Dworkin III

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Review
Paul West author of OK: The Corral, the Earps, and Doc Holliday Andrea
Dworkin has a tart, existential, well-stocked mind gifted at disagreeing.
Here she agrees with many commentators, sweeping their aperçus into a savage
indictment that will shock and enlighten. Her subject is misogyny, her
canvas planetary, her stance indignant. There are fascinating, painful
saliences on every page, and her commentary on the God of the Jews ('wrath
and terror'), prostitution in Auschwitz, and etymology in general is
outstanding. Her only omission is the case of Royal Air Force pilots who,
rather than fly against Jews in the time of Suez, retracted their wheels on
the tarmac. A belligerent, poised book full of mercy.

Book Description

On Yom Kippur, Jews of antiquity would sacrifice two goats: one killed as an
offering to a harsh and judging god, the other taken to the wilderness and
turned loose, a carrier of the sins of the group. Throughout history, argues
brilliant feminist critic Andrea Dworkin, women and Jews have been
stigmatized as society's scapegoats.
In this stunning and provocative book, Dworkin brings her rigorous intellect
to bear on the dynamics of scapegoating. Drawing upon history, philosophy,
literature, and politics, she creates a terrifying picture of the workings
of misogyny and anti-Semitism in the last millennium.
With examples that range from the Inquisition, when women were targeted as
witches and Jews as heretics, to the terror of the Nazis, whose aggression
was both race- and gender-motivated, Dworkin illustrates how and why women
and Jews have been scapegoated and compares the civil inequality,
prejudices, and stereotypes that have framed identity for both groups.
Taking the state of Israel as a paradigm, Dworkin traces the growth of male
dominance in societies both old and new -- resulting in the subordination of
women and a racial or ethnic "other."
In Israel today, Palestinians and prostitutes are the new scapegoats:
degraded, inferior, abject. Although the gentle Jewish martyrs of old have
become modern Israeli warriors, women retain the stigmatized status of "weak
Jews" who, when attacked, never fight back. This leads Dworkin to imagine a
world in which women betray men of their own kind in order to develop and
defend their own sovereignty. Ultimately, her book forces us to ask profound
questions: Why do women continue to value their own lives less than those of
the men they love? Where is the line between justifiable self-defense and
violence? Both an impassioned plea for women to challenge and destroy the
author- ity of the men in their own group and a startling work of history,
Scapegoat will forever change how we think about the patterns of behavior
and belief that give rise to domination and oppression.

kwp
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