Phyllis Chesler

Susan McDonnell speaks with legendary second‑wave feminist Phyllis Chesler – founder, scholar, and author of Women and Madness, An American Bride in Kabul, and The New Antisemitism – about a lifetime of documenting how parts of the feminist left embraced Antizionism, excused Islamist misogyny, and silenced women who refused to go along.

Watch on YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Chesler traces the rot back decades: from UN women’s conferences hijacked by anti‑Israel propaganda to academics and media gatekeepers who blacklisted her for saying what was happening to Jews – and to women – before and after 7 October. She names the costs: cancellations, smear campaigns, death threats, and the women (and men) who kept going anyway.

Most of all, she calls today’s feminists to moral clarity: defend women under Islamist regimes, reject fashionable Jew‑hatred, and build real alliances across faiths to tell the truth and save lives.

She also talks bluntly about the cost of telling the truth: ostracism, career sabotage, threats, and why she kept going anyway. And for women navigating this terrain today, she offers sharp, unsentimental guidance about how to survive inside a movement that often punishes dissent. She lays out strategy, what to expect, how to stay standing, and how to always keep your integrity intact.

Phyllis Chesler’s Feminist Lessons for the Battles Ahead

“You have to have or you must create other friendships, other alliances. It is possible to do. In the past, truth tellers in Israel, defenders have lost much more. They’ve lost everything. Now, for women especially, we have to learn to take absolutely nothing personally. And learn how to move fast in order to avoid all the speeding bullets.

They are not personal. Also, understand that the true measure of your power is in the strength of your opposition. If you have no opposition, you’re not making a difference.

Learn to embrace the struggle for its own sake and do not necessarily judge yourself as a loser or a winner because you have a triumph here in this battle, or you lose a battle or you can’t have a quick success.

You have to be prepared for a lifelong battle accompanied by unending and unpredictable consequences. And this is what a war of ideas and a struggle for fact-based truth against hate propaganda, and as you said, unreasoned irrationality entails.

Create a support group, not for personal emotional reasons – women are very good at that – but in order to exchange vital information to offer assistance and information where possible, and to work on a particular issue together at the same time. This support is to enable you to do the work.

Document everything, both for the historical record and for possible legal action or for media coverage, but mainly do it in order to share such information with others who don’t know what the history is.

Find techie experts who can try, who can begin to try to override false blood libels, not just about Jews and Israel, but about radical political Islam and Jihad terrorism. You have to get the other side up there somehow.

And we must create alliances first, as I’ve done with anti-Islamist Muslims, both religions, religious and secular, and ex-Muslims, and create alliances with them because we’re all fighting essentially the same battle for truth and tolerance over big lies and hatred.

Work with Christians and conservatives.

Be wary of all the ‘As a Jew’ Jews who are faithfully committed to assimilation and to Palestine.

Work with Orthodox Jews who are also pro-Israel if they are, and pro-Judaism and pro-West. Yes, even if you believe they are misogynists in their own lives or even in their political lives on other issues, which means we have to become political actors. We have to see ourselves as such.

Work with men. I can’t stress this enough. I stopped during my feminist firebrand years. I didn’t bother with them. Then I discovered, oh, hey, they’re smart. They can be supportive. They know a lot, at least if they’re genuine allies in the battles that you’ve chosen or that have chosen, you.

Never, never follow a herd. They are invariably followers, not leaders, and they are often cowards and easily brainwashed. Try to be a leader, even as you need to find allies and work on coalitions. Also, try to learn to go it alone as well as learn how to compromise, which is not easy.

If you lose one battle, that does not mean you’ll lose the next one or the one after that. One battle does not amount to losing the entire war.

Learn how to tolerate even celebrate differences. And as long however, as those different opinions, do not silence or shoot you, those who hold it don’t shoot you.

So let me say that we’re at a place in the world where everything matters and where it all hangs in the balance.

And now is the time.”

– Phyllis Chesler