Jews From The United States

"In 1954 Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg defined and popularized yidishe veltlekhe kultur/"worldly" or secular Yiddish culture for English readers through their extensive introduction and selections in A Treasury of Yiddish Stories. This culture intellectual dialogues, arts, and history appeared to be devoid of women and women's concerns, except as depicted and interpreted by men...By 1976, this tradition was an accepted historical fact which informed and titled Howe's massive history World of Our Fathers. Both Dawidowicz and Howe understood the complexity and richness of yidishe veltlekhe kultur with its probing intellectual controversies, bitter political debates and artistic expression. Yet their histories, distorted by their omissions, have been perpetuated by other scholars and translators. Until now, English readers non-Jews and Jews - have had little access to women's individual and collective roles and achievements in Yiddish-speaking communities on both sides of the Atlantic."

"Radical Jews of the 1960s and 1970s were the most bitter critics of Jewish suburbia. Irving Howe contended that assimilation there had extinguished some of the most distinctive qualities of the Jewish spirit: "an eager restlessness, a moral anxiety, an openness to novelty, a hunger for dialectic, a refusal of contentment, an ironic criticism of all fixed opinion." Certainly, these qualities describe the Jewish women activists in this book."

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

"As one looks back across the shambles of the intervening decades, it is hard not to envy them: the fierce young Reed making his prose into a lyric of revolt, the handsome young Eastman mediating among a raucus of opinions, the cherubic Art Young drawing his revolutionary cartoons with the other worldly aplomb of a Bronson Alcott. History cannot be recalled, but in this instance at least, nostalgia seems a part of realism. For who among us, if enabled by some feat of imagination, would not change places with the men of The Masses in their days of glory?"

"One explanation for the neglect of women's part in shaping The Masses and its content may lie in an image of the magazine constructed by its chroniclers. Indeed, the extent to which historians have neglected discussion of Masses women is quite remarkable. Daniel Aaron, in his Writers on the Left (1961), devotes some twenty pages to The Masses. He deals with Eastman, Dell, and Reed at considerable length, while mentioning the founding members Inez Haynes Irwin and Mary Heaton Vorse in a single line. Even more remarkable is Irving Howe's introduction to William L. O'Neill's 1966 Masses anthology, Echoes of Revolt. While O'Neill himself does include a representative selection of work by Masses women in the anthology, Howe achieves the remarkable feat of writing his entire introduction without mentioning a single female contributor. Howe concludes resoundingly: "For who among us... would not change places with the men of The Masses in their days of glory?" More recent histories redress the balance somewhat-notably Judith Schwartz's study of women of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy club, many of whose members had ties with The Masses, and Art for The Masses, Rebecca Zurier's 1987 anthology of the work of Masses artists. Nancy Cott's frequent allusions to Masses women in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) indicate how very central to that grounding, to the shaping of turn-of-the-century feminist discourse, Masses women were. But in many imaginations, The Masses remains the project of Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed (journalist), Art Young, and Charles Winter."

"Behind them still throbbed the tradition of nineteenth-century American radicalism, the un-ambiguous nay-saying of Thoreau and the Abolitionists. This tradition implied that the individual person was still able to square off against the authority of the state; it signified a stance-one could not quite speak of it as a politics-of individual defiance and rectitude, little concerned because little involved with the complexities of society. The radicalism of nineteenth-century New England had been a radicalism of individual declaration far more than of collective action; and while Eastman and his friends were indeed connected with a movement, the Socialist party of Debs, in essential spirit they were intellectual freebooters, more concerned with speaking out than speaking to. They swore by Marx, but behind them could still be heard the voices of Thoreau and Wendell Phillips-and it was a good thing."

"My energies have always gone into making art rather than promoting it."

"Arches National Monument is a place where I once lived, painting out of doors with a spectacular view of Mountain La Sal and the Arches. There were always furrows, storms, snakes, dinosaur bones, pot shards, new arches, rocks, the sun, pictorially real and other real adventures. I ventured over the old and new roads, trails, sensing and knowing new idioms and aims, exhilarated by my prospective Rivertrip- My intentions, not yet disclosed..."

