Jews From The United States

"I think the word is intractable. I blame the lack of live and let live. And which side is it coming from more than the other side? I think it is coming from people who call other people infidels. That's how it strikes me." Was she moved the first time she went to Israel? "Yes. Probably not like my father, who was simply swept away. He couldn't get over that he had ascended Mount Zion. I don't see any solution here. I'm despairing. That's where I stand."

"We are so placid that the smallest tremor of objection is taken as a full-scale revolution. ("Justice to Feminism")"

"Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?"

"The lower imagination, the weaker, falls into the proliferation of images. My hope is someday to be able to figure out a connection between the work of monotheism-imagining and the work of story-imagining. Until now I have thought of these as enemies."

"He who cries, "What do I care about universality? I only know what is in me," does not know even that."

"It is useless either to hate or to love truth - but it should be noticed."

"Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart."

"I've read...some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick."

"Remember Cynthia Ozick's story, "The Shawl"? In that extraordinarily moving story, Ozick doesn't once mention the word, Holocaust; she focuses on the conflicts of a mother and her two daughters trying to survive the horrors of death-camp internment. That's what good fiction does, and should do."

"To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) There are too many to be tempted to isolate only one, so here are five: “Lighea” (sometimes titled “The Professor and the Mermaid”), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade; Chekhov’s “Ward Six”; Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”; James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (everyone’s autobiography)."

"I don't think one writes for immortality. I think beginning writers always think they will have fame. But if fame — which is power — is what you want, then you'll get it, probably. But it's not something necessary to want or need."

"We have had, alas, and still have, the doubtful habit of reverence. Above all, we respect things as they are. ("Justice to Feminism")"

"Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self."

"I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing...I read in order to find out what I need to know: To illuminate the riddle."

"("On why she writes") Because I can't not. I mean, what else am I going to do with my life? That's another way of putting it. I simply must. Writers simply can't help themselves. In a way they're sort of like the queen of England. Every writer is doomed to his or her profession. What else is the queen going to do with her life? She was born a queen; she's stuck. And writers are stuck, too."

"She is the master of the casual, searing image; in a department store in Foreign Bodies, a woman is ambushed by "floating tongues of perfume". During an awkward conversation between two people "a stillness blundered between them." In Heir to the Glimmering World, Professor Mitwisser, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, has eyes "acutely blue . . . I was shocked by their waver of bewilderment – like heat vibrating across a field.""

"(What sustained you without publication during that period?) Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature...I no longer believe in Literature, capital L, with the same fervor I used to. I’ve learned to respect living, perhaps. I think I have gotten over my fear of largeness as well, because I have gotten over my awe—my idolatrous awe. Literature is not all there is in the world, I now recognize. It is, I admit, still my all, but it isn’t the all. And that is a difference I can finally see."

"Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition."

"One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language."

"Who is not curious as to how the Jews of India survived for so long in an atmosphere of tolerance when other Jewish communities such as that in China, benefiting from similar toleration, assimilated so thoroughly. Their argument is that India as a host society combined tolerance with culturally enforced diversity which made the difference. Indian society, with its several major religions and further division within Hinduism into four major castes, a fifth of outcasts, and over 3,000 subcastes, tolerates wide diversity but does not permit people born into one group to cross over into another or even to associate with the others beyond the public square, since the food taboos of every religious community, caste and subcaste mean that they cannot eat with one another. Nothing separates more than that. The Jewish community could fit into India as another caste and even developed its own subcastes, as the authors explain, properly denoting this as the Cochin Jews' one great (and sad) departure from halakhic Judaism."

"I think the best artists aren't doing it for the prize, they aren't doing it for the fame or the money. They're doing it because they love the art."

"I do think a good conversation requires [a duration of two, three, four, five hours], and I've been thinking a lot about why. I don't think it's just about needing the actual time of three hours to cover all the content. I think the longer form, with a hypothetical skilled conversationalist, relaxes things and allows people to go on tangents and to banter about the details, because I think it's in the details that the beautiful complexity of the person is brough to light."

