Even as wildfires and incredible heat have devastated parts of Europe, the summer of 2026 has been almost entirely rained out in New York City. Flash floods, thunderstorms, heavy downpours, incessant rain. The poets understand things best. As Paul Verlaine put it:

“Il pleure dans mon cœur
Comme il pleut sur la ville;
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon cœur ?

It rains in my heart as it rains on the village; what is this melancholy that penetrates my heart?

Melancholy—yes, that’s precisely it. Here’s why.

Yesterday, I watched an amazing and terrifying documentary that the Wall Street Journal published. It is free for all to watch. The film concerns the way in which America pulled out of Afghanistan five years ago. Biden’s decision to do so and in the way he insisted that it be done could not have been a more horrendous and ill-advised choice. After abandoning the airbase at Bagram, leaving behind hundreds of millions of dollars of military equipment for the Taliban; after refusing to keep a modest number of American soldiers behind; after failing to evacuate embassy personnel, Afghan allies, and Afghan civilians who had helped America in a timely way—America shamefully, hastily, crazily withdrew, thus causing extraordinary and lifelong injury to our own soldiers, not to mention the erasure of Afghan women (literally their faces were blacked out in windows and under heavy burqas). Women were restricted in every possible way.

America did not go into Afghanistan to “save” women but to find Bin Laden, to respond to 9/11. However, our boots on the ground led to extraordinary freedom for women.

Why do I care about this? Because on that last day, August 26th, 2021, I had someone who has become very precious to me on the way to the Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul, running under the Taliban batons, whips, and guns; trying to hold her own in the massive surge of mainly men who were doing the same thing. Women and children were largely on their own.

I am remembering the 398 women that my little grassroots feminist team rescued that last day. I am referring to Mandy Sanghera, myself, and a third woman whom I cannot name but who obtained the planes for us. After months of encrypted correspondence, the woman whom I would soon choose as my Afghan granddaughter was on the run towards Abby Gate. Her mother and grandmother could not keep up. They fell back. Her father pushed on.

Did our women make it? Did my future granddaughter get out? We had no way of knowing.

Were they blown up by the ISIS-K suicide/homicide bomber together with thirteen of our Marines? It turned out that “our” women had just taken off and were able to watch the bombing from their plane windows.

All the while I was safely here in New York City, and yet, watching this documentary very slightly traumatized me.

What I learned—what I saw with my own eyes—was the torturous plight that President Biden’s policy inflicted on so many brave young American soldiers. The Afghan crowds were wild, desperate, totally out of control. The smell of blood, feces, sweat was everywhere. The military orders kept changing and were often incomprehensible. Parents tried to hand, or really to throw, infants and children over a high wall. A garbage-filled moat surrounded that high barbed wire fence. Yes, America still managed to rescue 124,000 Afghans, and yet, the rest were about to be tortured, beheaded, executed by the gleeful Taliban.

The soldiers on camera describe their psychological war wounds, not as PTSD but as a “moral injury.” The faces of all those whom they could not rescue, the sight of their 13 compatriots blown up by the ISIS-K bomber, how the Afghan civilians begged the Marines to shoot them if they could not rescue them—words fail me at this point.

Of course, a genuine rescue, even of one woman, takes years, a lifetime to accomplish. It does not and cannot end with the flight to a European country. That is another story to be told.

What I had not realized was the profoundly harmful effect America’s decision to draw “down to zero” had on our own young soldiers.

One Marine on camera wanted the leaders in charge of this disaster to be held accountable. He also said that it might go a long way if any of them sought “forgiveness.”

Why did this matter so much to me? As my readers know, I was once held captive in Kabul in a marriage. I was rescuing myself. It was both an altruistic and a redemptive act on my part.

More important: The documentary states (and I agree) that America’s dysfunctional and cowardly withdrawal led to Russia, Iran, and Hamas in Gaza to draw their own conclusions about American might.

A Note to My Readers: I am not forgetting that President George W. sent Saudis back home on 9/11 and 9/12 nor am I forgetting the failures of every single American President in terms of understanding how dangerous Islamic Jihad truly is and that includes Presidents Clinton (1 and 2), George H.W., Obama (1 and 2), Biden (1 and 2), and Trump in his first term.

That danger is still with us growing stronger by the hour.

Dear Readers:

I was asked to assemble some 21st-century videos of mine. Turns out there are quite a few. Here is one about antisemitism. I shared the program with Max Wallace. I should have stressed Qatar as well as Saudi Arabia and Iran--even back then, I knew, I knew. Well, one cannot say everything at the same time.

Tell me what you think.

My Best,
Phyllis

https://www.c-span.org/clip/public-affairs-event/user-clip-chesler-new-antisemitism/5204961

Dear Readers:

I am sharing the Introduction to my forthcoming book. Once again, I was compelled to write about this; I really did not want to do so. An author does not always freely “choose” her topics. Since I am one of the pioneers of Second-Wave feminism, I wanted to honor it and at the same time document that we were only human beings, imperfect, and that those who came after us were far more than imperfect—they betrayed the essence of women’s rights. I call them faux-feminists. They are the ones who wear hijab or niqab on campuses even as women in Afghanistan and Iran are murdered for failing to do so. They are also the ones who view “Palestine” as the most important feminist issue in the world. This is also true for Women’s Studies, Reproductive Rights, in the LGBTQ movement, the Goddess movement, the Christian Feminist Theologians, and for Feminist activism. I also charted the existence and rise of Antisemitism/anti-Zionism among Second-Wave feminists, including among some of our “icons,” from the early 1970s on, as well as in the media, and in international organizations long before it was on anyone’s radar.

Pretty crazy, yes? And yet it is so.

Here, have at it.

Introduction

The Second-Wave feminism that I once pioneered has been completely Palestinianized.

Sixty years ago, I did not foresee that feminists would so eagerly join the rest of the West in embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless, and suicidal; that feminists would privilege barbarism over civilization; and that they would one day become such grim totalitarian thinkers, such cowardly herd animals, and so susceptible to pro-Islamist and anti-Zionist/antisemitic propaganda.

Contemporary American “feminism” is far more concerned with the alleged occupation of Palestine—a country that does not and has never existed—than it is with the occupation of women’s bodies, faces, and minds worldwide.

It is a postmodern, postcolonial, and intersectional “feminism” in which legitimate concerns about race and an anti-woman obsession with identity have replaced any focus on sex-based rights. It is a “feminism” that passionately condemns Christianity, Judaism, and only one nation-state—Israel—as dangerous to women’s rights but dares not critique religiously supremacist Islam for this same reason. This allegedly evolved version of “feminism” condemns only Western imperialism and colonialism and refuses to acknowledge the long history of Islamic imperialism, colonialism, anti-Black racism, and both gender and religious apartheid.

Women’s Studies associations and national feminist organizations are not merely “politically correct”; they have become “Islamically correct.” They are currently more concerned with the religious sanctity of head and face veiling than they are with forced face veiling and honor-based violence in Muslim countries and in Muslim communities in the West. In the name of anti-racism, not only have such faux feminists betrayed the Jews, but they have also abandoned tribal and immigrant women of color to barbaric misogyny. Above all, they have abandoned the most heroic ex-Muslim, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, and Hindu male and female dissidents everywhere.

Too many Western feminists have become total conformists. They are no longer independent or creative thinkers. Faux feminists have also been persuaded that Islam is a “race,” not an ideology or a religion; that America’s historically grievous enslavement of Black Africans and South Africa’s horrifying apartheid regime are exactly the same as alleged Israeli discrimination against Arab Palestinians, including against Jihadists with blood on their hands. American feminists are no longer independently inspired activists but only take to the streets in large swarms of Jihad-like bullies and usually on behalf of non-feminist issues.

For more than a half-century, American academics and so-called feminists have condemned American foreign and corporate policies and are now ready to die for America’s sins; they are quite willing to sacrifice their own way of life, as well as the lives of others, for a presumably noble cause; they are ready to surrender the West to a cleansing, redeeming force—in the misguided belief that doing so will finally rid the entire world of its immense suffering.

They believe that only America has caused the world’s pain and only its destruction can cure it. They view themselves as barbarians who have forfeited the right to challenge any other group, culture, or religious ideology, no matter how dangerous or violent, lest they somehow “offend.”

Some of these American faux feminists actually believe that the humbling of America and the destruction of Israel will reduce the sorrows of all the world’s victims. They hope it will also free them from the burden of Empire—a guilt they so unhappily bear—even if this also means that the whole planet might be bombed back to the seventh century.

Some of my former Second-Wave feminist allies and their contemporary faux-feminist descendants view Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis—even al-Qaeda and ISIS—as forces that are trying to level the playing field.

