It was “Silent Night” that did it.
Being asked to sing the popular Christmas carol started the young Andrea Dworkin on her way to becoming an activist.
She knew she didn’t believe in Jesus, and her sixth-grade convictions were strong. “I understood that Christians killed Jews and didn’t think anyone could force me to sing it,” she said.
Even when a Jewish teacher admonished her, telling her, “I sing it; you can, too,” Dworkin would not let the words of a Christmas song cross her lips.
Calling the teacher a “turncoat Jew,” Dworkin writes, “It was my first experience with a female collaborator, or the first one that I remember.”
Dworkin was in San Francisco recently to talk about her latest book, “Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant,” at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club.
The author of 13 books, who is best known for her work against pornography as well as for claiming that all intercourse constitutes rape, had a Conservative Jewish upbringing in Delaware.
The “Silent Night” episode did not end well. “I was put in a schoolroom, the door was closed and I was made to stay there,” she said. Later, one of her drawings that hung in the hallway was defaced with the word “kike.”
“I didn’t know what it was and had to find out.”
Although she loved Hebrew school and even got an award for being the best student, she did not have a bat mitzvah, because in those days, girls were not called to the Torah in the Conservative movement.
Later though, she realized that as much as she loved learning, and Jewish learning specifically, there was no place in Jewish life for a woman to become a rabbi. “That’s the reason I split from Hebrew school and led a secular life,” she said.
Dworkin’s memoir, “Heartbreak,” is not written in typical narrative form. Its chapters are short, each only a few pages, consisting of vignettes from her life. She wrote it that way, she said, because her last book, “Scapegoat,” took her nine years to complete.
In “Scapegoat,” she wrote about how both Jews and women as groups have been victimized as scapegoats, drawing on examples from the Holocaust and Israel to illustrate her research.
“That was a very complex and difficult book, so I decided with this memoir I would write a shorter and simpler book.”
When asked how her Jewish background informed her feminist politics, she said, “It taught me to stand up for what I believe in and not be cowardly about what I don’t believe in.” Judaism was very important to her in that sense, she added. “When I left Judaism, which basically I did, that was the same thing. It taught me not to stay where I didn’t want to be.”
In discussing the over-representation of Jewish women she had encountered over the years in the women’s movement, Dworkin commented that in addition, many of the movement’s leaders were Jewish.
“I think when you’re a minority in a majority culture, you have to learn to stick up for yourself.”
At 55, Dworkin has written about her life before, but never in book-length form. And in “Heartbreak,” she writes about the events that have shaped her, both large and small. The title “Heartbreak” comes from her years of activism.
“When you’re in a political movement, you have lots of victories and lots of failures,” she said. “And when you have the failures, your heart sort of breaks.”
Observing that she had her share of both, Dworkin said her greatest failure was her effort to make pornography illegal, on the basis that all pornography denigrates women. “Eventually, [the battle against pornography] will succeed but not in my lifetime, and that hurts my heart.”
When asked about her greatest achievement, she answered, “my writing. I’m not sure which books, but I think my writing and my politics come through my writing.”
Because of her militant politics, Dworkin is often harshly criticized. When asked whether that bothered her, she said not very much.
“Sometimes it does; it depends on what the criticism is. But I have never given in to what other people think, and it would be a little late for me to start now.”