"I worry that we humans will discriminate against AI systems that clearly exhibit consciousness. That we will not allow AI systems to have consciousness. We'll come up with theories about measuring consciousness that will say that this is a lesser being. And I worry about that because maybe we humans will create something that is better than us humans in the way that we find beautiful, which is they have a deeper subjective experience of reality. Not only are they smarter, but they feel deeper. And we humans will hate them for it. As human history have shown, they'll be 'the other'. We'll try to suppress it. It will create conflict. It will create war. All of this. I worry about this too."

"I think you have to try to walk in the middle, like, with the empathy and humility. And that's actually what science is about, is the. Is the humility."

"you have to look at the differences that exist among women and figure out how to organize to diminish the differences, to transcend the differences, to have policies that overcome them. That's very difficult, it means constant thinking, and studied awareness of what the realities are. It's not a short-term struggle, it's not meant for people who are going to fight today and run away and do something else tomorrow. It's a long-term struggle that requires tenacity and courage."

"A successful teach-in on campus during that fall of 1966 helped raise consciousness, although only a small percentage of students and faculty were involved. Noam Chomsky and Herbert Marcuse were the main speakers, but there were dozens more, and the event went on for fourteen hours, with thousands crowded into the student union cafeteria. I was distressed that none of the speakers were women. Dorothy Healey of the Communist Party was scheduled to speak but the Progressive Labor Party people-the Maoists-disrupted her presentation. That was my first personal encounter with infighting on the Left."

"one of the American left's most brilliant and fearless women-a pioneer in the '30s and role model for activists in the '90s."

"Dorothy Healey, a 1930s communist union organizer of the migrant workers and head of the southern California region of the Communist Party for two decades, including the four years I lived in L.A., recounted the 1938 cotton strike and celebrated the militancy and solidarity of the Okie cotton pickers, hardly mentioning that the strike was lost, or that two decades later, the children of the pickers were serving as L.A. police officers or were active in the John Birch Society. Furthermore, Dorothy and other Communist Party people perceived the 1930s Okie migrants as responsive to the Communist Party."

"To me she represented what was most appealing about the Old Left — commitment, dedication, selflessness...In devoting herself to working for peace, and against economic and racial inequality, she provided a fantastic model for the rest of us. I will always remember her fondly."

"The late Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a longtime CPUSA official, once remarked that Healey was a good leader in her District but was afflicted with a psychosis when she attended national meetings, because she insisted on challenging the leadership. FBI memorandum, August 6, 1969. I had seen many women in the Party who worked very hard and were intelligent and developed theoretically and politically, but I hadn't seen anyone with quite Dorothy's energy and charisma. I do remember very clearly certain Party conventions that I was at in the sixties where I saw her as the "embattled female." It was like this sea of cigar smoke, and she smoked these little cigarillos, and there was something about that, her being little, and she'd barge into these circles of men conversing on something or other, whatever caucus it was, she'd barge in there, and I just loved it. I thought that was great, just great. I didn't care what she said."

"One of the things I'd say about Dorothy is that she has a great capacity to listen sympathetically and to be able to see the other person's point of view. She might have disagreed with ideas that people were articulating (not just these young Black people; it was true of many people that she would encounter), but she could see from the point of view of their culture and who they were personally why they were saying the things they were. At the same time she would be able to articulate alternative ways of thinking. That's a great gift. It's very helpful to people. It allows them to see things in a different way than if you come at people with your line and bash them over the head with your pickax and say, "You're wrong, you're counter-revolutionary, you're petit bourgeois." You do that with people and they say, "Bye.""