Totalitarian thinking is flourishing today among educated American elites. Thought-control is flying high under the banners of “free speech” and “political correctness.” Dare to question this privileged lot’s right to silence or shame those who are trying to expose or challenge them, and you’ll quickly be attacked as representing a new and more dreadful form of McCarthyist “witch-hunting.”

Of course, movements are bound to evolve, and a diversity of ideas is always welcome. Blind and righteous conformity to rank propaganda is not a genuine intellectual development. Communist thinking is not an evolution; it is, rather, a devolution. It’s been tried and, in human hands, has failed; the human costs are beyond acceptable. An exaggerated concern for one’s own body and for one’s own sexual identity in no way addresses faux feminists’ presumably larger concerns about poverty, racism, climate change, and justice for the oppressed.

*****

Just as the Jewish pioneers once drained the malaria-infested swamps in the Holy Land, so too am I rooting out the swamps teeming with ancient Blood Libels and Big Lies that have penetrated and dominated every conceivable feminist space in America and, for that matter, in the entire Western world. Even I, who have been writing about this for decades, am overwhelmed by how much it is proving a Sisyphus-like task, or as my colleague Richard Landes has said, how much it’s like cleaning out the Augean Stables, a filth-ridden cattle enclosure that Hercules purged in a single day.^[i]

I am no Hercules. None of us is. But although the task is a mighty one, as Albert Camus understood, there is still valor and purpose in the perpetual attempt to do so.

Centuries of Christian and Islamic Jew-hatred as well as more than one hundred years of Soviet-era anti-Zionist/antisemitic propaganda, especially as propagated and even legalized by the United Nations, preceded all that was to follow. American organizations, left-wing philanthropists, and billions—perhaps even trillions—in Arab oil money solidified this new kind of “education.” Many Second-Wave feminist icons as well as their followers drank the proverbial Kool-Aid.

To my horror, most American faux feminists are among those who remained silent after 10/7. Unbelievably, they believe that wearing hijab and niqab (a face mask) is a statement of anti-racism or an act of heroic “resistance.”

It was not always like this.

Once, there was a moment in time, when a veritable multitude of American Sleeping Beauties awakened and saw themselves and each other in a totally new way. That moment has passed, but I still remember it with wonder and affection. Radical feminist ideas and activism were a bit like taking LSD. So many women became high at the same time. Suddenly, the world became psychedelically clear, and all the Lost Girls found themselves and each other.

The world had not seen anything like us—at least not since the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century suffragists, both in England and in America. We’d never seen anything like us. We—who only yesterday had been second- and third-class citizens—had, all at once, and all too briefly, become players in history.

I am writing this book as a Second-Wave pioneer, and I am doing so in order to remind both the anti-feminists and the faux feminists who we were and for what we once fought. I am writing this book for the coming generations and for the sake of the historical record.

Who were we?

Second-Wave pioneers emerged between 1963 and 1973, and we took ideas very seriously. Some of us were geniuses. Many of us were dangerously intelligent, and most of us were radical thinkers. We did not all think alike. We were champion hairsplitters and disagreed with each other with searing passion. In our midst was the usual assortment of scoundrels, bullies, con artists, liars, and incompetents—not to mention high-functioning psychopaths, manic depressives, and suicide artists.

However, I am not a “wokester.” I will not write any of them out of history or censor their works.

Without a feminist movement, I would have had a career but not necessarily a calling. I still would have written my books, but they would have had much smaller audiences and far less impact.

Despite everything, despite anything, I wouldn’t have missed this revolution—not for love or money. I remain forever grateful for that moment in time, that collective awakening that set me, at least partly, free from my former life as a “girl.”

Turning to women for the first time in my life to discuss my—and their—most important ideas was psychologically and intellectually revolutionary. For many of us rebellious and ambitious daughters, the wounds of maternal disapproval were temporarily healed.

However, we knew nothing—absolutely nothing—about our American and European feminist foremothers and forefathers, even less about non-Western feminists. Few of us knew that we had feminist ancestors who had battled for women’s rights and for minority rights in the Western world in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Before us, feminists had opposed sex slavery, wage slavery, marriage, automatic male custody of children, organized religion, and the absence of women’s legal, economic, educational, and political rights. Their writings were brilliant and fiery—but unknown to each successive generation.

In 1982, nearly twenty years after Betty Friedan’s enormously influential work, The Feminine Mystique,^[ii] had appeared, the divine Australian feminist scholar Dale Spender published Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them, in which she documented how the most remarkable feminist work had always been systematically disappeared again and again.^[iii]

Every generation of feminists had to reinvent the wheel. Mine certainly did. We called ourselves “sisters” and “daughters,” and we had no mothers, no heroic female models or mentors. We were, if anything, matricidal. With some exceptions, we also rejected the lives our own mothers had led.

Within ten to fifteen years, with a few exceptions, books by the best minds of my feminist generation were already out of print. Within fifteen years, university professors and their students were largely unfamiliar with most of our work. They took for granted—or regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned—the grueling lawsuits we had brought, our brave activism, and our most radical analyses, if indeed they even knew what we had done at all.

In our own lifetimes, we became like our suffragist grandmothers and shared their dusty, forgotten fate.

But I remember us as we were, and how we will always be: politically, intellectually, and sexually vivid, vivacious, incredibly vibrant.

Here’s what we did.

First, we formed a civil rights organization for women: The National Organization for Women (NOW), co-founded by two Black women—Aileen Hernandez^[iv] and Pauli Murray, who was a quietly “out” lesbian^[v] —and by a Jewish woman: Betty Friedan. NOW launched and won incredible class-action lawsuits. It demanded women’s employment and banking rights, access to public accommodations, and, in general, demonstrated against women’s legal, reproductive, political, and economic inequality. This work led to women’s entrance into formerly male-only jobs.

We picketed, marched, protested, sat in, and famously took over offices and buildings; helped women obtain illegal abortions; joined consciousness-raising groups; learned about orgasms; condemned incest, rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence; organized speak-outs, crisis hotlines, and shelters for battered women; some feminists came out as lesbians.

Finally, we implemented feminist ideas within our professions and began a process of transformation that, in some areas, continues to this day.

These were the three mighty tributaries of the second wave. I swam in all three torrents.

And yet.

Only now, looking back, do I remember how much of the early years of second-wave feminism was also painful.

I had such an idealized view of feminism that when I began to encounter incomprehensibly vicious behavior among feminists, I was stunned, blindsided. I had expected so much of other feminists—far too much, perhaps we all did—that when we failed to meet our own high standards, many of us felt betrayed.

And then, when we were really betrayed—slandered, shunned by everyone we knew, our ideas stolen, our authorship denied, our history revised—we had no name for what was happening. Eventually, we called this “trashing,” and it drove away many good feminists.

Individual petty jealousies and leaderless group bullying were frightening and ugly. “Mean girls” envied and destroyed excellence and talent. Feminists who had presumably left the 1960s Left brought with them its tactics of intimidation and interrogation. Many lesbians were supremacists who demanded primacy in terms of victimhood.

Some feminists did sound the alarm about what came to be called “trashing.” In 1970, the actress, journalist, and future film director Anselma Dell’Olio addressed this in an unpublished and incandescent manuscript that she titled her “Swan Song to the Women’s Movement.” In 1972, I quoted Anselma and discussed this subject in Women and Madness.^[vi]

In 1972, and again in 1976, Jo Freeman (Joreen) discussed this phenomenon in two important articles in Ms. Magazine: “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” and “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.^[vii]”

Mere words didn’t lead to a feminist reevaluation of sisterhood. Few feminists wanted to look at how they treated other women. And fewer still wanted to consider the possibility that the movement was not both “breast and womb.”

However, Paradise is always followed by the Fall.

For example: My good friend and colleague, the late great psychologist Naomi Weisstein, told me that within three years of its formation, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band had turned on her in pretty much all the familiar feminist ways. Naomi had written many of their songs and was also a genius at stand-up comedy at their performances. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which she had helped found in 1969, had already trashed her as a “star” and demanded that she surrender her speaking engagements to less eloquent speakers. Band members followed suit, and, fraught with envy and untold hidden agendas, they brought about the end of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band in 1973.^[viii]

As has been said: First, our movement ate its leaders; then, they turned on each other.

None of this stopped me, but it took its toll. After twenty years of research, I finally published a book titled Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman (2002). Nothing to see here. Feminists behaved just like women behaved towards each other: competitively, aggressively, and with cruelty—a female version of Man’s Inhumanity to Man.

My greatest comfort and strength came from doing the work itself—and from knowing that my work touched, changed, and even saved women’s lives.

