Andrea Dworkin - Right-wing Women

of Jewish law became, in Paul’s rhetoric, a major synonym for sin;

in a sense, concentrating on the abstraction of the law literally

turned intellection (more abstraction) into sin. What was not faith

in Christ was Jewish stuff: abstract laws, tolerance of sin, law and

writing and thinking as cultural diversions from the true faith.

What does it mean that Paul especially concentrates on the sin of

homosexuality in relation to the Jews and their law: the homosexual Greeks were at the pinnacle of culture five centuries before the birth of Christ—reading, writing, and ideas were their domain;

Paul passed the mantle of high culture to the Jews after the demise

of Greek culture—law substituted for both dialogue and tragedy.

Culture, through Paul’s agency, came to mean both homosexuals

(the Greek heritage) and Jews (the law as a basis for culture). For

hundreds of centuries, believing Christians have committed mass

murders, pogroms, vast persecutions, crafted and enforced systems

of civil and religious law so vicious and discriminatory that Jews

have been prohibited from owning land, denied citizenship and all

manner of civil rights, and even been defined as subhuman: sexual

intercourse with them has been regarded as a form of bestiality. In

at least two genocides of indescribable cruelty, both Jews and homosexuals were searched for, found, and killed: the Inquisition and the Holocaust.

The suffering of the Jews, the seemingly endless attempt to

purge the Jew from history and from society by driving him out or

exterminating him, has not made the Jews good. Jews remain human, to the astonishment of everyone, including Jews. But even more shocking to Christians is the undeniable fact that persecution

has not made Jews into Christians. As one liberal Christian leader

said on Sunday-morning television: we thought the Jews would

wither away; we have to face the fact that the Jews are still with us

and that even after the Holocaust there are still Jews who cling to

their identity as Jews; those of us who thought that conversion was

the answer to the Jewish problem have to face the fact that we

were wrong; we are going to have accept the fact that these are

God’s people in a very special sense— they cannot be wiped out, as

recent history has shown, as our attempts to convert them have

shown.

Not being Christian in a world that hates the Jew , the homosexual, the castrated male, haunts the post-Holocaust Jew : he has seen the future and it is annihilation. Especially the contemporary Jew

is fighting for his m asculinity. In the camps Jew ish men were castrated: some, only some. The castration was literal for individuals; two thirds of the world’s Jew ry was exterminated, which castrates

the people as a whole rather effectively. Nothing threatens the

Jewish male now more than a perception of him as being deficient

in m asculinity. For this reason, Israel is a m ilitarist nation: no one

will ever again accuse the Jew s of being soft. For this reason,

Amerikan Jew ish writers are apostles of machismo and pimp masculinity. And for this reason, there is a growing segment of the Amerikan Jew ish population that is part of the Christian evangelical Right.

First, there is the trade-off. On television, a rabbi and a priest

were talking. T he priest said: we feel about abortion the w ay you

feel about Israel. I think we can talk, said the rabbi. It is in the

interests of male Jew s (the power structure) to increase the population of Jew s. The trade-off—abortion for Israel— is in the interests of Jew s both for the sake of Israel and for the sake of rebuilding a

Jewish population in the easiest w ay— through male domination.

Second, there is the effort to dissociate the Jewish men from any

perception of fem ininity, being less masculine. Israel, of course,

makes Jew s more male: owning land, controlling a state, having a

nation, having an arm y, having borders to defend and to transgress. In associating with the Christian Right, there is a repudiation of homosexuality, liberal social tolerance of it (still blamed on Jews), a strong move against women (reestablishing male dominance), and in general making an alliance with the rulers— with the

Christians who run a Christian country.

Third, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,

which means that there are greedy Jews who think that power

means safety and also who take pleasure in power. The Christian

Right offers Jews not only a means of dissociation from homosexuality but also real dominance over women, if the social order the Christians want is effectively legislated.

Fourth, there is the fact that suffering has not made Jews good,

which means that there are Jews who hate homosexuals, women,

blacks, children, reading, writing, air, trees, and everything else

the Christian Right seems to hate.

Fifth, the right-wing emphasis on the importance of property

offers Jews a way of changing the history of Jews with respect to

property—whether the property is Israel or land or housing or factories or farms. The protection of property suggests to Jews that they will not be driven off what they own.

Sixth, religious conservatism has its analogue in social conservatism, in that both particularly uphold the rights of men to ownership of women and children. Right-wing Jews who are religiously orthodox see the secular pluralism of Western society in general and the United States in particular as taking Jews away

from Judaism: this, despite the emphasis that Judaism puts on

learning, makes them hostile to secular learning, secular intellectuals, secular Jew s, any education that is not strictly and explicitly Jewish. This brings them into a harmony of values with Christians

who do not like Jews because Jews represent learning: the right-

wing Jews are under the illusion that they and the Christian Right

dislike the same Jews for similar reasons.

Seventh, strangely enough it is in this quasi-religious coalition

with the Christian Right that right-wing Jews seek to find the assimilation that has always been the hope of Jews. We feel the same way you do, they say; we have the same values you have, the same

ideals, the same goals, and we are doing our share. It has been

brilliant strategy on the part of the Christian Right in the United

States to welcome the participation of Jew s, to support the state of

Israel, and to use pedestal anti-Semitism: rather than being ground