"The knowledge I gained about the Che-Lumumba Club did not satisfy me completely, because I had little firsthand knowledge of the larger Party. Kendra and Franklin, therefore, introduced me to some of the white comrades. I began to pay visits to Dorothy Healey, who was then the District Organizer of Southern California. We had long, involved discussions-sometimes arguments-about the Party, its role within the movement, its potential as the vanguard party of the working class; its potential as the party that would lead the United States from its present, backward, historically exploitative stage to a new epoch of socialism. I immensely enjoyed these discussions with Dorothy and felt that I was learning a great deal from them, regardless of whether I ultimately decided to become a Communist myself."

"Beginning in 1937, UCAPAWA-CIO offered hope. Four decades later, I asked Dorothy Ray Healey to recall her most rewarding experience as a labor organizer. Her answer: "To watch the disappearance or at least the diminishing of bigotry... watching all those Okies and Arkies and that bigotry and small-mindedness-all their lives they'd been on a little farm in Oklahoma; probably they had never seen a Black or a Mexicano. And you'd watch in the process of a strike how those white workers soon saw that those white cops were their enemies and that the Black and Chicano workers were their brothers.""

"when push comes to shove I still believe that until there is no longer the private control of the commanding heights of the economy, you can't fundamentally solve anything. Public or social ownership is needed-and that is a lot different than state ownership."

"Is it not time that the public should be enlightened on the subject of the ability and efficiency of those who, normal and intelligent in every respect, lack only the sense of hearing?"

"What is so long overdue is this pressure to put women in official positions, particularly in unions such as the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union."

"Daytime meetings and the demand for child care facilities would open enormous doors for women. Again, we have to judge how many unions are really on the cutting edge of such issues-not how much lip service they can give-but how many issues they really make into significant contractual questions in collective bargaining."

"I have an incurable belief in the potential of working class people. I believe that ultimately, the need to organize, the need to strike, it may get detoured, it may be a very long detour but ultimately it gets back on the road again."

"Few histories that have been written about the labor movement in the 1930s have focused on the intensity of the employer violence against the labor movement. Employers in the United States have historically been far more violent in their repression of the labor movement than employers in any other Western country. There was far more solidaritv between workers who were on strike, far more awareness of the meaning of the slogan "an injury to one is an injury to all.""

"my loyalties are to a vision of socialism, not to a particular organization. There's a phrase I've always liked in the revolutionary anthem "The International." It goes, "No more tradition's chains shall bind us." As Communists we argued that the survival of capitalism depended on the false consciousness of the majority of the people who weren't able to perceive the reality of their own lives. Ironically, the Communists also found themselves bound by "tradition's chains," and substituted a false consciousness for a real understanding of the world around them. The challenge that faces the Left in the future-if it is to have a future-is to base itself on the knowledge of what collective action by human beings can mean, rather than on faith in the infallibility of either its dogma or its leaders. If I were allowed just one piece of advice to give a new generation as to how to sustain a life-long commitment, I would suggest the cultivation of those two essential virtues of a good revolutionary, patience and irony. (p 254)"

"(Today labor is often looked at as merely an arbiter for wages and benefits. Do you think labor leaders today have defined the mission of the labor movement too narrowly?) That is not new, that was started under Samuel Gompers who said that the purpose of the labor movement was "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." But you can't separate the worker and the community. I think it is a survival question. The labor movement must awaken in its ranks and leadership a broader awareness. Workers need to understand what causes the export of jobs so they can unite to prohibit the export of jobs to places that do not allow workers to organize to get decent working conditions. The leadership must recognize that without that, the labor movement is cutting its own throat. It's not a question of abstract protectionism-it's a question of protecting both the foreign worker and the American worker. Even the United Auto Workers (UAW) has recognized there has to be a global approach to the problems of the automobile industry, that it can't be solved country by country. Workers have to be organized because the corporate interests are already organized-multinationals are far more class-conscious than the workers have been."