But I also never stopped trying. Twenty years later, I convened a panel at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association at Spelman College. The panel’s title was “Horizontal Hostility among Women: Race, Class and Gender Issues,” and it nearly tore the roof off the place. Because my invitee and co-panelist, author bell hooks,^[ix] and I publicly agreed on so incendiary a subject, some audience members—many of whom were African American women—accused the much-younger hooks of being my “mammy.” But mainly the audience wanted to tell their own stories of woman-on-woman betrayal and heartbreak. When we were finally forced to leave the auditorium, I sat outside on the lawn for a very long time listening to them speak.

Once, I also presented my views on psychological matricide and sororicide at a national conference of feminist therapists. Therapists had difficulty acknowledging that women could also be sexists. One African American therapist insisted that this was a “white girl’s problem”; one lesbian therapist insisted that this was a “straight girl’s problem”; one heterosexual therapist said that she hadn’t known that “women even had ‘a’ mother goddess or that we had killed her.” She urgently wanted to know “the” goddess’s name.

This book will share my own encounters with anti-Zionism/antisemitism among other feminist “icons”—long before our descendants became Palestinianized. However, I do not stop with my own experiences.

Sighing mightily as I girded my loins for this book, I also researched the American Women’s Studies movement; the Reproductive Rights movement; the LGBT and Queer movement; the Wiccan/Mother Goddess movement; the Christian feminist liberation theology movements; and the Feminist Activism, Media, and Organization movements. This research includes many contemporary interviews as well as much reading; it was considerably painful and enraging but also enlightening.

Look: I’m not asking for much. (Just joking.) But as the demonstrators chant: “What do I want? And when do I want it?” For starters: I want feminist intellectuals, academics, activists, and organizational leaders to learn how to shun propaganda and peer pressure. I want them to write only about subjects in which they are truly expert and to write clearly and think independently. I want them to quit being Jew haters and anti-Zionists. I want them to stop sacrificing the women and dissidents of Islam in order to bring about the destruction of the West.

As I was writing this introduction, a lesbian feminist who is in her late eighties posted a rant on social media. Her name does not matter. There are thousands more like her:

The US and Israel are bombing the hell out of Iran, killing Iranian people and destroying sacred historical heritage sites while caskets containing young American soldiers who died for the cause are carried across our TV screens without an honor guard and all we hear is the success of the mission while the price of gas goes up and the stock market goes down and the worn out tired earth continues to die and whatever happens after is unknown; and yet, our country right or wrong is no longer the place where dark skinned immigrants could once flee to because we now have concentration camps and deportation of such much needed immigrants who do the dirty work; and all this while pregnant migrant teens are kept in a place in South Texas to keep them safe from abortions. Have I gotten these things right, or is it my fevered imagination run wild?

As of this writing, I’ve not yet seen a parade of Vietnam War-era-like young American soldiers in caskets being carried across our screens without an honor guard post-Iran, have you? I’m not saying that this cannot happen…

However, the only feminist issue she mentions—abortion—appears towards the end of her post, and the only pregnant women she is concerned about are the “migrant teens.” She seems to have no knowledge that Iran has been murdering and torture-murdering Americans for the last 47 years; she knows or cares nothing about Iran’s barbaric persecution and murder of its own people, including feminist and gay dissidents. Climate change and immigration now pass as burning feminist issues, not sexual violence towards women and children, woman-battering, or even female poverty.

This book was very hard for me to write. The amount and intensity of anti-Zionism and antisemitism among my former allies and friends, the Palestinianization among my so-called descendants, the faux feminists—made me feel tainted by choosing to handle so much toxic material.

However, real feminist work has continued on throughout the 21st century.

Contemporary real feminism differs from our Second-Wave grand illusions and historically lucky momentum, but, in a way, it has also built upon many of our ideas. Real twenty-first century feminism is a bit more balkanized in terms of a feminist focus on one ethnicity, one race, one issue only, but it is also more international in nature. It is not Palestinianized work; the focus is not on the overriding importance of Palestine.

This is a very personal book. I lived everything about which I write: it either happened to me, or I was an eyewitness to the incident, or I spoke to the woman immediately afterwards. I also lectured and published about it from the early 1970s on. In addition, I interviewed still-living Second-Wave feminists about their own experiences of antisemitism/anti-Zionism. As a “recovering academic,” I was able to read a great deal of academic (and pseudo-academic) work that appeared both back in the day and throughout the 21st century.

The personal voice—or my lived experience—is my contribution to the historical record. This is exceptionally important since so many accounts of Second-Wave feminism, especially on the subjects of Israel, Judaism, anti-Zionist/antisemitism, Islam, and Palestine, have been wiped clean on the internet or radically transformed into believable lies. Some important feminists and events have been “disappeared”; credit for something that someone else really did has been neatly claimed. Of course, this kind of revisionism is also true in general—more so with the advent of social media and AI.

I hope that my personal voice will make it easier to trust my political conclusions and analyses. As they said in my generation: “The personal is political,” and so it is.

If one lives long enough, one may also begin to hear the sound of a mighty pendulum beginning to swing.

For example: Early in 2026, a brave new group, Feminists Against Antisemitism, asked to interview me. They are primarily based in the UK, and even more significantly, most of the founders are Christians. Jews are among them. Their group arose in response to pro-Palestinian demonstrators and their attempted takeover of a feminist conference in Brighton, England.

I have waited for them for quite a long time. I am so glad they are now here. The late great poet Adrienne Rich, in her collection Snapshots of a Daughter in Law, speaks for me:

“Well,

she’s long about her coming, who must be

more merciless to herself than history.

her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

breasted and glancing through the currents,

taking the light upon her

at least as beautiful as any boy

or helicopter,

poised, still coming,

her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:

delivered

palpable

ours.”

^[i] Richard Landes, “Augean Stables,” Augean Stables (Augean Stables), accessed June 18, 2026, https://theaugeanstables.com/; Richard Landes, Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034 (Harvard University Press, 1995); Richard Landes, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (Oxford University Press, 2011); Richard Landes, Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Academic Studies Press, 2022).

^[ii] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (W. W. Norton & Company, 1963); Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Random House, 1976).

^[iii] Dale Spender, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to Them (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).

^[iv] Aileen Hernandez, National Women of Color Organizations: A Report to the Ford Foundation (Ford Foundation, 1991).

^[v] Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (Harper & Brothers, 1956); Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage (Harper & Row, 1987).

^[vi] Anselma Dell’Olio, “Swan Song to the Women’s Movement” (unpublished manuscript, 1970); Fellini of the Spirits, directed by Anselma Dell’Olio (Mad Entertainment, 2020).

^[vii] Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” The Second Wave 2, no. 1 (1972); Jo Freeman, “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood,” Ms. magazine, April 1976.

^[viii] Naomi Weisstein, Psychology Constructs the Female (New England Free Press, 1968); Naomi Weisstein, “Will the Women’s Movement Survive?,” Ms. magazine, 1975; “Chicago Women’s Liberation Union Herstory Project,” Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (Chicago Women’s Liberation Union), accessed June 18, 2026, https://www.cwluherstory.org/

^[ix] bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (South End Press, 1984).

I rarely weep, but when I first read about the death of our latest Jewish American lone soldier, William (Z’eev) Shakin, I sobbed. Heroic action and magnificent selflessness compel me to do so.

Then, earlier today, when I attended via livestream his levaya—his memorial service—I briefly wept again. This all-American religious 25 year old (so very young!), half-Ashkenazi, half-Moroccan, outta Great Neck, New York, was buried earlier today on Har Hamenuchot. His grave may be found at Block 15, Section D, Row A, Grave 67. He was the descendent of both Ashkenazi and Moroccan rabbis. I tried hard to catch the names of his Moroccan maternal ancestors but failed to do so. It may have been Mrejen.

As we now know, Shakin was war-wounded and could not find a way to continue on in this life after seeing so much death, so much evil cutting down his haverim in the Golani 13 Brigade; after he witnessed his friend “killed in battle”—perhaps after he understood that the war against the Jews and against Jewish Israel seems to have been going on for millennia and was not about to end anytime soon.

At least a thousand people were there to see him off, to honor him.

Will was an all-American “guy”“ who loved hockey, fishing, and skateboarding. However, he and his family were also religious and very educated. Every relative who eulogized him quoted from the Torah, Talmud, Pirkei Avot—as well as from our current parasha, Shoftim, Judges—to address him. This included his sister and his mother.

Will was generous. He bought gloves, long johns, a generator for his fellow soldiers.

Here is how the many speakers described him:

“He believed in something bigger than himself.”

He “loved life and was always looking for his purpose...Will was always searching for a just cause.”

