After four decades as a successful author, Phyllis Chesler worries she’s being “written out of history” in her own lifetime.

On Sunday night, Tifereth Israel Congregation hosted an evening with Chesler, who, throughout her career, has worked as a psychotherapist, an organizer for various human rights campaigns and a professor of psychology at the College of Staten Island.

She lectured on the cost of exposing anti-Semitism and the way in which her recent work has been received by critics and colleagues. Chesler said that at the height of her success, she lectured across the world, engaged with mainstream media outlets and co-founded feminist organizations.

But today, critics question her credibility and her engagement with audiences has diminished.

She remains an active writer, and during her speech she talked candidly about her controversial book, “The New Anti-Semitism.”

“I am a Jew, a feminist, an academic and a civil libertarian. I believe in universal human rights. I am not a multicultural relativist,” Chesler began. “Today we are up against the most dangerous demagogues whom we have allowed to flourish on campus and in the media.”

For the first three decades of her career, her published books dealt with topics like second-wave feminism, motherhood and surrogacy.

“I have been troubled by anti-Semitism on the left from the late ‘60s, and I opposed it. But I didn’t make it the primary focus of my work,” she said.

This changed following the Second Intifada, a period of intensified Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2000, when Chesler took issue with the way the media portrayed Israel during that event and in the years that followed.

This culminated in her book from 2003, “The New Anti-Semitism,” which cites anti-Zionism as a modern adaptation of anti-Semitism, a concept she said was provocative at the time.

“My every word was treated as traitorous. For the first time in my career, the mass media was no longer interested in reviewing my work or interviewing me,” said Chesler.

Part of the controversy stems from her argument that intellectuals on the left have aligned themselves with Islamists by way of multicultural relativism, meaning that an individual’s actions and beliefs are dictated by their own culture.

She believes this line of thinking has protected Islamic practices like sharia law from being properly criticized, which in turn has given rise to anti-Semitism, especially within college campuses, and the repression of Muslim women.

“Those in the West who themselves benefit from free speech were defending or at least refusing to criticize the utter absence of such rights in the Islamic world. And they focused disproportionately on Israel alone and condemned me,” she said.

Her speech highlighted the two years that followed the publication of her book, where she was accused of being an Islamophobe and a warmonger through electronic mailing lists. She said, as a result of the increased criticism from her former colleagues and allies, she stopped receiving invitations to speak at feminist conferences.

“My punishment is this: my earned credibility and economic survival have been compromised, so I cannot be the kind of effective advocate for Israel and the West that I think this struggle requires,” said Chesler.

Due to monetary constraints, she worries she won’t be able to continue her written work past this year. She feels that speaking out is the only way there will be change in the world.

“We live at a moment where ideology has failed us,” she said. “We need ideas, not ideology.”