"Corporations couldn't care less about welfare-community welfare, the nation's welfare. In the absence of any countervailing pressure, I don't see any way they can be held accountable. The public must be educated to understand that the most fateful decisions in their lives are being made not by politicians sitting in Congress whom they can watch and see, but by corporate executives who make the major decisions affecting their lives-whether they will have jobs, whether their children will have jobs, where they are going to live, whether they are going to live in a healthy atmosphere. Until people in great numbers start to understand the significance of the corporate decisions made privately, I don't see much likelihood of any important regulation of them."

"“She was a heartfelt revolutionary of her time,” Donna Wilkinson, the widow of national civil liberties leader Frank Wilkinson, told The Times on Monday. “She was always so fiercely partisan for working people. Yes, of course, she cared about war and peace and women’s issues, but she was always concerned about working people.”"

"Socialist politics should mean more not less debate; socialist democracy will involve an ongoing debate over all the important issues confronting the nation. Genuine democratic debate requires a genuinely free press. My travels to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union convinced me of the necessity for the independence of the mass media from state and Party control. Most people did not believe what they read in the official press or saw or heard on radio or television. Their daily lives belied the "official" facts. A socialist America should not only ensure a free press, it should guarantee as well something that does not exist today under capitalism, and that is the widest possible access to popular communication for individuals and groups. Real democracy is impossible unless people know the facts behind proposed policies, unless they hear all the relevant arguments pro and con-which is something that our own corporate-dominated media has almost as little interest in promoting as the Party-dominated media in the pre-glasnost Soviet Union. (p 252)"

"I won't see socialism in my lifetime; I don't know if my son will see it in his, or even my grandchildren in theirs. There is no way to foretell what kind of political developments and issues will galvanize a future generation to turn towards socialism. The model I embraced in my youth, the vision of a vanguard party of the working class seizing power in the midst of a great social and political crisis like the one that had overtaken Russia in 1917, is no longer relevant. But I still believe that working people must be at the center of any real movement for socialism, for they are the majority for whose well-being that government "of, by, and for the people" should be concerned. Ultimately I have faith that people, given the understanding of how they can help bring it about, want to live in a better world. People can change the world, but they can't do it as individuals alone. They have to join with others to do it. One thing I have not changed my views on over the years is the belief that organization is the key to winning victories for social change. That's why it was such a tragedy that so little in the way of organized radicalism survived the collapse of the New Left. (p 252)"

"People must have a channel through which they can express themselves if there is to be any hope that they will transcend the sense of powerlessness and apathy encouraged by our dominant ideological myths. Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition has come closest in recent times to serving as this kind of channel. One could see a glimmer of the possibilities for the future, watching the young people who were Jesse Jackson delegates at the Democratic conventions in 1984 and 1988. Many had never participated in any political movement before, and you could see how the Jackson campaign had opened things up for them and gave a whole new dimension to their lives. The Rainbow Coalition has had its share of internal problems, but it has been far more successful than any of the more explicitly ideological groups on the Left in teaching people to give an affirmative answer to the old Biblical question, "Am I my brothers [and sisters] keeper?" One keeps oneself only by keeping others. That means we have to learn to look upon the societies of this world as things which have been created by humans and which are therefore subject to being changed for the better by humans. (p 254)"

"You've got to accompany any demand for privatization with worker and community control. It shouldn't only be the worker, it should be the worker and the community participating together."

"It seems to be that Lincoln's definition of democracy, "Government of the people, by the people, and for the people," is as good a summary as any of an essential element of the kind of socialism I would like to see established in the United States. Socialist democracy means democracy in the economic as well as in the political sphere."

"Hitler's triumph made terribly clear the danger of our earlier notions, as well as the very stark differences between a fascist regime and "bourgeois democracy" as represented by someone like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By the mid-1930s the issue of anti-fascism permeated all our mass work. In countries like France and Spain where big socialist movements existed, Communists sought to unite the Left into antifascist united fronts. In the United States we sought to work with the socialists, and we also began to reevaluate our earlier, highly critical assessment of the New Deal."