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.
Scapegoat
: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation 
Intercourse