"The trunks and limbs heavy with resin look polished, Smooth to a caressing touch or embrace, Stimulating feelings into the nature of things, Triggering thoughts of surface textures, of color-light, form and tension. Bristlecone Pines don’t decay...they erode like stone. Astonishing! Yellows, greys. Their scattered fragments, eternal spirit shapes, seem planted, Alive and whole with shadows and scents of pine."

"We need to cherish, to listen to the wisdom of the “Ancients,” As they listen to us. Bristlecone Pines don’t decay...they erode like stone."

""Dance Eternal" demonstrates Abbey's excellence as a draftsman. Her line, always bold and rhythmic, is bursting with supple eloquence."

"Rita Deanin Abbey translates the wild gestures of action painting into compositions on large steel panels enameled with shiny porcelain. This technique solidifies the strokes and blobs of paint into parodies of themselves, much as Roy Lichtenstein's cartoony "Brushstroke" paintings took the rough edges off Abstract Expressionism."

"Land is not simply a subject for Abbey, but a major fact of her life that she examines daily."

"My former boss Barack Obama likes to invoke a teaching of Martin Luther King Jr.: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It sounds nice but it's not quite true. The arc can bend toward justice, but much of the time it tacks stubbornly toward the status quo. We must be willing to do the work, reaching up with our own hands and wrenching the arc away from stasis and toward a better future. And when the arc seems to be bending away from justice, we have to dig deep, muster even greater resources, and bend it back."

"Our society is becoming more vulnerable by the day to hate on both the left and the right. Beset by a pandemic that has devasted communities, unsettled everyday life, and cost millions of jobs, people are on edge, ever more likely to blame the Other, whether it's Jews, immigrants, Blacks, Asians, Latinx, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ community—you name it. Deepening economic inequality magnifies the tension, as does inadequate health care, excessive levels of personal debt, and stresses caused by once-in-a-century natural disasters that now occur every year. In this environment, with hatred seething around us, the arrival of another demagogue—one smarter and more disciplined than Donald Trump—is all it would take to produce an explosion of violence, mass death, and the destruction of our society and democracy."

"The insidious nature of antisemitism, and these tropes about power, is Kanye [West] can say these things—"Jews have all the power, they are controlling everything"—and if we don't get him, you know, if we don't deal with that, the myth spreads, and it takes root. If we do address that, and there are consequences, he says: "Aha! Proves my point." So it's kind of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario, and we're kind of stuck. We can't ignore it, because it has, again, consequences, and if it gets addressed, he says: "See? Proves my point." But, I mean, that's just the insidious and ugly nature of antisemitism."

"Every hateful thought or deed matters—not just because of the direct harm it causes to others, but because of the indirect role it plays as a vector for the spread of hate. Horrific attacks such as the one that took place at the Tree of Life synagogue don't just happen out of nowhere. They happen because over time, biased thinking and disrespectful behavior become normalized, leading larger numbers of people to demonize, dehumanize, and diminish the outsider."

"The FBI, for instance, includes "feeling alone or lacking meaning and purpose in life," "being emotionally upset after a stressful event," "not feeling valued or appreciated by society," and "believing they have limited chances to succeed" as among the factors that make people vulnerable to radicalization. Research has suggested that extremists have higher rates of childhood trauma than members of the general population."

"I believe that you call people in before you call them out. And I don't believe in cancel culture, I believe in counsel culture."

"I have gone after Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump, plenty of other people on the right who are white. I have gone after plenty of people on the left who are white. I have gone after—I shouldn't say "gone after", but called out people like Candace Owens, and people like Kanye [West], and others."

"I think about Meyers Leonard last year, two years ago. Meyers Leonard, you know, he was a forward for The Heat who was caught. He was streaming on Steam playing, like, I cannot remember what game he was playing, and he used a pretty offensive term towards Jews. I think it was, like, Call of Duty. And we called him out. The Heat dropped him. He hasn't been picked up by another team. So he pretty much got cancelled. By the way, we've worked with Meyers over the years. We worked with him right away after that. He's done some good stuff with us calling out hate on video games since then. … He lost his whole career."

"As case after case came up, I saw the vast chasms between our rhetoric of freedom, equality and charity, and what we were doing to, or not doing for, poor people, especially children."

"We have lost a sense of personal responsibility and sensitivity to people, and our faith that we can do more for people who need help if we care. In other words, I don't believe we can have justice without caring, or caring without justice. These are inseparable aspects of life and work for children as they are for adults."

