Judeosphere

Phylis Chesler, a prominent feminist author and co-founder of Women of the Wall—an organization the fights for the rights of women to pray as a group at the Kotel, read from a Torah scroll and wear tallit—discusses her ostracism from the feminist movement:

For years now, newly arrived refugees have been contacting me. They write to tell me that they’ve lost nearly everybody they once knew. Their whole world is gone now. Some whisper over the phone. Others write long letters. They ask me how I’ve managed.

I am talking about ideological refugees from feminism, leftism, gay liberation, socialism, and progressivism.

Yesterday, I received a letter from someone in Berkeley. She tells me that, earlier this week, she was “overjoyed to see the feisty Tikvah students on the steps of Sproul Plaza giving out Israeli flags and t-shirts and dancing in circles,” and how afterwards, some “went to confront the theatre of the absurd, enacting the checkpoints.” Referring to the feminist movement in Berkeley, she asks: “Could you ever have believed it? From anti-patriarchy to pro-Hamas in a few decades?” Her letter continues:

“That you exist and are doing this work means a great deal to me. So far, I have found ONE new friend who comes from the same Jewish lesbian feminist cultural lineage of the 1970s. Neither of us has many friends from the old days we can comfortably talk to anymore, although I still try. I thought I had the smartest bunch of women assembled for a lifetime but I was wrong.”

Please understand: I am a sentimental and sociable woman and for such reasons, I might have continued to talk to the useful idiots who routinely demonize Israel and America, romanticize jihad and the Islamic Veil, and slander freedom fighters as “fascist Islamophobes.” Luckily, they condemned me. After years of kissing up, they shunned me, attacked my work, sullied my reputation—or they simply “disappeared” that work from their collective memories. They did not invite me to speak at conferences or at memorial services for feminists whom I’d once loved and with whom I’d worked for years. These conferences and funerals were all being filmed for the archives — and my fine feminist comrades needed to create a “revisionist” history, one in which no Zionists, no American patriots, no defenders of Western civilization could appear.

It was an excellent education. I am grateful to them for it. But now, there is no going back. I understand that we were never “friends,” only “fellow travelers.” When I departed from and dared to criticize the Party Line, I no longer existed.