Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

A Liberated Woman

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Abigail

Abbie’s talk at Stony Brook.

Homer’s World

The first time I came out in public as a feminist, I was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. For some reason, I had decided to give a public talk titled “Why Women’s Liberation?” The topic was then a new one in academe. It was also just crystallizing in my own mind as something to think about.

I’d already read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex before it was translated. All my women friends who, like me, held Fulbright Fellowships in Paris, had read it and we debated it intensely. But raising questions inside professional life here in America – questions about the social status and legal rights of women – was a very different story. If I spoke candidly, might I not be risking present relations with colleagues in the Department, and possibly jeopardizing my future in academic philosophy? How far out on a limb should I go? It was scary.

When you’re scared, you have to go with whatever you know. What I knew was that it doesn’t matter what happens to a woman –

as long as she’s dressed for it!

So I walked out on the stage of that packed Stony Brook auditorium in a black mini-dress, black tights and black boots. As my talk began, with no holds barred, I could hear the sound of feet shuffling and angry whispers crescendoing. At first, it wasn’t clear that I’d be allowed to go on speaking.

But I kept on, and after a while the whispers subsided.

Finally, at the close of my talk, I invited my friend Fred-the-Drifter, who was wearing his blue jeans, green shirt, cowboy boots and carrying his guitar, to come up on stage with me and play behind me – while I sang songs that I’d written (to keep my courage up) for the women’s liberation movement (my new words put to familiar folk tunes).

The roar of applause filled the auditorium edge to edge. I recall one of my students saying as I left the stage, “I have never heard you so eloquent.”

“I thought he [the student] was gonna cry,” Fred said to me later.

Revised and retitled “Feminism Without Contradictions,” my talk was included in The Monist, which was, I believe, the first well-regarded philosophical journal to devote an entire issue to feminism.

So much for one of my pioneering contributions to those daring days. But what about now? What’s the news regarding feminism – especially as that news touches my present life?

Let me bring the question up to this very week. I had sent for a book I saw advertised that promised to foreground the women in Homer’s two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Iliad concerns some of the decisive episodes of the Trojan War and the Odyssey tells of the long voyage home of Odysseus – one of the victorious Greek heroes in the defeat of Troy. The form in which we have these poems dates roughly to the 8^th century BCE (before the common era). Although it is a man’s story, of war and warriors, one of the important characters in the Odyssey is Penelope, the shrewd and patient wife who waits ten long years for Odysseus, her husband, to return home to Ithaca.

With her personal force and ingenuity, Penelope manages to hold off the young bachelors of Ithaca, who each want her to marry one of them and thereby inherit the wealth and position of the long-absent Odysseus. After many adventures, Odysseus does finally get home to Ithaca, where he slays the suitors and reclaims his and Penelope’s marital kingdom – in all its fine erotic and political contours.

The Odyssey had been a favorite book of mine in my early teens (together with Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers). So I was quite curious to read the new book I’d sent for, which promised to disclose the feminist lowdown on the story that I’d read long ago in the way Homer tells it.

As I began to read the new book, I didn’t find new incidents that had been omitted in Homer. There was a difference in emphasis, but no significant new information that I could detect.

I could see that the book was handsomely illustrated, with photographs of artifacts and detailed maps of Homer’s world. So I turned to the maps to find Ithaca, Troy and other such sites, on maps that took in territory as far away as Egypt. But, much to my astonishment, Biblical Israel – certainly contemporary with Homer’s world – did not figure on the maps. The territory of the Israelite kings, of the prophets – Isaiah would most likely have been contemporary with the dates assigned to Homer – was designated “Canaan” on the author’s historical maps.

I looked under “I” in the index. Hey, Israel was not even in the index!

That night I had a dream, whose graphic unpleasantness I won’t recall in this column. However, it clearly pertained to the book I’d been reading – a book ostensibly about the women in Homer.

By morning, picking up the book again, I noticed that it quoted a woman known world-wide for her belligerent activism against modern Israel. The quote, lifted out of its original context, was in this case being used by the author to condemn some case of unworthy conduct that Homer reports … but it certainly reinforced my unease. What was that woman doing in a book about Homer’s world that deleted contemporaneous historical Israel from its otherwise-inclusive maps?

In the mornings, I routinely sit for prayer and meditation. Normally, from my still and silent listening, I get the sense that I’m pretty much on track and can proceed forward into the coming day.

