Dear Friends,                                                                                    Susan Brownmiller

“It all got sort of mishmashed in my brain except for one thread: a helluva lot of people over the centuries seemed to want to harm the Jewish people. ... I can argue that my chosen path – to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women – had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and the Holocaust.”

We are all in debt to her. Feminist writers whom I respect and love criticized Against our Will when it was published (1975), but I cannot imagine feminism without it. I only found the quote above just now while I was writing this. But it speaks to us all right now, that one thread led her to fight against all physical harm against anyone at all. That fight, desperate, seemingly hopeless, but always and absolutely necessary connects her to another writer, also Jewish, and also always an inspiration, Simone Weil: “force is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”

This is the first and basic fight, the fight against physical harm, violence, force. Harm, violence, force, are so pervasive so ingrained even in “ordinary” life that we often fail even to recognize them. But they are the first, the absolute enemy. How are we to fight them, so deeply are they embedded in our selves, in all of us?

By fighting them first in ourselves, and then … well, then, continuing the fight. Simone Weil and Susan Brownmiller will be our comrades in arms.

Simone Weil

3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943

Susan Brownmiller

15 February 1935 – 24 May 2025

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby