-equality proper to the particular ethnos in question, doesn’t mean it is defunct.³⁸ “Israeli Women Fight on Front Line in Gaza, a First,” gushed the Times, echoing the 1890s Zionist press’s enthusiasm for maternalist feminist leadership in the Promised Land.³⁹ In today’s lush photo-spreads of youthful bands of tank-toting “Zionesses of the desert,” we are invited to appreciate the world-historic mission of the wannabe white “New Jewish Woman” of yore, now yassified and updated with triumphally MAGA- and MAHA-inspired aesthetics.⁴⁰ Once again, Lebensraum is presented as a feminist survival imperative: a frontier of violent innocence.

Dworkin’s wrestling with the question of female fascism is difficult to watch. She legitimately isolates, in order to condemn, the misogynist elements in post-liberation public beatings of female collaborators in France, or in Russian soldiers’ treatment of Nazi women. While she knows that fascists should and must be violently confronted—indeed she trumpets the necessity of liberatory violence—she also excoriates any violence directed at any woman, full stop. The only way to square this is by treating “fascist women” (a phrase she can’t bring herself to say) as an oxymoron; the most we may have is “pro-Nazi” women. Thus, Scapegoat manages to contend that the question of moral responsibility for Auschwitz in the case of Hedwig Höss, wife of the Auschwitz commandant, is somehow an interesting puzzle.⁴¹ “Who was she? Who was Mrs. Commandant Höss?” ponders Dworkin dumbly, without providing answers: “Is the wife of a perpetrator a moral nullity, or should she be accountable?”⁴² It’s, again, complex, in her terms, because “the racist escape clause from the burden of being female works better than any other means of escape,” and Frau Höss escaped the abjection of femaleness by saying “blame them, not me.”⁴³ Apparently, this is something we can’t condemn the right-wing woman for doing.

For a self-described enemy of “all nationalism except my own,” the view that emerges of what would effect women’s entry into history is strikingly masculinist. “Are women,” Dworkin demands to know, “weak Jews?” If so, the solution might be sovereignty, land, and a military—“control of a boundary further away from their bodies, a defended boundary”—to be built by a people hitherto ahistorical, on a land without a (male) people.⁴⁴ This, unhappily, is where Andrea Dworkin’s thought ended up. Its revival is a terrible idea.

Feminism, Israel/Palestine, Zionism

Sophie Lewis

Sophie Lewis is an exacademic based in Philadelphia, and the author of Enemy Feminisms (Haymarket, 2025), Abolish the Family (Verso, 2022) and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019). She is currently working on a book on children’s liberation for Penguin. You can find all her published essays at lasophielle.org and further unpublished ones at patreon.com/reproutopia.

“Are Women Weak Jews?”

On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism

Sophie Lewis

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