But the meditation of that morning was unlike my typical meditations. For the first time, I had the sense of a divine Presence very near me. Nearer in fact than I’d ever felt it before. Let’s go ahead and call it God’s face, for that’s what it felt like.

The face, or Presence, gave me a directive:

Throw the book out.

Throw out a book I had just purchased? Surely not. It must contain some interesting facts that I might yet glean. Couldn’t I at least flip to the end to see how it finishes? I might copy down some references … .

But the more I temporized in this way, the less persuasive I found all these moves-to-postpone. The command had been simple and utterly clear.

So I went to the room where I’d been reading the book and threw it right into the trash. And, as suddenly, all the magnetism that had attached to the book shriveled and emptied out. I felt released, having acted …

the way a free woman acts.

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Traumatic Memories: Past and Future

Posted on June 2, 2026 by Abigail

I used to take pride in my excellent memory. But sadly, it got somewhat less excellent after my first marriage. Perhaps my psyche decided that certain scenes from that part of my life story were best left un-remembered.

With regard to memory, by far the biggest holes were dug in 2023, after October 7th and 8th. At that time, as you may recall, there was rejoicing all round the planet – but especially in the universities – over the atrocities committed against Israelis by invaders from neighboring Gaza. The atrocities were photo-recorded by their jihadi perpetrators who boasted of committing them!

It seems that my psyche found itself unable to bear these scenes. So it dug out craters, forgetteries – psychic oubliettes – into which those memory segments could be dropped. And, since emergency defensive measures can be imprecise, more was dropped into the forgettery than needed to be.

Aware that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, I’ve started to read books about memory, trauma and therapeutic treatments for memory loss.

The first book I read, Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past, by Peter A. Levine, PhD, offers theoretical explanations of brain function and malfunction, as well as detailed case histories of successful treatments. I assume that the patients shown must have also agreed to be photographed. The differences between their expressions and body language at the beginning and end of treatment are both clear and dramatic. It’s also evident that practitioners who follow Levine’s methods need to be carefully trained and to proceed in a gradual, step-by-step manner when working with clients.

At present, I’m about a quarter of the way into a quite different book. It’s titled Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith L. Herman, MD. Her overview might be called the vertical view: she situates attitudes toward trauma within culture and political history.

Some traumas, such as marital rape and incestuous abuse of children, were present long before the culture was prepared to recognize them. Women’s complaints were dismissed by eminences like Freud as fantasies or unconscious wishes – until the political empowerment of women in the latter half of the twentieth century made room for consciousness-raising groups and began the process of changes in the law.

As in Levine’s reports, it’s become possible to treat trauma because it’s now possible to remove victims from the scenes of their suffering. If you have been accurately diagnosed with PTSD, doctors no longer send you back into combat as they used to. Likewise, domestic abuse is now recognized as grounds for divorce and legal penalties. The judge won’t force a wife to go back to her wife-beater. And, although abused children can’t themselves take legal action, by now some attention has been drawn even to their predicament.

There is one major obstacle to my contacting one or both of these authors for referrals to therapists who might help me get back the full power of memory that I had before the traumatizing events of October 7th and 8th, 2023.

In the cases I’ve read about so far, the traumatizing deed is not being done now. The raped woman who confides her story to her consciousness-raising group isn’t being raped now – not at the same time that she tells the women’s group what happened to her! The traumatized veteran isn’t back at the front at the same time that he tells the therapist what shocked him in previous combat.

But anti-semitism isn’t over! On the contrary. It’s world-wide and it’s growing. So it’s not clear that the therapy that repaired the traumas in these reports could help in my case.

Speaking of anti-semitism, here’s an interesting factual detail: Peter Levine reports that the grandchildren of Holocaust victims carry bio-chemical traces of death-camp trauma that they did not personally experience. Such traces can be detected even in the wombs of grandchildren of survivors! So that trauma is being passed on even to the third generation!

In this context, I wonder whether the sudden reappearance of anti-semitism after October 7- 8 might not itself be a resurfacing of the contempt for Jews that had been commonplace for almost two thousand years. Social anti-semitism was repressed during World War II‘s war against Nazism. Meanwhile the discovery of the Holocaust – it became Exhibit A among the Nazi atrocities – prolonged the suppression of such thoughts. But just as the memories of suffering can be passed down the generations and detected in certain bio-chemical markers, so possibly the even older memories of Christian contempt for and cruelty toward Jews might erupt like a collective “return of the repressed.”

