Feminists

"I feel connected to Jewish history. I feel a part of the Jewish community, in all of its variety. As a Jew, my fate is bound up with other Jews. That could be Hasidim, Sephardim...people who are very different from me. In addition to that sense of bond and commitment, I also feel an obligation to contribute to Jewish culture, and that could take different forms. That could be my own writing, or it could be translations from Yiddish, so that people who don’t speak Yiddish can connect with Ashkenazi tradition. I don’t want Yiddish to disappear because nobody can read it. I also spend a lot of time on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I feel very much that it’s a part of me, in a way; I can’t totally distance myself from it, but I’m deeply disturbed by what’s happened there. I recognize the existence of religious texts, but I don’t necessarily believe them. I appreciate some of them from a literary or historical perspective, and I understand that they’re part of my history as a Jew, but I’m not moved by synagogue. I’m not even sentimental about it."

"There’s got to be a greater knowledge of diversity in Jewish life."

"The word "secularism" is simply not part of this generation of Jewish students' vocabulary. With few exceptions, they define their Jewishness solely in relationship to Zionism (whose secular origins they don't even consider) and/or to the synagogue. Extremely conscious of the Holocaust, they commemorate Yom Hashoah, but are ignorant of Jewish European history before 1939. They've heard of Yiddish and know the word shtetl and are familiar with the names Sholem Aleykhem and I. B. Singer, but know nothing of the extensive cultural or political history associated with any of these. Born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this next generation is, of course, the product of its upbringing, which almost never included Jewish secular culture and history. Raised in assimilated or semiobservant homes, educated till their bar or bat mitsve in Sunday Hebrew schools (which most of them disparage), contemporary Jewish college students are totally cut off from a Jewish heritage which was thriving just forty years ago."

"Though U.S. Jews were quick to protest the Knesset's attempt to define "who is a Jew," it is a definition we are obsessed with."

"You’re sort of one person at one moment and another person at another moment. I suppose the only time that you’re ever really complete is when you’re by yourself or in an environment in which you’re not hiding. In the gay community, I was not hiding my Jewishness. Not everybody was interested in my Yiddish work, but nobody was hostile to it. But in the Jewish world, I had to be shut down in certain ways."

"I don’t think there is an ideal community—there are different kinds, and it shifts. One of the things we make a mistake about is that we want things to be static. You have to recognize when it’s become confining or rigid or prescriptive. You know, people always forget, Hasidim were considered rebels only 250 years ago. They were excommunicated! Everyone thinks they were around, walking in the desert in Palestine. They weren’t! They don’t realize that it’s much more dynamic. That gives me hope, that things change."

"what the Jewish lesbian encounters are the typical conservative stances. Closed doors. Silence. Disgust."

"I feel I was very lucky, though, because when I came out, which was in 1973, New York was just hopping. It was exploding. It was after Stonewall. Lesbians started getting organized. I belonged to a group of lesbian writers. There were four of us who decided to start Conditions magazine, for example, and before that we had a group called Di Vilde Chayas [the wild animals], which was a group that had Adrienne Rich, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Gloria Greenfield, and Evelyn Torton Beck, who did Nice Jewish Girls."

"The Jewish Labor Bund was a non-Zionist organization, so I barely thought about Israel. But if you’re going to be involved with the Left, you’ve got to start thinking about Israel. Melanie and I became very committed to supporting the Women in Black in ‘87. I formed a group here, the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley. We wanted to be identified as Jews protesting."

"Those of the Left, Jew and non-Jew alike, seem to believe what the Right has always maintained-that Jews run the world and are, therefore, most responsible for its ills. The casualness, the indifference with which the Left accepts this anti-Semitic stance enrages me. It is usually subtle, often taking the form of anti-Semitism by omission. Its form is to show or speak about Jews only as oppressors, never as anything else. That is anti-Semitic."

"I think there’s a strand of people who say you have to speak Yiddish, and you have to speak it correctly. I don’t want the movement to become elitist. It used to be that Hebrew was the loshon ha-kodesh [holy language]. I don’t want Yiddish to become a holy language. I want it to be of the people, which is the way that it always was. I think that’s something to guard against."