Will was the “most purpose-driven man I ever met.”

“Your heart was too big for this world.”

People called him a “fire.” He was on fire to do good in this world.

Every speaker, friend, and relative apologized for not having understood how much Will had been suffering, for not having been able to console him or to help him find the help that he needed.

When Will returned to America, he enrolled in Yeshiva University’s School of Social Work. However, he was suffering from what they once called “shell shock” after World War One and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after the Vietnam War. This is more serious than a broken bone (Will did not know that he came home with a fractured ankle, which was more easily mended than his non-visible wounds). PTSD has often been underrated, even mocked by those who do not understand that psychic wounds can steal the color from one’s life, make continuing to live dishonorable, unbearable.

The symptoms include nightmares, insomnia, flashbacks, intrusive memories, anxiety, numbness, hypervigilance, an inability to focus. This goes on, day after day. Night after night. Some war-wounded soldiers remain trapped on the battlefield with no respite, no exit.

Therapy is not always effective nor is it always available. Drugs may or may not be effective. Time alone may not heal a fractured soul. We do not understand why one soldier can return to life (almost) as he knew it before, and why another one cannot do so, however hard he tries.

The beloved writer Stefan Zweig safely escaped Germany, but he died by suicide because he could not live in a world in which the Nazis had risen and destroyed the European culture he once knew and loved.

Perhaps—just perhaps—our hero Z’eev Shakin could not continue a life that had not only become too painful for him to bear, but also one in which his ability to do good on earth, to help and protect others may, in his eyes, have become forever broken.

Someone who spoke said, “We will never let your fire die out, your candle will become our collective duty.” (And here I am paraphrasing.)

May this be our promise as well.

May Z’eev z”l finally rest in peace.

Photographer William Meyers’s new collection, Civics, has given us a photographic record of our more civilized moments in 21^st-century New York City. The scenes are relatively peaceful portrayals of citizens running for office, handing out election brochures at subway stops: Here’s one weary and worried candidate “working the phones,” and there’s a smiling African American female bus driver, and a warm-hearted school principal—this photo won my heart as did that of a losing candidate’s empty headquarters the night the election was lost.

Meyers also photographs demonstrations, but he has captured seemingly non-violent moments down at Wall Street as well as those of a Black Lives Matter protest on the Upper West Side. Meyers photographs candidates in synagogues (a really beautiful one of Carolyn Maloney at the Sutton Place Synagogue—I so wished that she had won) and journalists hard at work on the street and at their desks. Volunteers engaged in Good Causes for indigent women, peaceful town hall meetings, trusted police officers on the job, a Good Samaritan aiding a victim of epilepsy in Brooklyn at a Church Avenue station.

These are stills of patriots and parks, Democrats and Republicans, churches and synagogues, statues and monuments.

I fear that such civilized behavior is profoundly under siege—or so it increasingly seems. Perhaps Meyers wanted to document our city’s better moments as a tribute to what we’re in danger of forgetting or losing. Although his photographs range in time from the early 21st century to 2026, his discerning camera has not memorialized subway shovings, stabbings, and staring contests, car rammings, lootings, the hallucinating homeless, ugly street encampments, strangers screaming at each other, the deranged encouragement of violent anti-Jewish demonstrations by New York City’s mayor, Zohran.

Perhaps Meyers’s work is that of a transitional artist, one versed in the past—and not yet willing to let it go—and who is not willing to step into a very strange and frightening future.

Strangely enough, the choice of photographs in Civics reminded me of why I just rewatched the Oxford-based British police drama Endeavor. A recent review of this much-loved program by someone named Rhino1008 explained my abiding interest in Shaun Evans’s portrayal of an Oxford-educated young man, someone who dotes on opera and classical music as well as on the classics but who nevertheless chooses to enter the rough-and-tumble “game” of being a police officer. Endeavor wants to be known as “just Morse” (his last name, his official name), and he is not a hero so much as he is a “chronicler—one eye on events, one eye on how they will be remembered.”

Here’s what Rhino writes:

“He is a classicist. He understands civilizations as arcs...Empire fading. Certainties thinning. Institutions hollowing out...And crucially, he responds as a man formed by high culture rather than mass culture. Mahler’s Fifth - not as background music, but as structure. Longing, rupture, suspended resolution. Opera rather than variety hall. His tastes situate him inside a European tragic tradition that assumes fracture is inevitable. He does not expect harmony; he expects collapse delayed.”

Meyers has photographed our past or at least the still-ongoing scenes of our better, more civic-minded selves. At some level, he may know, or fear, that these moments may be passing—may actually have already passed—away from our city.

The fact that Meyers works in black and white but not in color is interesting. Perhaps he is also memorializing or honoring the way that all the great photographers of the past were once forced to work. In describing his previous collection of music and musicians in the city, I wrote:

“I grew up with black and white photos, movies, which were then known as the ‘pictures.’ My childhood family photos are all in black and white. Although the world itself is multi-colored, images in black and white somehow still seem more authentic, more serious, more artistic, more personal than the best technicolor photos.

“I once viewed the past only in black and white, in photos by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Eve Arnold (I worked for her husband), Margaret Bourke-White, Brassai, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Mary-Ellen Mark, Gordon Parks, and James Van Der Zee.

“I haunted the Thalia and Paris movie theaters in the early nineteen sixties to travel the world through black and white films. Who can forget Bergman’s Persona, De Sica’s Two Women and The Bicycle Thief, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, and Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Jules and Jim?

Bill: Thanks for focusing on the Bright Side. Thanks for the memories.

Recently, at a gathering, a man came by and, for some reason, assumed that we share all views in common. I am a feminist. That, to him, means that I think the way Democrats think. Thus, he asked me whether I was optimistic about the mid-terms.

Said I: “Sir, what we are facing is so much larger than the color war between the Republicans and the Democrats in America.”

“What do you mean? What could be larger? Aren’t you hoping that Susan Collins will lose?”

Committed to kindness and diplomacy, I said: “I am thinking about the out-of-control wildfires in Spain, France, and Scotland. I also have in mind the dangerous surges of immigrants into Europe, at least those immigrants who have no intention of assimilating but who reserve the right to live on the Western dime while they prey upon their own women and upon all infidels. But I am mostly thinking about what is going on in Iran and with the devilish doings of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey.”

“Are you a Trumper?” he asked. Aghast. Terrified.

“I am not at all comforted by President Trump’s on-again/off-again approach to making a deal that absolutely can never be made with fundamentalist fanatics. Any ‘peace’ deal that Hamas or Iran or their proxies agree to only and ever means ‘for now,’ while they re-arm, train new Jihadists, plan new terrorist operations against the West, especially against Israel and America. As my friend and colleague Dr. Mordechai Kedar has written many times, including today at Israel National News, all so-called ‘peace deals’ are temporary among the Jihadists and can be broken when they’ve recovered their strength.”

I paused. Sipped some water.

“But, on the other hand, this is a terrible decision that President Trump and his administration are weighing. Following through on strikes against Iran will definitely mean many deaths, possibly world war, and the continued failure of the global economy. Even if Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah are mightily diminished, even if Iran is further reduced, even to its knees—they will come back. America would only be buying some time. Our coming generations would be sacrificed once again to Jihad-terrorism. And the hidden terror cells all over the world would be activated.”

“So what are you saying? That Trump is right to delay and delay? Isn’t he just plain crazy?”

“Sir, what I’m actually saying is that President Jimmy Carter should have gotten our kidnapped American diplomats out of Teheran in 1979, no matter what. That President Bill Clinton should not have stood together with Yasser Arafat and PM Yitzhak Rabin, all so proud of themselves for having forged an imaginary, even a delusional peace. That President Bush should not have sent all those Saudi nationals back home right after 19, mainly Saudi, terrorists had flown planes into the World Trade Center, tearing a hole in history. What I’m saying is that Presidents Obama and Biden just threw billions and lots of shade at Iran, making this almost impossible situation worse. Appeasing such opponents, such openly self-declared enemies can never work.”

“So what are you saying we can do?”

“First, I recommend reading the Middle East Forum on this question. I also recommend reading a lot more about the history of Islam vis-a-vis their own dissidents, their own women, and vis-a-vis all infidels, beginning with the Jews. Read expert and non-partisan military analyses of asymmetrical warfare. But especially read up on the Iranian and left-wing funding of the greatest online disinformation campaign that has ever existed, i.e., the propaganda against the West.”

“If you do, perhaps you will start coming up with independent suggestions about what to do; what is to be done.”

“What are you saying—that you approve of how Rand Paul handled his witch-hunt against Dr. Fauci?”

