Phyllis Chesler: Modern Feminism’s Failure to Condemn Hamas

“The feminists have deserted Jewish women. And it wasn’t just Jewish women. There were Arab Muslim women, and there were Thai Buddhist women. No doubt many Christian women or some Christian women who were also raped, murdered, and kidnapped.”

On December 5th, Phyllis Chesler, an Emerita Professor of Psychology at City University of New York, joined Merion West contributing editor Jonathan Church for a discussion about violence against Israeli women during the ongoing conflict. The author of 20 books Dr. Chesler, who earned a Ph.D. in psychology from The New School for Social Research, is well known for her work on feminism and issues affecting women and girls. She co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology in 1969 and has been vocal about the interests of women both domestically and globally, including drawing attention to the treatment of women in many Muslim-majority nations such as when it comes to honor killings. In their discussion, Dr. Chesler and Mr. Church examine how women have been victimized during and after October 7th; the reaction by many in the modern feminist movement; and what feminism means more broadly.

Editor’s Note (12/16/2023): A video of the conversation can be found at the bottom of this page.

Thank you very much for agreeing to an interview. You have had an extraordinary career in terms of longevity, prodigious output, and impact, having to do with feminism. The first question is very basic—it may even seem frivolous—but, as an entry point, how would you define feminism? Or, in other words, what do you see as its main aims and purposes?

What it was—and has been—is the belief that women are human beings and, therefore, worthy of human rights and equal rights in all areas. That’s very simple and not complicated. That is not what feminism is now. That is not what feminism became. I’m, of course, thinking of the 19th century. And I’m thinking of the 1960s and 70s, and maybe part of the 1980s. Then everything took a turn south for the worst. Feminism became concerned not with sex-based rights, but with identity-based rights and with LGBTQIA+ and transgender rights, leaving behind any passionate concern with the battering of women, the raping of women, the sexual harassment of women, the honor murder of women, polygamy, and child marriage. These were forbidden and uninteresting subjects, for feminists in the academy, because these violence-against-women issues cut across every race, every ethnicity, every geographical region, every religion. Were they to focus on it, they might find themselves having to name men of color, Muslim men of color, men of color who were previously colonized, quote unquote. And that became increasingly forbidden.