WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

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The year was 1933. On the day of the big Nazi takeover, a feeble old general tottered down the aisle to hand Adolph Hitler his sword. But halfway there the German general stopped and made a tiny bow to an empty chair. Nobody understood why he did it. Later someone remembered that in the old days the Kaiser used to sit there. Maybe the old general forgot how many years had passed. Or maybe he was making a secret comment about the evil and despicable new order. Maybe he was a good man once, but in the end his world disappeared without a trace.

Not long ago, Katha Pollitt wrote a brilliant column for The Nation. With enormous courage, she condemns the rape of Israeli women by Hamas. Rape is an awful thing, and it can happen to any woman anywhere in the world. So all women everywhere should stand together to stop it. It's a compelling argument. The only problem is that Katha Pollitt tries to back it up with a quote from Virginia Woolf. "As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world."

Katha Pollitt breathlessly describes this as "a noble thought," and then asks almost petulantly, "what happened to it?"

Dragging Virginia Woolf into the conversation reveals where Katha Pollitt's loyalty really lies. And it cripples an otherwise brilliant column. Just like that old German general, Katha secretly sees herself as an aristocrat of the old school. Her loyalty to a vanished world prevents her from resisting a barbaric new order.

Virginia Woolf is Katha Pollit's Kaiser Wilhelm. She wants everyone to bow to the literary greatness of a long-dead white woman from England. And it's not about culture, it's about power. The only feminists who matter are the affluent, educated white women who revere the hot-house flowers of the aristocratic past.

Now you don't have to know much about Virginia Woolf to know that she never left the rarefied atmosphere of literary London. She didn't write about poor women in the slums, or factory workers, or coal miners, or prostitutes, or any of the shabby common people. But at a time when brown and black women, Muslim women, and the poor are openly turning their rage on privileged white women and Jews, Katha Pollitt has only one hero to fall back on. Why?

During the violent anti-Israel protests, I heard a story about an old Jewish woman who was putting up pictures of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. A couple of young black women came along and started tearing down the pictures. The old woman asked them to stop, but they didn't. They started beating her up instead. And when she yelled for them to stop, they said, "F–-k your white privilege."

Katha Pollitt claims in her column that "tribalism" is bad for women. But young feminists of color aren't buying her white-girl hypocrisy, because they know that her whole life – like Virginia Woolf's – has been defined by white privilege. By tribalism. And she knows it too. Her reverence for the dead white authors of the long vanished British Empire is just one more form of tribalism. It's Katha Pollitt pulling rank, reminding the ghetto-dwelling rabble that she went to Harvard and they didn't. It has nothing to do with protecting real women from rape, in Israel or anywhere else.

Katha Pollitt isn't really condemning rape. She's exploiting it. She uses the horror of what Hamas has done and is still doing to Israeli women to bolster her own cultural and moral authority. Anyone who doesn't read Virginia Woolf isn't a real feminist, and anyone who isn't a real feminist doesn't deserve to have a voice in the movement. The problem is, the whole world is getting younger and younger, and browner and browner, and angrier and angrier. And a lot of that anger is being directed at affluent, educated white feminists. And Jews. And all Katha Pollitt can do is bow to the vanished idols of a forgotten world.