“No. I’m not saying that. Revelations about a public figure’s character are not that relevant, but the gossip is enjoyable. However, what Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary comprises crimes, or coverups, that are now part of the story of how 7 million people died worldwide, and how 1.1 million Americans died. I always described Covid-19 as the Wuhan Virus, and it seems that I was right. At the time, I was accused of being a racist.”

“But are you not in favor of Susan Collins maintaining her Senate seat in Maine?”

“Well, you decide. She did vote against abortion. But look at the candidates whom the Democrats dragged out in Maine. Up to the voters. I do not live in Maine, do you?”

And, at that, we parted company and began talking to other people in the room.

What I’ve been doing this this week is portraying some of the Western Academy’s leading and most influential figures, such as Edward Said, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Judith Butler. Their ideas have not only shaped the media and most international organizations, but they have also been fueled by both left-wing and Muslim anti-Western funders. Today, I have a few words to say about Angela Davis. In my forthcoming book, The Complete Palestinianization of American Feminism, I expand the discussion to include many more such idols with considerable claws of clay who have dominated our universities for at least four decades.

When I was much younger and somewhat in the grip of a left-wing cult, I was among those who marched for Angela Davis when she was jailed in Manhattan. Most feminists and feminist magazines featured her as a Black-American feminist hero starting in 1972; this has continued on down through the decades. Feminists did not—and do not—view her as a pro-Soviet apologist. Feminist newspapers idolized her as a Black woman fighting back. They and others glamorized Davis as a feminist, an artist, and a heroic dissident, but she is nothing of the sort.

Davis is an unrepentant Communist who supported the Soviet Union in every way and refused to criticize it for its persecution of real dissidents and ethnic minorities, including Soviet Jews. The millions of peasants whom Stalin murdered in a state-sponsored famine—not a word from Davis. Stalin’s torture cells? His gulag? The rise of a plutocracy? Putin? Ukraine? Again, not a word of reproach. Instead, Davis savagely criticized only America for its history of slavery and for its continued discrimination against Black Americans. She was among those who took the globalized fight against apartheid in South Africa to alleged “apartheid” in Israel.

Although she is a lesbian, thank God, Davis does not identify as “queer.” She has falsely compared what happened to Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, with what happens to brown-, black-, and olive-skinned Palestinian Jihadists and terrorists at the hands of Israelis fighting back. Davis has misused the concept of “intersectionality” so as to better create cartoon-level memes, the purpose of which is to scapegoat Israel for the crimes committed by others and to draw false parallels where none exist.

For example, in a 2015 collection of her lectures and interviews, she strongly embraced anti-Zionism and, according to Dr. Corinne E. Blackmer, continued to repeat “the major strand of Soviet-era ideological propaganda but has transcended Cold War aporias to remerge in the twenty-first century as pro-BDS advocacy.”

In a 2017 article titled “The Intersectionality of Fools” in The New Criterion, Dominic Green critiques Davis’s 2016 book, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, in which she likens “the recurring shootings or killings of unarmed Black men in the United States, on the one hand, with the deaths of armed Palestinian protestors in Israel/Palestine.” I want to thank Corinne E. Blackmer for having led me to this article. “Armed protestors”? Is that how Davis characterizes Arab Jihadist/terrorists who are obsessed with ethnically “cleansing” the Middle East of its remaining Jews in Israel?

As I’ve noted elsewhere, when I spoke at the University of Santa Cruz, where Davis taught, I personally invited her to attend my lecture on antisemitism or at least to meet with me. Of course, I received no response.

Does anyone even remember why Angela Davis was jailed, tried, and exonerated? Does anyone even care?

In 1970, Davis purchased the firearms that Jonathan Jackson, the brother of the imprisoned George Jackson, used in the kidnapping of a judge, prosecutor, jurors, and two or three African American prisoners in an open court. A police shoot-out ensued, which led to the death of the judge and three African American men. Davis made the FBI Most Wanted List, was jailed, tried, and found innocent by an all-white jury. Support for her was tremendous. She visited Cuba and found it an anti-racist paradise. She visited Soviet Russia to receive the Lenin Peace Prize and ran for vice president of the American Communist Party.

Even before she was found “not guilty,” Davis had already become the Che Guevara or the Lila Khaled of the feminist movement.

Who is Judith Butler? Does one really need to ask?

Butler is the academic flavor of the last three decades, our very own home-grown Lacan, a “performance” artiste par excellence.

Butler is known for advancing the thesis that gender/sex do not exist, that everything is socially constructed, and that “gender/sex” are performed; they are not biologically based. In a sense, for Butler nothing is real; it is only what one feels or says that matters; reality is something with which one can “play,” at least linguistically. Thus, in her view, only grammar is real, and she demands to be referred to as “they,” not as “he” or “she” because both are concepts, or insults, that do not even exist. Her writing is postmodern, obscure, sometimes incomprehensible, always affected, and domineering. Her own chosen identity is a queer performance. Back in the day, “they” might have been described as a butch dyke or a lesbian who wears no makeup, keeps her hair very short, and could “pass” as a man. (No crime of course but, nevertheless, a bit startling.)

Butler became internationally known in 1990, when she published her book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Although Butler’s Ph.D. is in philosophy, “they” are also very well known for “their” anti-Zionism and “their” preference for Jewish vulnerability in an endangered and stateless form because, in Butler’s view, that is a more moral way of being Jewish. I just checked Butler’s Wikipedia entry and found it disturbing that the editors have adopted Butler’s demand that “they” be described as “they.” I will no longer follow her instructions in this brief sketch.

Incredibly, like every Islamic Jihadist, Butler believes in a one-state solution—yes, despite the long history of how Arab Muslims have routinely taxed, impoverished, murdered, and exiled its Jewish citizens; despite the fact that the Arab Muslim Middle East has been rendered Judenrein for quite a while; despite the fact that Arab leaders have rejected a Palestinian state over and over again.

To Butler, such facts do not exist; she prefers an abstract solution to a very dangerous reality. In her view, Zionism is a racist, European, and colonial practice. She has supported versions of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, has criticized Israel for what she calls the “apartheid” wall (not the security barrier), and has savagely critiqued Israel for its various wars of self-defense.

She is one tough Jew, mightily admired in both Berlin and Berkeley.

In her 2012 work, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, she notes that many important 19^th-century Jewish thinkers also opposed Zionism, and it was not necessarily viewed as antisemitic. According to Corinne E. Blackmer in her excellent 2020 work Queering Anti-Zionism: Academic Freedom, LGBT Intellectuals, and Israel/Palestine Campus Activism:

“Two possible lessons or conclusions can be drawn from the fact that Jews experienced considerable state-sponsored violence, persecution, and discrimination in the galut [diaspora] culminating not only in the Holocaust but also the forced removal of nearly one million Mizrachi [Arab] Jews from their ancestral homes in the Middle East....the only plausible means for Jews to realistically preserve themselves requires having a state of their own.”

However, in Butler’s view the alleged, non-factual, and exaggerated harm done to Arab Muslim Palestinians now demands a one-state solution, a state in which Butler requires that Jews “perform” an “identity makeover” and become part-hybrid Muslim and Christian Arabs, and reject Zionism. Blackmer describes Butler’s proposal in this way:

“Just as Herzl was wrong to conclude that creating a Jewish state would end anti-semitism, so too does Butler err in contending that eliminating Zionism would also end hatred of Jews...Butler desires that Greater Palestine become an entity inhabited by Jews and Palestinians who have deconstructed their particular mono-national identities and then reconstructed themselves with binational identities.”

Butler’s malicious mischief is somewhat insane. And because it is, she has become very popular and very celebrated. Butler is quite literally “playing” with lives but at a safe distance.

At least she does not identify herself as a Palestinian. Butler actually climbed the ladder to the stars by following in Derrida’s and Lacan’s paths and by claiming she was “queer.” I am grateful for this small mercy.

Being pro-Palestine, or better yet, presenting oneself as a Palestinian, is a form of academic opportunism, at least in the West. One cannot exaggerate how pervasive this is.

The overly influential Edward Said did so with impunity, and he allowed the world to view him as a dispossessed and therefore heroic Arab Muslim Palestinian. As I’ve previously noted, Said was a dhimmi, a Christian who came from a very wealthy family. Said identified with the aggressors just as so many Westerners are currently doing.

Lila Abu-Lughod is another such academic climber. Is Abu-Lughod an Arab and/or a Palestinian? Is she a Muslim?

Lila Abu-Lughod’s father, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, was born in British Mandatory Palestine (in Jaffa). However, both he and his family left for good in 1948, long before Lila was born. Thereafter, Ibrahim graduated from the University of Illinois and taught at many American universities for nearly forty years. He became a prominent pro-Palestinian academic.