It would be hard to prove such an hypothesis, since by now the grass is green over the present generation’s anti-semitic great-great grandfathers. No doubt there are other influences also in play. But this sudden eruption of hate seems to be a surd in culture for which a fuller explanation might include such factors, conscious and unconscious.

On the brighter side, there is one improvement over the placid surface of earlier years. The Jews whom I see interviewed today, or making speeches of their own, are no longer as deferential and tip-toe-y as they used to be. They’re candid and contemptuous of their anti-semitic contemporaries.

Is it the very existence of Israel – a nation under arms – that gives this confidence? Theodore Herzl, who convened the first Zionist conference where he introduced the idea of a Jewish state, pictured manufacturing and agricultural produce that would enrich the world. There is all that – and Israeli Nobel prize winners have also enriched the world along the lines of Herzl’s vision.

But mainly, today there is a Jewish state. Only one – and it’s a small one – which you can see almost in its entirety from the air. But its citizens, surrounded by hostile forces, are armed.

And they know

how to fight.

Related Content: Witness | Reincarnation: Anne Frank and Me

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The Lot of Women

Posted on May 27, 2026 by Abigail

A line comes to mind that I first heard spoken in the alabaster French of the Comédie-Française, many years ago in the Paris of my youth:

Do you not pity the lot of women?

Le sort des femmes … the destiny of women. Well, I do and I don’t pity women. Depends on the woman and what exactly befalls her. Barring victimization of the sort the law now forbids and ought to punish, the destiny of women runs along a spectrum. To put it another way: in ordinary circumstances one gets a situation to keep in balance and the question is how to balance it.

*. *. *

A big question, but let’s start somewhere in the middle. I’m the only woman I know who actually watched the interview of Juanita Broaddrick after she reported being raped in her hotel room by (former President) Bill Clinton back when he was attorney general in Arkansas.

Broaddrick sure looked truthful to me. So I believed that the matter deserved independent investigation and thought a letter to the NY Times was warranted, signed by me (with my academic credentials) along with some feminists better known than me. But to my surprise, my feminist friends were not one tiny bit interested. Back then, they were looking to Clinton for legislation on certain favorite issues. Also, one had a book coming out and she needed favorable reviews. But several feminist friends praised my idealism. And so on.

Since then, the fearless Phyllis Chesler, who has helped so many women, told me she would have signed. But at that point we hadn’t met and somehow it didn’t cross my mind to contact her.

One feminist did agree to sign such a letter, but she was not widely known. However, I did eventually locate a feminist who had sufficient public presence: Catharine A. MacKinnon who has written importantly on the topic of rape. She was willing to co-sign a letter. However, MacKinnon put up one condition: Broaddrick herself must approve the project of such a letter.

Now it may be that MacKinnon believed me incapable of tracking Broaddrick and securing her permission. If so, she reckoned wrong because I can be very persistent.

To abridge a long story, I did finally manage to contact Juanita Broaddrick and did speak to her at length. By the end of our conversation, I got her approval for a multiply-signed feminist letter to the Times.

When I got back to MacKinnon with the good news, very much to my astonished chagrin, MacKinnon told me that she was leaving town and couldn’t give any more time for this particular effort! The result? I let Juanita Broaddrick down and likewise all the people who had helped me to track her.

Here’s another case “from the middle” of feminist real-life. At an early point in my career in the Philosophy Department of the City University’s Brooklyn College, I was pressured to vote for a candidate for Chair of the Department whom I thought quite unqualified. I was not the only junior member of the Department who was fired for voting “wrong.” We all were. But my case was striking since the same senior professors who voted to fire me in the fall had – just the previous spring – voted to promote me to a higher rank! To explain why their estimation of me had plummeted so suddenly, they claimed that over the summer I had “lost all my talent”!

The trouble with this story was that by my lost-talent September I’d had another article accepted for publication in the same philosophical journal that had published me in my promotion-worthy June. So the bloc of senior professors would certainly have a use for any additional evidence, to support their flimsy case for firing me.

Anyway, among other avenues, I tried appealing to the faculty feminist group on campus. The experience was not a happy one. Not only did they decline to support my claim of having been fired for reasons irrelevant to my academic merit – they sent a letter to my chairman that endorsed my firing! Even in the annals of academic feminism, that’s probably unusual.

What was behind their extra effort? Well, I had not joined a “women’s bloc” in the Department that had seemed to me more relevant to the personal power of Professor Gertrude Ezorsky, the most senior woman of that faction, than it was to any potential unfairness to women as such in the Department. I’d also thought it rather unfair to extort a promise to join their bloc as a condition of voting for my appointment.