"Though the Middle East is "far away," Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza remain close to our hearts, to our Jewish identity. We discuss the U.S. government's role in the region, the connections between defense spending and the homeless, between Third World people's solidarity with the Palestinians and the tensions between Jews and other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. But these are not, I believe, at the core of our involvement. Israel retains a special place on our list of priorities because it is a Jewish state and we are Jews and cannot disengage ourselves from its fate. It pushes us psychologically, gnaws at our sense of personal responsibility. It keeps us constantly focused and conscious of our Jewish identity."

"Defining and setting Jewish boundaries, prioritizing Jewish concerns and Jewish needs (especially less concrete ones like identity building) are particularly difficult for those of us who have learned to value and respect other cultures and peoples."

"When I published my first book, I had lesbian poems in there. Some people got it, and some people didn’t. There were people who only wanted to look at my Holocaust poetry. They pretended like there was nothing else. On the other hand, there were lots of lesbians who were just interested in my lesbian poems and could care less about the Holocaust ones. It was very difficult for me to give readings because I never had an integrated audience. It was only many years later, in the ‘90s, when I became better known and would be invited to campuses, for example, that my readings would be co-sponsored by an English department, a women’s center, and an LGBT committee or group. When I did these things, people would always say, ‘Gee, we’ve never had such a mixed audience before.’ In the ‘70s… this was still too raw. Some of it was quite ugly, and it was very disappointing for me to see the community that I had come out of be so bigoted."

"This is perhaps the most painful aspect for me of being Jewish, for I identify strongly as a Jew, am proud to be a Jew. And yet I sometimes feel so torn-so torn from the Jewish community, from the Jews I grew up with, who nurtured me, helped me. And yet I don't understand what America has done to them and how it has seduced them. The conservatism is there and really hard to accept. But it is there, definitely there with the mainstreaming."

"The translation of Yiddish literature into English by the -- beginning with, like, Irving Howe, and that totally erased women, so it was even worse in English than it actually was in Yiddish."

"The Jewish Labor Bund began as a kind of socialist movement aimed at Jewish workers and evolved into -- very quickly, actually -- it evolved into a kind of socialist, self-consciously culturally identified movement, so that they weren't just -- that it wasn't only interested -- or understood that just either having better wages or better working conditions was really not enough, and that people needed schools and libraries and sports organizations and theater and art and literature in order to lead a kind of enriched life...The Bund was always -- was very strongly, before the war, anti-Zionist, and I was raised -- I don't know if I was raised anti-Zionist, because already by the time I was conscious, Israel already existed and the Bund made its peace with the fact that there was an Israel, but I never had the Zionist idea that I was -- that my home was there. I always felt that my home was in Poland...I want to make sure that it gets remembered. I want to pass it on to other people."

"Like most activists and artists, I have difficulty establishing priorities. The tension between being active in the world and needing solitude is one all of us struggle with. I find myself discussing this tension with other Jews, particularly in regard to our activism on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not an abstract discussion."

"The Jewish artist in me feels displaced. I want to have time to write, to create literature which expands our notion of our Jewishness, which might in turn give us rest and inspire us to keep on with our peace work. But I don't make time for it. I remain focused on Israel and the Occupied Territories, where the situation is worsening."

"I'm a person who's interested in history in general. I think we should have accurate history, and I think we should look at people that have been erased, histories that have been erased."

"I felt that by translating, first of all, I made something accessible that was inaccessible and would remain inaccessible. And in some cases, it actually inspired other people to learn Yiddish, by reading the -- then they said, I want to read the original and I want to read more. What's not translated?...it's not like the real thing. It never is. But it's either you get this, or you get nothing. And I feel that a good translation -- it's not the original -- gives you a lot...I wish more stuff was available in English. I mean, I wish I could put stuff in my classroom. But I can't, unless it's translated. And then, that means that students remain ignorant of it."

"When it comes to the bottom line, the Moral Majority is Christian. So is the Ku Klux Klan. So is the Nazi Party. And I am completely stymied that large segments of the Jewish population have not absorbed these simple basic facts."

"Eastern and Western European Jews and struggling Jewish immigrants here in the States were neither completely passive nor pacifists in World War II or before that. Before that--? Jewish men served in various European armies, sometimes willingly, sometimes by force. Jewish workers-men and women-staged strikes, often violent. Various Jewish political groups organized self-defense organizations. Political enemies fought each other with weapons which were not limited to words. To claim otherwise is to erase the historically documented active Jewish participation in European life as well as the less picturesque Jewish underworld of gangsters, alcoholism, prostitution, violence, wife and child abuse."