However, Lila Abu-Lughod’s mother—her mother!!!—was a Jewish American sociologist, Janet Abu-Lughod (nee Lippman), which automatically makes Lila a Jew, at least in the eyes of Jewish law. Her daughter nevertheless identifies herself as a Palestinian-American (or allows others to make that assumption). She does not identify herself as a Jew, not even as a Jewish-American Palestinian. Her tie to “Palestine,” through her father, is no more a credential than being born a Jew is a qualifier for one’s non-scholarly views on Israel-Palestine.

At least Lila has studied Arab Muslim and Bedouin communities and has spent some time in Egypt doing research. However, she does not approve of Western feminists who dare to care about the women of Afghanistan, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. According to her, we have no right to “judge” what we cannot possibly understand; our attempts to do so lead only to “Islamophobic,” racist views of a Western-occupied people.

On October 25, 2010, at the American University of Beirut, Abu-Lughod admonished (Western) feminists who “sensationalize” honor killings. She warned “that an obsessive focus on so-called honor crime(s) may allow scholars and activists to ignore important contexts for violence against women: social tensions; political conflicts; forms of racial, class, and ethnic discrimination; religious movements; government policing and surveillance; and military intervention.”

I strongly disagree. Based on my own four studies on honor killing, and my interviews with those women who escaped being honor killed, this ugly practice is not due to any political conflict or military intervention. It seems to be indigenous to the region and may have preceded Islam. I hold all religious leaders responsible for not attempting to find ways to abolish such femicide.

What kind of feminism does Abu-Lughod represent? She is a post-colonial, postmodern, multicultural relativist; a professor who does not believe in universal standards of human rights. Like Sunera Thobani, Abu-Lughod’s work primarily serves the cause of one nationalism—Palestinian—and one tradition only—Islam/Islamism.

Another Lila—this time spelled Leila Ahmed, an Egyptian American-born feminist—has defended both the Veil and Polygamy within Islam. Accepting Muslim societies as they are, she explains that veiling allows an “upwardly professional woman to move from the familiar settings of their rural homes and emerge into a sexually integrated urban world, [one which is] still an alien, uncomfortable social reality for both women and men.” Privately, Leila once explained to me that polygamy often works for women since they crave female companionship as well as help with the chores.

Such views have helped Ahmed rise within the Western academy—and rise she has. From professor, and then director, of Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, she became the first professor of Women Studies in Religion at the Harvard Divinity School. Within a year, she also received an Endowed Chair there.

I happen to agree with her point that the bikini is no more a free choice among Western women than is the burqa, niqab, or hijab among Muslim women. However, the fact that sexism dominates female clothing in various and almost opposite ways is not a good enough justification for any of the fashion. Although Ahmed views Mohammed as honoring women especially because he veiled his own wives and other upper-class women—my view is that, understanding unbridled male lust, Mohammed declared “his” women as off-limits. Perhaps this is another unspoken but understandable reason for the female Veil.

At least Ahmed is thinking deeply about women. Our other Lila (Abu-Lughod) is often the “fig leaf” for all those faux-feminists whose expertise does not lie in the Middle East.

For example, in December of 2023, two months after 10/7, Barnard again failed womankind as well as any and all moral clarity. They organized an event whose program was titled “Feminism and Palestine at Barnard.”

Faculty speakers included Columbia’s very own Lila Abu-Lughod, Jafari Sinclaire Allen, Jack Halberstam, Premilla Nadasen, and Neferti Tadiar. Sarah Haley moderated. Five of these panelists are professors of Sexuality and Gender and/or Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, as is the moderator. They are experts in “Islamophobia” (a clever concept but one that does not reflect reality), queer studies, African American and Afro-Caribbean studies, transgenderism, working-class women of color, women of color in the Philippines, post-colonialism, Black feminist history, prison abolition, and “colonial” feminism, etc.

Yes, I looked up their work.

Their papers in these fields may be excellent. Or not. However, not one of the panelists studied the Middle East, no one became a scholar in Middle Eastern archeology, anthropology, history (both ancient and modern), or in the languages, history, laws and customs in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.

Lila Abu-Lughod is the only panelist who has at least published some interesting work about Muslim women in the Middle East and about Bedouin women in particular, including Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. However, Abu-Lughod, like her Columbia University colleague Gayatri Spivak, views a Western-style fight for women’s rights in the Muslim world as “colonial feminism.”

That means that all Western views of forced veiling, forced marriage, forced cousin marriage, polygamy, and the appearance of seeming too Western—they all deserve beatings, lashing, house imprisonment, and even stoning. Disobedience in a woman is not allowed.

In a way, Lila Abu-Lughod, like Edward W. Said, chose to identify herself as a Palestinian. Was this out of loyalty to her father or merely the usual opportunism in terms of the Western academic life?

Perhaps I am the one who fails to understand. In a post-modern era, and one which idolizes both Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler, one can easily change one’s identity from male to female, from Jewish to Palestinian. Everything is fluid, permeable, and so academically useful.

I just re-watched an important and lively Intelligence² debate that took place in 2007 in London. The proposition was “We Should Not Be Reluctant to Assert the Superiority of the West”—yea or nay. The panelists included my dear friend Ibn Warraq, Douglas Murray (with whom we have both worked), and David Aronovich. They were all in favor of defending the West. Those opposed were Tariq Ramadan, William Dalrymple and Charles Glass. It was chaired by the jovial but controlling Edward Lucas.

Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He believes in a moratorium on stoning women, to give the Ummah enough time to consider the matter amongst themselves. Ramadan, formerly an Oxford-based and much glamorized “Islamic scholar,” was subsequently convicted of three rapes in both France and Switzerland, and an international warrant for his arrest remains in existence. Ramadan insists that only illness kept him away from the trials. Perhaps that is true; perhaps it is merely a ruse. Ramadan apparently lives in Geneva and conveniently became a Swiss citizen. Switzerland does not extradite its citizens.

Everyone on the panel was exceedingly well-spoken, serious, even brilliant, but Ibn Warraq drew the greatest laughter that evening when he said: “I’d rather not live in a society where one gets stoned for adultery and much prefer a place where one gets stoned—and then commits adultery.” (I am paraphrasing).

What caught my ear was this: Tariq Ramadan damned the West for its gravest excesses, its worst colonial cruelties, World Wars, etc. (as did Dalrymple and Glass). But Ramadan also pointed out that many so-called Judeo-Christian Western values were not really Western. For example, he actually admitted that “the Jewish tradition is not Western.”

What ho??? And so, Ramadan himself confirmed that the Jewish people are indigenous to the Levant and were there for more than three millennia, that we are not “settler colonizers” in an imaginary country called “Palestine,” whose only purpose is to genocidally cleanse the Arab Middle East of its remaining Jews. Ramadan also confirmed that “Christianity is also an Eastern religion”—and, I might add, one originally founded by a Jewish rabbi in Jerusalem and one that once flourished in Central Asia, Africa, and the Levant until Muslims conquered these areas and took over Christianity’s holy sites. They have continued to persecute the remaining Christian remnant to this very day.

The panel’s issues concerned the ideals of freedom, liberty, self-criticism, scientific thinking, and the separation of religion and state—all issues that Ibn Warraq dealt with in his many books, especially Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s work has occupied the Western imagination completely and has led to an endless amount of self-flagellation. Said was seen as the Great Defender of Islamic Palestine. I have much to say about this terrible and misguided influence in my forthcoming book The Complete Palestinianization of American Feminism, but for now, I have a few psychological and biographical points to make about Said. Few have ever made them before.

Please note: Edward Said and his family were never expelled from Jerusalem. Although Said became heavily invested in a “Palestinian” identity, and viewed himself as a spokesman for “Palestine,” Edward was a Christian, not a Muslim. His family left with both their wealth and American contacts intact. In other words, Edward was a “nepo baby” who opportunistically, and as a matter of academic opportunism, chose to identify himself as a stateless victim of Western imperialism or of “Orientalism”—and he did so while enjoying all the rights and privileges of living in the West. Edward went on to champion the rights of other Arabs who also chose to leave their ancestral homes but not those Arabs who chose to remain—all of whom have since become Israeli citizens. However, his life was far different from the Arabs who fled to other Arab Muslim countries, where, to this day, they have been denied both employment and citizenship and have been forced to live under the rule of fundamentalist terrorist tyrants.

For this, Edward blamed only Israel, not the Arab Muslim states.