At the time of their putting that condition before me, I had answered them ambiguously – “if the chairman thinks I’m his tool, I’m nobody’s tool” – and of course they held that ambiguity against me once I didn’t automatically join their bloc but instead voted on the merits as I saw them.

Here’s another case from the middle. When I was last in Paris, I had the pleasure of meeting with Catherine Chalier, the closest disciple of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In the course of our conversation, I asked her whether the prestigious French feminists had been of any help in her efforts of that time (since successful I gather) to get a more secure teaching appointment in the French academic arena.

The feminists? Chalier made the sort of gesture one makes when alluding to the preposterous.

*. *. *

Recently I’ve been reading Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by the late Andrea Dworkin. Though she has many bad stories to tell from her own life, Dworkin also concedes that certain advances for women have by now been enshrined in the law. No longer may husbands batter their wives. Sexual harassment in the work place is now illegal. Rape in marriage is now illegal. And, incidentally, Dworkin reports working constructively with Catharine MacKinnon to bring rapists to justice.

MacKinnon? Wait a minute! Wasn’t MacKinnon the feminist who let me down so badly in my effort to get a fairer hearing for the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick? Does that mean that Dworkin’s praise was misplaced? Not necessarily. Perhaps it was in the Broaddrick case, which is the one I know about first hand. But the praise might have been warranted in other cases that Dworkin knew of or worked on.

In real life …

these distinctions can get blurry.

Related Content: Battle Wounds | Afghan Hope

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The Lot of Women

Posted on May 26, 2026 by Abigail

A line comes to mind that I first heard spoken in the alabaster French of the Comédie-Française, many years ago in the Paris of my youth:

Do you not pity the lot of women?

*. *. *

Since then, the fearless Phyllis Chesler, who has helped so many women, told me she would have signed. But at that point we hadn’t met and somehow it didn’t cross my mind to contact her.

Now it may be that MacKinnon believed me incapable of tracking Broaddrick and securing her permission. If so, she reckoned wrong because I can be very persistent.

The feminists? Chalier made the sort of gesture one makes when alluding to the preposterous.

*. *. *

In real life …

these distinctions can get blurry.

Related Content: Battle Wounds | Afghan Hope

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A Quarrel That Mattered

Posted on May 19, 2026 by Abigail

It was Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote, “A quarrel does not matter.” He was writing about a friend with whom he had broken. I believe it was Maurice Merleau-Ponty of whose death he had just learned. And, in the same commemorative essay, he went to characterize that kind of quarrel as simply one of the ways in which friends who disagree can decide to coexist in the world they still share.

Well, in my experience, that’s not the whole story. Depending on the reason for the quarrel and how deep that reason goes, a quarrel can matter absolutely.

At an earlier phase of my life, I’d had a woman friend who was also a philosopher, with a significant reputation and attainments in her own philosophic milieu. I’ll call her Ingrid. Though we’d parted ways some time back, in the past week Ingrid had been on my mind. So I decided to look her up, to see how she’d been faring and even consider a belated reunion. Perhaps, in the reshufflings and shakeups of life, by now things might look different between us.

However, there’ll be no belated reunion. I learned that she died thirteen years ago.

Had we stayed friends, I would not have published Chapter Eight, “Spoiling One’s Story: The Case of Hannah Arendt,” in A Good Look at Evil. Arendt, a political theorist, had been a friend of Ingrid’s. On my scale of values, friendship trumps publications.

Of what was our friendship composed? We were women friends as well as philosophic friends. Both together. That’s a combination rare and precious. Also, we were what Ingrid called “twin opposites” – almost organically connected and, at the same time, at variance with each other.

How at variance? She was an updated Viking – a lover of the outdoors, a skier, a swimmer, a thinker who could spend a solitary summer on an island off the coast of Sweden reflecting – taking in the austere landscape while shedding the old year to get into form for the year ahead.

Though I had my own affinities with nature, I sure couldn’t have spent a summer alone on a rocky arctic island. Though we sometimes went riding together, mostly we’d meet in the cafes of our neighborhood. There we could really talk – while subliminally sharing the company of compatible strangers – getting it all said and sorted out in that setting.

I was a Hegelian, for whom “the real is the rational.” Or at least reality is to be viewed as reasonably as one can manage to regard it, discerning its lessons as they pertained to the nonfictional, true and ongoing story of one’s life and times.

