Andrea Dworkin is one of those love/hate figures many people have heard of but fewer have read. Gloria Steinem has said of her: "In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them." Famous for excoriating writing on the pornography industry and violence against women, up to now she hasn't explored her Jewishness in any depth. Scapegoat is a book which has the feel of a life's work, uniting her experience as a Jew, a former battered wife and an ardent activist for women's causes. It is an ambitious project, attempting to write about women and Jews, the hatred of them, how it is constructed, how and why it interconnects, and why it has been so enduring. Taking these similarities a step further, Dworkin seeks to examine patterns in Zionism and women's liberation.
Taking sweeping themes - "The State/ the Family", "Religion/Maternity", "Hate Literature/Pornography" - Dworkin explores the parallels between the persecution of Jews and the debasement of women. The book embraces many complex issues, and this is where Dworkin loses her way. Nearly every one of the chapter headings would have merited a book. This is a difficult book to read, and not just because Dworkin is an unflinching witness to atrocity who insists on making us one, too. She is exploring and exploding myths about Zionism. She admits, that as a Jew previously committed to Israel, it is difficult for her to criticise male Jews' behaviour in the Promised Land. Fashionable ideas about Israel as the ultra-macho state replacing and repudiating the vision of the feminised ghetto Jew are introduced. But in many instances, Dworkin is revisiting old arguments about anti-Semitism or masculinity/femininity. She may give them a tweak but she's not necessarily giving us new theories, particularly in the realm of historical evidence.
On the Holocaust, which has haunted and obsessed her since she was 10, she is particularly good about the sexual degradation of women, the double degradation of Jewish women and the hidden history of prostitution in the Nazi regime. She reminds us that the Holocaust was rehearsed in many forms. Particularly instructive is her visit to the scene of Cossack pogroms where she tells us Jews were flayed, babies ripped from wombs, limbs hacked off. As she notes: "What distinguished genocidal anti-Semitism from what had gone before it was precisely how rabid and commonplace it was. It became an ordinary truth, an unexamined premise of ordinary as well as intellectual, cultural, militarist and party political life; it was a familiar truth to the man in the street."
Her vision of women's future takes its cue from early Zionists. She may be attempting to become the Theodor Herzl or David Ben Gurion of women, going so far as to posit that only in an independent state of women will women ever be truly safe: "Women need land and guns or other armaments; or women need to organise non-violently in great masses that grow out of small demonstrations using civil disobedience." Put like that, it seems eminently sensible. The shocking thing is that Dworkin offers some eminently sensible ideas. She also undercuts them with a playful sense of humour, as in a reference to the state's attitudes to dissidents: "The punishment for being a dissident can range from the horror, the absolute horror of not being invited to A-list parties ; to the gulag, the penal colony, prison, exile, torture or death."
But while there are devastating insights in these pages, they are swamped by a style that is rambling and unwieldy. Sometimes a paragraph will be stuffed to bursting with quotes and footnotes, as reflected in a 48-page bibliography. She can veer from Burchill-like polemic to academic jargon at speed.
In Scapegoat, Dworkin hits us with practically every atrocity committed against Jews and women. Then she gets on to the atrocities being perpetuated by Jews against Palestinians in Israel. It is like having blows raining down on your head. The trouble with this catalogue of atrocity, a kind of encyclopaedia barbarica, is that it numbs the reader. If she intends to mobilise women and call us into action, she'll need a punchier and more accessible manifesto than this.
Katrina Goldstone is a critic and researcher who has written about attitudes to Jews and Jewish history