"One of the things that I did when I went to Poland this summer was, I insisted that there were lesbian -- because I know what's going on over there -- that I insisted that the word "lesbian" be in my bio. And it was interesting -- in Kraków, three young people came up to me, one of them in tears, just ecstatic that I had done it, and that I actually -- I had talked about it."

"I am also angry that Jews have somehow, during this process, gotten stuck—I'm not sure if that's the right word, but I don't know how else to express it. They have been unable to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, have not learned how to transcend the catastrophe. They've mistakenly thought that to transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it's kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression—not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression."

"I only really became familiar with religious aspects of Judaism when I became active in the Women’s Movement, and I was forced into it. I was working with women who were observant, and I wanted to be sensitive, so I started learning. A friend and I did a feminist Haggadah. I have a whole bunch of xeroxed Haggadahs with all kinds of goddesses on them."

"Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!"

"I cannot end without affirming as strongly as I can my deep feelings of identification and pride in being a Jew. It was Jews who first instilled in me the meaning of oppression and its consequences. It was Jews who first taught me about socialism, class, racism and what in the fifties was called "injustice." It is from Jews that I adopted ideals that I still hold and principles that I still believe are true and must be fought for and put into practice. It was from Jews that I learned about the necessity for resistance. It was from Jews that I also learned that literature is not simply fancy words or clever metaphor, but instead is deeply, intimately connected to life, to a life that I am a part of. It is really almost impossible to compress this inheritance into a single paragraph. But I know its depth and vitality, and I know that I have absorbed it thoroughly into my consciousness."

"since Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatilla camps' massacres, I have experienced a slow disorientation around my Jewish identity. Israeli policies have caused me to question the adequacy of how I defined myself as a Jew. Like those Jews who until '82 were not focused on Israel, I felt discomfort and then rage about Israel's relationship to Palestinians and an increasing urgency about working to resolve the conflict. With great resistance, I have accepted that events in Israel and in the Occupied Territories-no matter how I defined myself as a Jew-affect my vision of myself as a Jew, my Jewish pride, my sense of how Jewish issues are to be prioritized."

"At the time, it was not an easy process to come out in the Jewish community. And very often, I voluntarily was a token. I mean, I knew I was being used as a token. But I think that that's also part of the process. I think you allow yourself to be a token just so often, you know. But I think it's part of a process of people getting adjusted and having a token out there that they can -- that makes it easier for somebody else not to be a token."

"This is the confusion. Being Jewish. Being a lesbian. Being an American. It all converges. It is like feelings about one's parents. Love and embarrassment. The painful realization that they are not perfect."

"When I write, I will say it out loud to myself over and over again. I want to hear it. I want to hear how it sounds. Not only -- I like to manipulate it on the page and how it looks, but I also want to be able to hear it."

"I experienced a lot of homophobia when I came out, around 1974"

"I write as much out of a Jewish consciousness as I do out of a lesbian/feminist consciousness. They are both always there, no matter what topic I might be working on. They are embedded in my writing, embedded and enmeshed to the point that they are not necessarily distinguishable as discrete elements. They merge and blend and blur, for in many ways they are the same."

"In the last few years, I have realized the value of Homework: I have studied the history of our people in this country. I cannot tell you how proud I am to be a Chinese/Korean American Woman. We have such a proud heritage, such a courageous tradition. I want to tell everyone about that, all the particulars that are left out in the schools. And the full awareness of being a woman makes me want to sing."

"Merle Woo wrote a letter to her mother, stating her pride in being a Chinese-Korean-American woman: "We have such a proud heritage, such a courageous tradition.""

"As a feminist and lesbian, as a Yiddishist and a cultural Jew, I often feel alienated from Jewish progressives who do not share my cultural concerns, who do not worry about Jewish cultural survival... I have found, in fact, that my concerns about Jewish identity and culture often form the bridge to the mainstream Jewish community and enable me to get progressive issues such as women's and gay and lesbian rights a more sympathetic ear."

"I sort of liked the kind of Yiddish poetry of like, Morris Rosenfeld. I liked somebody telling a story -- narrative. I liked narrative in poetry."