By contrast, Ingrid had written about thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche – thinkers for whom “the real is not the rational.”

Our differences were fruitful for our friendship. She could contribute the equipoise of a thinker who did not ask life to make sense. Whereas I could produce the highs and the lows, the tragic comedy, of someone who always hoped to pull the meaning out of life’s troubled tangle of situations.

Subliminally I was aware that our differences might someday bring us to a fork in the road where they could become consequential. But I hoped we could manage to step around that fork.

Until one day, there we were – standing in front of the fork in the road. There’d been someone in my life (not in my life by my choice) who’d hated me and wanted to do to me all the harm she could manage to do. For this destructive project, she’d been able to muster quite a lot of theatrical talent for telling lies. Her persuasiveness was such as to peel off from my life many of the people whose presence I had previously taken for granted and who had supplied my life with its protective layers of emotional familiarity, ease and comfort.

But of all the losses, the one I regretted most was the loss of Ingrid. Ingrid – who eschewed moral judgment as a matter of philosophic principle – had lacked both the personal force and the conceptual equipment to resist such an ingeniously malign and mischievous influence.

Talking it over with Jerry, on the morning that I sadly learned of her death, he suggested one way I might have kept her in my life. Had I left aside the moral questions (like questions of defamation or loyalty) and just told Ingrid how highly I valued our relationship as friends, she might have responded to an appeal confining itself to that level.

So I thought about that suggestion, turning it over piece by piece, taking note of what would have been required on my side to bracket, to put out of play the rights and wrongs, and to focus solely on the affective ties – the feeling ties – between Ingrid and me.

It looked to be a question of what I prized most, what I valued, in the shared space of friendship. Especially philosophic friendship. Until finally it became clear and definitive.

Without truth,

such a friendship founders.

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Five Coins in the Fountain

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Abigail

Before feminism, girls in America were expected to be “popular.” But exceptionally, in my high school, I got an exemption. So, what high school did I go to?

At that time, it was generally thought both democratic and fair to set aside public schools for the gifted. New York City boasted two such high schools: The Bronx High School of Science and The High School of Music and Art. If you could paint or draw, sing or play an instrument, you went to Music and Art. I could paint and draw.

So I didn’t have to be popular! Of course, when the caption under my yearbook photo read, “A good mind possesses a kingdom,” that was going too far, like hanging an albatross around one’s neck. But that was my own fault, for having been too far above it to have provided my own caption, as the other kids knew enough to do.

Eventually, my classmates sorted themselves into the five girls who would become close friends. Together, we participated in “The Literary Club,” with a rotating presidency in which capacity each of us, on our respective college applications, could claim to have served. (We also got a fair number of good books read.)

Looking up at the wide blue sky beyond high school – we each and all intended to grow up to be Wonderful. So, how did that turn out?

After college, Deborah secured a one-year fellowship to study in Rome. I forget what she intended to study. A movie of that period, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” had the theme of three young American girls tossing their coins in Rome’s Fontana di Trevi. Legend had it that, if you made a wish before tossing a couple of coins, and the fountain looked favorably on the wish, you would find your true love in Rome. We were too sophisticated to swallow such a movie straight, but that didn’t mean we were above the wish.

I doubt the fountain had anything to do with it, but Deborah did get herself an Italian true love. During my Fulbright year in Paris, I visited them in Rome. By then they were married, she was pregnant, but alas, her Roman husband had not been the first! He hadn’t been deceived in this respect, nor did he exactly condemn her. He only told her, repeatedly – and in vividly depicted contrast to her own case – how pure and ecstatic was the perfection of a wedding night when the bride was an Italian virgin!

I didn’t know the term “brainwashing” then. When later I saw them in New York, his control seemed tighter and the Fountain of Trevi more distant. But the opinionated, thoughtful, serious-minded girl I had known in Music and Art – that girl I never saw again.

Another in our group of five was Lily. She had been a young beauty and a gifted painter. In both capacities, her method had been simple, direct and intuitive. Like poetry.

She married Steve, her sweetheart from long ago pre-high school days. He’d been more a man of prose than of poetry. Such a husband could have provided grounding and protection, while still respecting her own winged flights in the realm of color, line and vision.

So far as I could tell, it didn’t work out that way. When I visited her after the honeymoon, the colors of the painting she was working on were muddied. Then, in that still-early time of their marriage, a mutual friend had been murdered in their new neighborhood. She pulled back into a syndrome of dread and fear that, in the years ahead, would require periodic hospitalizations.

