By Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 22, 2005

Review: Death of Feminism: What’s Next in the Struggle for Women’s Freedom, by Phyllis Chesler, Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pp., $24.95

It is a great tragedy in America that whenever someone calls for balance and fairness in political discussions, the media and the academy, they are often denounced as fanatical, hateful, right-wing zealots. They are accused of McCarthyism. Their work is refused publication in many mainstream outlets. They are blacklisted and smeared.

Unfortunately, that has been the experience of noted feminist and former-leftist Phyllis Chesler. Aside from being closed out of (among others) The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, which once published her work, she was also recently purged from a women’s email list-serve for daring to challenge a consensus view among its members–that Palestinian Arabs are the victim of Jewish aggression rather than the other way around. (Never mind the fact that a debate over Israel ought to have little if any place in an honest discussion of either U.S. or global women’s rights). In 2003, she had also dared to write The New Anti-Semitism.

Worse, Chesler in 2003 also took Swedish film producer Lukas Moodysson to task for refusing to show “Lilya 4-ever,”–on sexual slavery–in Israel. And she exposed the issue in FrontPageMagazine. This, according to the list members, amounted to a full-scale abandonment of reason, a defection to the enemy, and required that she be silenced. The same attitude prevailed when Chesler wrote in FrontPage on gender cleansing in Sudan. What mattered most to the list was not what she wrote, but where. After President Bush was reelected in 2004, Chesler was shut out of the women’s email group all together, effectively at the behest of Nation columnist Katha Pollitt. Continue reading “For a Feminist Foreign Policy” →

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