Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation Hardcover by Andrea Dworkin (Free Press #FreePress)

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.