"What happened was that Jewish feminists decided to either reclaim some stuff or -- they pushed into the Jewish community -- and people who had been outside of it, suddenly, women saw that there was a way in because of these other Jewish feminists...Every minority woman did this. They went back to their communities and they said, Where are the women? Let me see where they've been hidden, where they've been buried, who's forgotten, who should be remembered. We all did that with our own communities of origin, and I did the same thing with the Yiddish. And so, when I did with Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz -- when we did "The Tribe of Dina," we highlighted Fradel Shtok, who I'd never heard of before, and Kadia Molodowsky, who I had, but I didn't even know that she wrote prose. And we published -- I translated two short stories by both of them. And aside, I think, from Rokhl Korn, it was, like, the first time that these people's prose was being shown."

"The right to free speech./Jeanne Kirkpatrick walks out when students hiss./She has the right to free speech/any time/anywhere/because she defends/U.S. imperialism./But Merle Woo?/Merle Woo gets fired/from the classroom./She speaks about democracy./For students, staff and faculty. Against censorship./For a Third World College. Against cultural genocide./For lesbians and gays. Against heterosexism./For the possibility of all our voices,/in all languages, singing out."

"the Holocaust. I find it almost impossible to write that word because here-in America-the word has lost almost all meaning. And the fault lies with both non-Jews and Jews. It lies with the "American way of life," with the process of Americanization, with American Big Business, with commercialism, with posing, with artificial feelings...I find-and am repeatedly stunned by it-that people (including non-Jews) insist on dredging it up. Writers, for example, who have no feelings or connection to the war, insist on it as literary metaphor, as an epigraph, as some kind of necessary addition. A casual allusion to Auschwitz. An oblique reference to the Warsaw Ghetto. Somehow this "sprinkling" of Jewish experiences is thought to reflect sensitivity, a largeness of heart. And of course it does not. It is simply the literary Holocaust, the Holocaust of words that has nothing to do with fact. It is nothing more than a pose. I must say that my teeth grind whenever I see these gratuitous gestures-usually devoid of any Jewish context, devoid of any sense of the Jewish experience or history."

"To the racist white female professor who says, "If I have to watch everything I say I wouldn't say anything," I want to say, "Then get out of teaching.""

"To the white female poet who says, "Well, frankly, I believe that politics and poetry don't necessarily have to go together," I say, "Your little taste of white privilege has deluded you into thinking that you don't have to fight against sexism in this society. You are talking to me from your own isolation and your own racism. If you feel that you don't have to fight for me, that you don't have to speak out against capitalism, the exploitation of human and natural resources, then you in your silence, your inability to make connections, are siding with a system that will eventually get you, after it has gotten me. And if you think that's not a political stance, you're more than simply deluded, you're crazy!" This is the same white voice that says, "I am writing about and looking for themes that are 'universal."" Well, most of the time when "universal" is used, it is just a euphemism for "white:" white themes, white significance, white culture. And denying minority groups their rightful place and time in US history is simply racist."

"It wasn't an age in which people explained a lot of things to kids. Really. I mean, we're so careful now about, is this gonna traumatize the child and all of this. Nobody even thought about it."

"I think my introduction to loving poetry and literature came from Yiddish"

"I get so tired of being the instant resource for information on Asian American women. Being the token representative, going from class to class, group to group, bleeding for white women so they can have an easy answer and then-and this is what really gets to me-they usually leave to never continue their education about us on their own."

"Try to understand that our distrust is from experience, and that our distrust is powerless. Racism is an essential part of the status quo, powerful, and continues to keep us down. It is a rule taught to all of us from birth. Is it no wonder that we fear there are no exceptions?""

"I've been thinking a lot about it lately, about the corruption here in America, how everything becomes big business, how everything becomes diseased. Everything."

"There's an enormous amount of protectiveness -- of sort of like, the three classic writers. You're not -- can't say that they were sexist. Why? I mean, why were they -- were they really, I mean, the only three men in the last century who were not sexist? It just doesn't make any sense."

"But there are barriers to unity: white women who are racist, and Asian American men who are sexist. My very being declares that those two groups do not share my complete sensibility. I would be fragmented, mutilated, if I did not fight against racism and sexism together."