As the husband of a wife who had morphed into a patient, Steve was what he had always been: a man you could count on.

What about Marian? She’d been an outspoken, politically-committed young woman – farther to the Left than the rest of us. A feature that she’d perhaps kept backstage during the courtship phase of her relationship with Harry. After marrying, she was working at a humdrum job, helping to put him through med school.

We met again after my return from Paris. She told me that Harry had to be very disappointed with her. She’d not proved to be the girl he’d married. Now she was morose, downcast and boring. On my side, I urged her to read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It had not yet been translated, but we Fulbright girls read it in Paris and discussed it with much interest. From that book, I said, she would learn that her sense of failure was not her fault!

I might have been right, but what actually failed that day were my persuasive powers. She was as implacable in her self-condemnation as earlier she’d been in condemning rich capitalists!

It was a couple of years before I saw her again, this time alongside Harry. Now she looked the smiling, unflappable wife of a young doctor. Either she had learned to prize the life she’d chosen or else she’d erased the memory of the outspoken girl she had once been.

Arlette is the only one of the original five with whom I’ve remained friends. We’ve stayed in contact through the years. She continued to be a very fine painter. Her husband had been posted to a Far Eastern country that, oddly, harmonized with the extremely intelligent, truthful and unsentimental girl she had been in Music and Art. She’s had two kids, and loved them as they now love her. Life doesn’t shock her. She’s warmed to it.

And what about me? Well, if you want to know how it worked out, every step and misstep, read Confessions of a Young Philosopher… and the story turns upward from there … .

Confessions of a Young Philosopher

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Women Who Want To Kill Themselves

Posted on May 5, 2026 by Abigail

Some years ago, when I was still working full time as a philosophy professor, I got a late-afternoon call from E.S. He was a senior colleague and good friend.

We’d exchanged just a few words when he remarked, with concern, “You sound like hell. What’s the matter?”

I told E.S. that I’d just hung up from talking with a woman friend whom I was soon to meet for dinner. “She said she’s going to kill herself and – from her tone – I believe her.”

As it happened, E.S. had lost a daughter to suicide. So he knew enough to take such a threat seriously. First, he advised, “don’t argue with her. Don’t try to talk her out of it.” Second, “buy her dinner.” Third, “buy her a present.” Fourth, “Whatever you might want to say later, first just listen.”

We met at a nice restaurant in the neighborhood. I told her that dinner would be my treat. From what I recall, my present was a teddy bear. In other words, nothing grim and grown up. And I settled back to listen.

She told me that she had submitted a book proposal to a publisher that had the potential dramatically to upgrade her status in her profession. She’d made her case thoroughly, covering every aspect of the venture, with great care and in detail. Nevertheless, after considering the proposal with much interest and at length, in the end it had been rejected.

Since I wasn’t in her line of work, I couldn’t feel the defeat as she felt it. But I understood that, for her, the setback was major. It came at a time when she was getting romantically involved with a man whom she wanted to impress with achievements and status of her own. Now she was back to being, in her own eyes, nobody special.

“So how do you plan to kill yourself?”

“I’ll rent a hotel room and take enough sleeping pills.”

“So they’ll find your body in the morning and that’ll restore your image? When he finds out, Jack will be devastated. Which do you think he’d rather have – a live fiancée who’s suffered a career setback, but can still be there to plan new initiatives and share the highs and the lows with him – or a dead body in a hotel room?”

I don’t know what I said that might have turned the tide. Or maybe it was nothing I said. Maybe it was the teddy bear.

But I think it was a friend’s seeing that her concern was with losing face – which is a concern with honor. What I did was take that concern as seriously as she did and try to address it on its own terms.

Another friend who contemplated suicide had a more classic motivation. She had joined a self-help group whose members included a guy who took it upon himself to be specially supportive to newcomers. In that capacity, he had managed to get her into his bed. It was unlikely that she was the first, or would be the last, to be taken advantage of in that manner.

Of course, in the aftermath she hated herself and wanted – with all her proud Iberian soul – to die. Nothing less would do justice to such a dishonor.

As a concept, nowadays honor is thought to belong to a pre-modern era. All I can say is, not in my experience.