Edward Said’s father, Wadi (William) Ibrahim Said, was a wealthy Christian Protestant who grew up under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Ibrahim was also an American citizen who fought for America in World War I. Edward Said’s mother, Hilda, was also a Christian Protestant who grew up under the Ottoman Empire. Wadi Ibrahim Said left the Jerusalem area in 1947, even before Israel became a sovereign state. At the time, Edward was a pre-teenager. They lived in Cairo, where Edward attended English-language schools; thereafter, in 1951, when Edward was 17 years old, he attended an elite high school in Massachusetts.

After Edward completed Princeton and Harvard, he obtained a professorship at Columbia and soon occupied well-funded Endowed Chairs. Interestingly, Edward never specialized in Middle Eastern Studies; his expertise was in Literature. Nevertheless, at some point, he was elected to the Palestine National Council. How does that happen? One can only wonder.

Edward allowed others to view him as a dispossessed Muslim Palestinian who was forced to flee his homeland. Ironically, Edward’s support for a one-state solution over and above a Palestinian state lost him his position on the Palestine National Council.

Edward’s 1999 Memoir, Out of Place, concerns his sense of existential displacement from his roots (an entirely legitimate literary venture). However, it might best be compared with the even more anguished works written by Jews who were thrown out of Arab Muslim countries with at most ten dollars in their hands. For example, why not read Andre Aciman’s 1994 work Out of Egypt; Lucette Lagnado’s 2007 work The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World; Jean Naggar’s 2008 work Sipping From the Nile: My Exodus from Egypt; Ariel Sabar’s 2008 book My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for this Family’s Past (in Iraq). We might also consider Algerian-born Jew Pierre Rehov’s films about the forced flight of Jews from Arab lands, like The Silent Exodus (2004). Pierre himself had to flee Algeria as an endangered Jew and infidel. Gisele Littman, better known as Bat Ye’or (Daughter of the Nile), was also forced to flee Egypt in an impoverished state. She went on to document the history of infidels, “dhimmis,” under Muslim rule in the Arab Middle East.

Edward Said was a dhimmi. He dealt with this reality by defending his potential persecutors, by allying himself with them, and defending their tyranny. (Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it? This is precisely the posture that Western leftists, including feminists, have adopted, and it’s pretty weird as well as dangerous.)

Edward’s work has been “magnified and glorified,” so to speak, and his influence has been monumental. In addition to the influence of the French post-modernists and de-constructionists (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jaques Lacan, etc.), Edward’s accusation of Western “Orientalism” has had an oversize influence on the Western academy. His point? That the West has interpreted the East in grossly stereotypical and racist ways in order to dominate and colonize it. To him, the “Orient” primarily consisted of Arab Muslim men of color, especially Palestinian men. He did not focus overly much on Arab Christians or Arab Jews, and he certainly did not concern himself with the fate of Arab women—not even of so-called Palestinian Arab women.

If anyone wants to read a major and detailed critique of Said’s work, I strongly suggest that they read Ibn Warraq’s previously mentioned masterful book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism (2007).

As a psychologist who was also trained in psychoanalytic theory, please allow me to venture a comment about Said’s 2003 work, Freud and the Non-European. In this work, Said refers to Palestine as a “colony,” and treats “the” West in a totally stereotypical way. He treats “the” West just as he claims that Westerners have treated or mistreated the Orient. Amazingly, Edward chooses to present Moses as a non-Jewish Egyptian who “adopts” the Hebrews as his people. Said approves of Freud’s “provocative reminders that Judaism’s founder was a non-Jew, and that Judaism begins in the realm of Egyptian, non-Jewish monotheism.”

This is simply not true. Even the former Hebrew slave Joseph, who preceded Moses and who had been elevated to Pharoah’s second-in-command, spoke Hebrew/Aramaic and still yearned for his people. Joseph asked his sons to take his bones back with them to the Holy Land.

Those who are even minimally Torah-literate know that God spoke to Moses in Midian and that Moses had married a Midianite woman; however, this does not make Moses a Midianite. We also know the names of Moses’s Jewish parents (Yocheved and Amran) and those of his siblings (Miriam and Aharon). We know that Moses was raised in the household of Pharoah’s daughter, who adopted him in a most daring act of civil disobedience. This does not mean that Moses worshipped any of the Egyptian gods. Edward’s view that Moses was an Egyptian and that he “adopted” the Jews allows him to present Judaism as having been founded by a pagan Arab Egyptian. If so, the official Jewish state, Israel, has simply “eliminated” its true origins entirely.

This, too, is entirely false. However, Said would do anything to delegitimize Judaism and the Jewish state—just as he’d do anything to support an imaginary country called Palestine.

Great minds...and our wavelengths....just today, my friend and colleague Jonathan Leaf, who also attended our book launch for Ibn Warraq’s new book on Churchill, has reviewed a new biography of Edward Said. Leaf describes this book, authored by Timothy Brennan, as “atrociously written.” Brennan is a devoted acolyte of Said’s, and he believes that “Said’s windy, tedious, out-of-print examinations of the currents of modern literature are weighty and profound.”

Au contraire.

Leaf continues that Said lacked “anything that could be construed as aesthetic taste or sensibility.” Apparently, Leaf accidentally found an old syllabus to a class taught in the 1920s; Said had “barely altered the list of readings.” Said disliked Mozart and did not understand that “art had value in and of itself” as opposed to being a vehicle for his political agenda.

How many feet of clay do these two poseurs have? And both have been lionized by Westerners, especially the academic world and to our detriment.

Mayor Mamdani is a clear and present danger to New York City. He is not so much the problem as are the people who got him elected—and the nature of the times in which we live.

Celebrity film stars and musicians pronounce their political opinions—all based on ignorance. They are applauded for their Jew-hating lines. So, too, Mayor Zohran is something like an actor/activist who is repeating what he has been taught, catering to the basest of prejudices. His lines repeat all the propaganda out of Iran and Qatar; he is a living bot inciting to genocide.

Those who elected him agree with his rap-artist ways, find them “cool,” and welcome his over-the-top hatred for the Jewish state and its leaders. After all, Mayor Zohran is a Shia Muslim (that’s what Iranians practice), as well as one of the 1% against whom he rails.

Nepo baby Zohran’s wealth came from settler-colonial beginnings. The British sent Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus to Uganda to economically control and profit from the Black Africans in Uganda. His family’s wealth emerged from this precise history, which may be why he so loudly condemns Israel as a “settler colonial” enterprise when that is factually not the case. It is a classic example of scapegoating the victim for one’s own crimes or, in this case, for the source of Zohran’s family’s wealth.

Our mayor’s hatred is Hitlerian. After falsely accusing PM Netanyahu of being a war criminal and of having committed genocide in Gaza, he then called for his arrest on the basis of the ICC’s having issued one such charge. The United States and Israel are, wisely, not party to the ICC and even Mr. Zohran had to retract the warnings of arrest once someone explained to him that he was violating both international and federal law by assuming powers that a city mayor simply does not have. However, it is a crime to harass and attempt to intimidate a foreign dignitary who is protected by diplomatic immunity. (I thank Lauri B. Regan, Esq., for having pointed this out to me.)

Not to be stopped by the mere law, what Mayor Zohran did next was to call for a massive protest in the streets to take on the job of intimidation and harassment of the PM of a sovereign state. Is he hoping for a riot? A very violent riot? Is this the kind of red meat that he is feeding to his Masters? Served up with his diabolically creepy smile?

What if a single American Jew, perhaps someone merely passing by, is seriously injured in the melee that Mayor Zohran hopes to inspire? Will this be grounds for a lawsuit against the mayor? If not, why not?

The man is reckless, not only in terms of all his campaign promises and governing issues (cutting down the police force, overworking a reduced such force, refusing to end unsightly, unhygienic, and dangerous encampments, vowing to open up more E-bike lanes, shut jails down, reduce prison sentences, employ mental health workers instead of police, provide sanctuary to all comers, and, oh yes, his tax-the-rich scheme, which has already meant the loss of the city’s fiscal base.

He is exactly the kind of Jihad-focused politician that Middle East Forum, Steven Emerson, Charles Small, and a host of others, including Gerald Steinberg, have been tracking as the systematic work of the Muslim Brotherhood in America and in the West. Mamdani is busy appointing others (and helping them get elected), people just like himself who are Jew- and America-hating pro-Jihadists, aka the Red-Green Alliance from Hell. I’ve been told that the day Mamdani came into office he fired everyone with a Jewish name. Not known Zionists. Not known “Islamophobes.” Just Jews.

The city, including all those who actually funded Mamdani and all those who supported him, really wanted him. They got him.

Now, what are the rest of us prepared to do?

I have photos galore and will pick some for us.

Weather has become a rather Big Player in our daily lives and definitely in our travel plans.

