Kesher Talk

Shouting in the rain When Judith sent me a link to Phyllis Chesler's recent and entirely characteristic article in the Front Page, I was overcome by the same awe that I felt when I interviewed Phyllis last summer. To say that woman is brave is to say that rain is wet. To talk to her even over the phone is to feel her intensity pulsing over the wire at you (and to write about her, I'm afraid, seems to demand imitating her style, right for her, lush and positively overripe for me).

But to plunge ahead:
Phyllis is to me the absolute personification of courage. From her early work, the 1972 feminist classic Women and Madness, she established herself as a voice of truth; if the truth were coincidentally popular, she'd deal with it, but it it were not, then tough. (On everyone else, that is.)

Her leftist credentials have been solidly established over the course of her career.
But, as she made clear in her new book, "The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It," she's also Jewish. Fashionable as anti-Semitism now is, she faces it and stares it down. She knows the loathing she will evoke but she knows she must invoke it. Her arguments are not particularly new, but the passion and conviction with which she argues them, and the position from which she argues them, make them matter.
(She also has an authenticity that's hard to beat. Among her other exploits, she married an Afghani man when they both were young, and together they moved back to his family home in Afghanistan. She survived the experience, she writes, but barely.)

I hope people start listening to her; I hope she's able to keep talking.

posted by Joanne @ 11/26/2003 10:04:04 PM