I began what was understood to be our farewell dinner by accepting her view of honor as well as her view of its defeat. With me that acceptance didn’t have to field objections – whether philosophical, psychological or feminist. Like her, I too thought honor was real – though it played out differently for a woman than for a man – and you could lose it. If I had to defend that view on the terrain of philosophical argument, I might be in difficulties. But in real life, I knew what I knew.

So what did I say? I didn’t contest her loss. I fully granted the difficulties that encounter had put her in. I simply pointed out that this dog-of-a-man and his abuse of power wasn’t worth her life! Why honor him with her uncured defeat? Let him live to regret the loss of her charms and the ignominy of her contempt.

Did my interventions cost me anything? Yes. It cost me both friends. I assume that neither friend wanted an inconvenient witness to moments of defeat that otherwise would have been visible only to themselves. I respected their decisions.

On balance, I’m willing to accept the loss.

As long as they’re alive!

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Battle Wounds

Posted on April 28, 2026 by Abigail

The post-October 8th, 2023 outbreak of Jew-hatred in academe continues to open psychic wounds. As a battle-tested veteran of many combats (for example the one pictured above), this phenomenon of psychic wounds is itself startling to me. Let me give my readers a fly-over view of just a few of my earlier combats.

Years before the combat to save the core, before I had tenure in Brooklyn College, I voted for the loser in an election for chair of the philosophy department. I voted that way, in full knowledge that a different answer to a leading question asked me by a powerful man just before the election would have secured both my job and my promotion. For the following seven years, I was fired, reinstated thanks to a union-backed grievance procedure, and promptly fired again. And again. The interesting details are told in the final chapter of my book, A Good Look at Evil (under my name Abigail L. Rosenthal).

The point of bringing up that combat now is that – to the surprise of the union – it left me with no hard feelings. When it was over, I was just happy to be back in the department, among colleagues whose work I respected, and teaching students I loved. And that’s why I entered the fight to save Brooklyn College’s core curriculum.

Here’s another case: living with Jerry in Pennsylvania, I joined the local Reform Temple because holding on to Jewish identity here appeared to require more forethought than it had needed in New York City. As it turned out, all kinds of challenges came with that membership. Just to let your imagination get the picture, I’ll list the ones I recall: getting the heroic Phyllis Chesler invited to speak on the new anti-semitism (back when it was new); getting the anti-Israel weekly vigil-holders in the town square to fade away (their sublime devotion to peace believed consistent with frightening the nearby Jewish shopkeepers); persuading our then rabbi to stand face to face before the Presbyterian congregants who fired questions like arrows at him, by way of endorsing their denomination’s anti-Israel resolution; contacting the local museum about the anti-Israel (or anti-Jewish, I forget which) cartoon featured in a current exhibit and so on.

So here, in the peaceful hinterland, Jewish identity was turning out exhausting. The climactic case involved a guy whose charisma had captivated the Temple board’s president but meanwhile was behaving “inappropriately” with the women. He was not even a Temple member, so efforts to oust him would not have required any extraordinary measures, but nobody wanted to offend his high-level supporter. Except me, Abigail. Who was treated, in classic whistle-blower style – as herself the trouble-maker. And, although it took me some months (and giving a talk of my own to a Temple forum) to get my honor back – the predator was finally ousted and gone with him were the dangers he had brought to the Temple.

*. *. *

Given that combat record of psychic and emotional survival, I’m puzzled as to why I couldn’t just “roll with” one more trying phenomenon: here the positive glee with which the atrocities of October 7 had been celebrated in universities world-wide. Why did that affect memory and other psychic powers that had survived unimpaired in the wake of previous combats? Why now does my psyche seem to me like a fighter on the ropes?

Well, here’s what I seemed to hear when I put the same question in the form of a prayer:

*. *. *

You love and you believe in

the Jewish assignment in history:

real people in chronologically real

relations with God

as their Witness and companion-Traveler

on the timeline.

You also love and believe in

the House that Plato built –

where truth can be sought

without fear or favor.

*. *. *

Now to see them in seeming contradiction … is heartbreaking.

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | The Campus Wars

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My Identity Problem

Posted on April 21, 2026 by Abigail

The title of this column tilts and teeters into a complaint so hackneyed – so yesterday – that even alluding to it might put one at social risk among the smart set.

This although just a few years back, mores had been different. Then, identity problems were very much in style and, if you didn’t have one, you were better off hiding a fact so socially inconvenient. If you were white, male and heterosexual, your cover story was that at least you knew how to joke about your multiply-compounded but unseemly privileges.