I expected a very dear guest today, Rebecca Bynum, the founder of The New English Review Press—the very woman who, together with Nahma Sandrow and myself, is co-hosting, as well as publishing, Ibn Warraq’s new book Churchill’s Secular Creed: Empire, Zionism and Islam’s Complicity in the Holocaust. She has three of my books in print as well.

God bless her. May angels sing her way to Paradise.

Still, Rebecca’s plane from Nashville was cancelled early this morning. Leftover/still ongoing? weather conditions from the recent storms on the East Coast. Hundreds of flights have also been cancelled; thousands more have been delayed. Tomorrow? We’ll just have to see.

Luckily, the launch party is set for tomorrow, 7/21. However, great rain, thunderstorms, and flash flooding are all predicted but not until the afternoon. Will other guests be able to get here? From one of the five boroughs, from crosstown, from other cities in the American South?

Look: Odysseus turned up twenty years later. Penelope could never be sure of the time or the date of his return. And none of us are much like Penelope. We are impatient, arrogant, used to having our way. Back in the day, Middle Eastern friends and colleagues of mine would definitely arrive but only after the sand storms, ships, highway brigands, and various very inconvenient wars allowed them safe passage through. Before them—the major Jewish scholars—OMG! It took some years to get to their desired destinations.

We have been so spoiled. We assume that our trains, planes, cars, and buses will all leave and arrive on time. We assume that we can actually control our destinies. What fools we be!

We are all being thrown back to early times and to life on other continents where a person rarely left their own village or did not travel very far from where they were born. Of course, there were exceptions, but this was and still is the rule for most on planet earth.

Oh, but that’s far from everything. There are all the very hot “foreign” wars, coming ever closer to our American shores. Seventeen—or is it eighteen?—very young American soldiers killed by Iran. And the regime far, far from collapsing. And their proxy paramilitary jihadist armies in Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza lining up for their continuing Jihad—maybe Jihadist cells elsewhere, and all over the world, will start attacking.... Israel has already bled too many of its young at the hands of Iranian Shia proxies Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, etc. Iranian citizens have been at the mercy of fundamentalist fanatics for nearly half a century. I hope that the American administration really, really understands with whom they have been trying to make a “deal.”

And then there are the information and disinformation wars that keep everyone in a state of daily confusion, which provokes ignorance, frustration, and a great rage. What is really going on? Who’s in charge of the nuclear weaponry? Why in God’s name ask Pakistan (!) to mediate anything? How can anyone erase the deepfakes that are everywhere upon us?

My own personal misery: I simply refuse to learn how to enter medical portals. I am totally defeated by the continued Apple upgrades; the streaming platform scams—it is no longer enough to pay their monthly fees. Now, in order to avoid all the ads they’ve begun to drop into the movies, one has to pay again to upgrade these greedy platforms. I was re-watching one of my all-time favorite British police procedurals, Endeavor, when, after the first three or four episodes, the entire series would have to be bought for more than $125.00. Amazon Prime: Is this really fair?

Endeavor is Morse’s first name. He is an Oxford-educated lad, a literary and classical music loving oddity for a police officer, and yet he is very good at this job. He is also impossibly “cute.” I believe there are at least six seasons. Shaun Evans is the Oxford-educated one; Roger Allam is his very steady-ready superior; and Anton Lesser is the Capo di Tutti Capi.

I wonder if I try to re-watch Foyle’s War on Brit Box whether I’ll run into this same thing.

Luckily, if you live long enough, you might forget the series you watched more than a decade or more ago. And both these programs are far superior to the cartoon-level shoot-outs that now pass for The Latest Thing. My ass.

I don’t even want to rant on about the uses of AI. I have checked it out, and I fear it.

I am old enough to actually miss landlines. Why? Because when one left one’s home or office, there was no way people could find you. One could enjoy a long train ride into the country with time to read and dream and to actually gaze at the landscapes at one’s window.

Gone forever—unless the weather and all the wars destroy our already failing infrastructure entirely.

Oh, this is too tricky to write about. Here I am, opposed to Jews criticizing other Jews, at least at this time, and yet, there is something very pathological about the lengths to which some Jews will go to defame and destroy other Jews.

Criticizing Jewish Israel for one policy or another is fine; accusing Israel of committing genocide is crazy. Accusing Jews, who are allegedly “settlers” in their own homeland, for committing violence against armed-to-the-teeth Jihadists is also crazy.

But here’s what’s on my mind right now. I was visiting a friend in East Hampton over Shabbos/the July 4th weekend and honestly believed that the most dramatic event was the thunder, lightning, and drenching rain that caused power outages, destroyed trees, stranded drivers, flooded roads, and gravely disappointed some of the most ardent firework fans, who had traveled all the way out to Montauk to see the sky light up.

Silly me.

As we sat there in the dark, our flashlights safely at our sides, I did not know that pro-Palestine activists had invaded and demonstrated against two restaurants, one in Sag Harbor, the other in Montauk.

Why pick these two restaurants? I am not naming them, but they are both owned by a Jewish billionaire. Not just a billionaire but also a courageous philanthropist who funds those who are fighting against antisemitic anti-Zionism. Three for the price of one—an admirably self-made man, a true American success story, a supporter of both Judaism and Israel.

I am not naming him either. Perhaps these protestors/demonstrators/invaders are not Jewish, not at all.

I did not know this, but similar demonstrations had been held in Sag Harbor two weeks ago, in June of 2026, and in Southampton at Cooper’s Beach. The situation in Gaza was linked to broader anti-war (which war?), labor, and anti-billionaire movements. (”No Kings, No Billionaires.”)

Between 2024 and 2026, these local and perhaps national groups gathered every week at Steinbeck Park.

I am relieved. Not all of them claimed Jewish ancestry.

However, last year in June, protestors demonstrated on Meadow Lane in Easthampton against the super-rich. They were powered by anti-Trump, No-Kings, pro-immigrant, anti-ICE, and pro-Palestine beliefs. One speaker claimed that the land belonged to her and to her people—the Shinnecock—not to the billionaires who currently own and have stolen it. Wealthy Jews, as well as non-Jews, happen to live on Meadow Lane.

The Hamptons (Westhampton, Southampton, Bridgehampton, Water Mill, East Hampton, Sag Harbor, Montauk, etc.) are viewed as the preserve of the super-wealthy, right? And as I searched the internet for similar outrages, I found out that on Labor Day, in 2025, another deranged group of Jews had invaded what seemed to be the Westhampton Beach Synagogue.

And there is where the super righteous “as a Jew” Jews starred.

Theirs was an ugly form of activism. One middle-aged man loudly presented himself “as a Jew”; he claimed that he was a Jewish Long Islander, had lost ancestors in the Holocaust (what a non-credential that is), and for that very reason felt compelled and entitled to decry the ongoing genocide in Gaza. (Well, maybe he was only acting the part of an outraged Jew. A girl can always dream.)

This man was not alone. A group of much younger activists, both male and female, were with him. They characterized the synagogue’s speaker, Israeli Brigadier General Nadav Padan, as a “war criminal,” “waltzing around the Hamptons, brunching with Rich Donors.” A young woman insisted that she “embodied Jewish values” in protesting the alleged “genocide” in Gaza.

But there is no “genocide” in Gaza. What in God’s name is she talking about? How much Kool-Aid has she downed?

What has unleashed this continuing cult-like madness? Is it the obsessive hatred for Trump? The long-term steady organizing of the Social Democrats (the Working Families Party) and the Democratic Party? The insane levels of funding for Marxists and for the Red-Green Alliance? The nature of elite education in America? Is it the rise of Mamdani, under whose reign a thousand mini-Kristallnachts have already been committed? A dear friend told me that her nephew had been working for many years in the mayor’s office, but the day after Mamdani won the election, he and others with Jewish names were fired. This I hadn’t heard.

Have you?

Mamdani is not the only problem. Those who elected him are. And, although the voting turnout was unusually low, so many New York City Jews voted for him, so many “nepo babies,” just like Mamdani.

In my opinion, the ghastly sight of Jewish blood on 10/7 simply opened the floodgates to all those who lust for more of same. That’s why I urged people not to show Hamas’s footage.

One final thought: There are now two detailed, legal, and forensic reports about 10/7, one by the Dvora Institute (Dr. Ruth Halperin-Kaddari), the other by the Israeli Civil Commission (Dr. Cochav Elyakam-Levy). Dr. Elyakam-Levy has been presenting her findings internationally and in many distinguished venues. However, neither her work nor that of Halperin-Kaddari has really been covered by the non-Jewish, non-Israeli mainstream media on any continent.

Why do you think that is?

The good news is that a pro-Israel group peacefully stands opposite the pro-Palestine group every week on the long wharf in Sag Harbor. Every single week.