What Should I Be Writing About?

By Phyllis Chesler

Here’s why I’ve been relatively silent in the last week. I’m editing a new book of mine—and yes, it’s about something entirely new–but I’ve also been thinking and thinking. In addition to covering Islamic gender and religious apartheid, I’ve been writing, almost exclusively, about the new antisemitism/antizionism for nearly a quarter-century now. I may have been among the first to insist that antizionism IS the new antisemitism, and I’ll be forever proud of all the blowback I endured without a second thought. However, we now have newer, younger, healthier, funded, or employed writers and thinkers, who have picked up the torch and are doing excellent work. No, I’m not resigning my post but yes, I am thinking about whether my work is–or is not–still essential in terms of Israel, Iran, Islam, and American foreign policy.

I am an unfunded civilian soldier-wordsmith, carrying on, carrying on.

It takes many hours each and every day to keep up with all the news, the opinion pieces, the propaganda, and many more hours to further research and write something of use, an analysis, a point of view, that might be unique, or at least important. Might I be spending the same six to eight hours every single day, working on something that needs me more? Some topic that awaits a pioneering thinker–or, should I be writing more new books?

A book that I was working on 54 years ago and which I published 52 years ago has just been sold into China in both a paperback and a kindle edition. I am talking about “Women and Madness” which has also been translated into Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, and Farsi, (a pirated edition), as well as into many European languages.

Maybe something I write now will have a life abroad fifty years from now. Wouldn’t that be something!

First published in Phyllis’ Substack