In the hierarchy of accusations, the worst thing you could be accused of was racism. As for Jews, in the circles of my youth, Jews wore their identity like a badge of honor. After all, Jews had been the people most consequentially targeted by a Nazi regime that depicted humanity in terms of races – superhuman versus subhuman.

So I grew up thinking of Jewish identity as talismanically protected – at least from the standpoint of any decent people with whom one would want to associate. Since I had a number of Israeli relatives then at the front in the fight for Jewish survival in the homeland – and was also said to be descended on the maternal line from 40 generations of rabbis – all that went to support my sense that I owned an identity that, for decent people, was unassailable.

When the victimes du jour became persons of color, I felt happy to welcome them to their newly-privileged condition and had friendships of greater intensity and candor with black philosophy students than my colleagues generally had. At the same time, because of my own personal experiences (retold in Confessions of a Young Philosopher), I didn’t hesitate to discourage student friends who were black from playing The Victim Card. I thought it was a species of con artistry and they could do better than that with their lives. So my advice to young people of color was to do what, in their place, I would have been well advised to do – and to avoid whatever I would have been, in their place, wise to avoid doing.

*. *. *

It was with such a background that I could fathom the high level of organization, money, propaganda and expertise that could have led students all over the world to rise as one person on October 8, 2023 to cheer the massively multiple rapes, beheadings, rippings of babies from wombs, roping together of whole families to set them afire, and other violations of humanity’s well-recognized norms. All that cheering from students and their equally ecstatic professors must have taken years of costly preparation. The whole phenomenon had caught me pretty much unawares.

I’ve been absorbing all this – the changed world – in successive waves, since it happened. I don’t have a thick layer of skin, much less thicker layers of denial, to serve as buffers between me and the changed reality that’s out there.

Being a philosopher by training, and perhaps by nature, I can’t deny the undeniable. Being a thin-skinned woman, the trouble is that I don’t find myself enfolded in the needed layers of group belonging with which I might naturally and seamlessly identify.

The liberals might possibly still cherish their Habits of Denial that I don’t share.

The conservatives might continue to enjoy their Habits of Belonging that I can’t claim.

As for identifying with a group whether or not such identification feels natural to me, pared down as I am, the only “group” with which right now I wholly identify –

has just one member.

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Civilization and Me

Posted on April 14, 2026 by Abigail

There seems to be something at the heart of historical existence that’s probably incurable. It gets the name of envy or sibling rivalry. And it’s the insurmountable fear that God might love my brother or sister more than God loves me!

In the Bible, the Cain and Abel story lies at the inaugural moment of human sequential time: the precise it-starts-from-right-there moment. There is nothing deeper, more original or primordial that occurs to prepare the incident or explain it away.

Why are Jews hated – in every generation – on the basis of whatever rationalizations the culture of the moment can dig up at that moment?

I can answer that. Jews are hated because people secretly fear, and reflexively can’t stop themselves from believing, that God’s chosen people might be and remain the Jews.

God is far-seeing. He (please, fashionable-world, pardon the pronoun) didn’t change His mind: not in Hitler’s ovens, not in Auschwitz, nor Treblinka, nor Bergen Belsen.

Nor, in the present case, has God changed His mind.

Can God cure this sibling rivalry – the outsized unfairness, this hatred? (On the question of “outsized” or proportion – just how many Jewish nations are there, compared to the number of Muslim nations?) And who in human history has been so persecuted – on whatever pretexts are in the Zeitgeist, happening to enfashion among the beautiful people in this moment’s currents of belief and attitude – whatever the beliefs and attitudes might turn out to be right now?

To the great civilization of the West, there were – if we are to credit Matthew Arnold – over its long history, two foundations:

Athens and Jerusalem

The Academy, the House that Plato built in Athens – where truth can be, has been, is meant to be – sought without fear or favor, is the philosophical foundation.

And the other, which calls for telling the truth (without scanting the difficult parts or self-flattery) about what one has lived in linear time – the historical foundation – that is the contribution of Jerusalem, the Biblical foundation.

And I can tell you that my mind, as it contemplates the menacing of Jews in the Academy, and with that the present shredding, shattering and tearing asunder of this historically and culturally joined foundation, is having a helluva troubled time getting through it!

Speaking very personally, as a person who is both a philosophy professor and a Jew, I too am substantially a compound of Athens and Jerusalem. With the result that, when the civilization based on these companion-foundations splits asunder, I can sense myself as well, quite simply and obviously …

coming apart at the seams.

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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