"I tell myself each time that I am trying to do the best that can be done for this one child in front of me now. And then, starting after court, I try to do what I can for the others like him.'"

"One need not go South to discover the injuries to children which result from discrimination or indifference, too often rationalized on the ground that neighbors did not know about them."

"I was one of the most fortunate of children because my parents shared so much- in their ideals, their work...And perhaps most important they...never gave us the feeling they were too busy or engaged in anything more important than their life with us."

"Those were the days of the battles for the right to organize, and the conditions of workers were abominable."

"It's too late for liberalism. Because what I do outside of bed may have nothing to do with what I do inside-but my consciousness is branded, is permeated with homosexuality. For years I have been branded with your label for me. The result is that when I am among gays or in bed with another woman, I am a person, not a lesbian. When I am observable to the straight world, I become gay. You are my litmus paper."

"By the end of my second year [1926], the great textile strike had broken out in Passaic where I had worked, so I commuted between Yale Law School and Passaic, to the horror of some of the reputable people at Yale."

"We want something more now, something more than the tolerance you never gave us."

"We are the extrusions of your unconscious mind-your worst fears made flesh."

"Look out, straights. Here comes the Gay Liberation Front, springing up like warts all over the bland face of Amerika, causing shudders of indigestion in the delicately balanced bowels of the movement. Here come the gays, marching with six-foot banners to Washington and embarrassing the liberals, taking over Mayor Alioto's office, staining the good names of War Resisters League and Women's Liberation by refusing to pass for straight anymore."

"We are the sort of people everyone was taught to despise-and now we are shaking off the chains of self-hatred and marching on your citadels of repression."

"Surely, the concern for the liberation of women need not and should not be separated from the struggle by women to protect and advance the freedom of all those still denied equal opportunities and full participation in the life of this country. (1973)"

"Liberalism isn't good enough for us. And we are just beginning to discover it. Your friendly smile of acceptance-from the safe position of heterosexuality-isn't enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle and we will be the nightmare that awakens you."

"We're gonna make our own revolution because we're sick of revolutionary posters which depict straight he-man types and earth mothers, with guns and babies. We're sick of the Panthers lumping us together with the capitalists in their term of universal contempt-"faggot.""

"Understand this-that the worst part of being a homosexual is having to keep it secret. Not the occasional murders by police or teenage queer-beaters, not the loss of jobs or expulsion from schools or dishonorable discharges-but the daily knowledge that what you are is so awful that it cannot be revealed. The violence against us is sporadic. Most of us are not affected. But the internal violence of being made to carry-or choosing to carry-the load of your straight society's unconscious guilt-this is what tears us apart, what makes us want to stand up in the offices, in the factories and schools and shout out our true identities."

"We exist outside the traditional structure-and our existence threatens it."

"Passionate concern may lead to errors of judgment, but the lack of passion in the face of human wrong leads to spiritual bankruptcy...""

"My parents were among the first progressive parents who thought their children should always be at the dinner table to be heard as well as seen.""

"Freedom means many things to many people. From my earliest childhood I saw it through the eyes of my parents as both opportunity and challenge to do battle for those in bondage, to achieve freedom of the spirit and mind for one’s self and one’s fellow men. Blessed by parents whose deepest joy was through service to their fellow men, who were deeply moral without ever being self-righteous, who were profoundly religious and therefore not sanctimonious, I learned that love of mankind became meaningful only as it reflected understanding of and love of human beings."

"I will tell you what we want, we radical homosexuals: not for you to tolerate us, or to accept us, but to understand us. And this you can do only by becoming one of us. We want to reach the homosexuals entombed in you, to liberate our brothers and sisters, locked in the prisons of your skulls. We want you to understand what it is to be our kind of outcast-but also to understand our kind of love, to hunger for your own sex. Because unless you understand this, you will continue to look at us with uncomprehending eyes, fake liberal smiles; you will be incapable of loving us."

"True, some gays play the same role-games among themselves that straights do. Isn't every minority group fucked over by the values of the majority culture? But the really important thing about being gay is that you are forced to notice how much sex-role differentiation is pure artifice, is nothing but a game."

"You will never be rid of us, because we reproduce ourselves out of your bodies-and out of your minds. We are one with you."

"What is strange to you is natural to us."

"Religion is needed in the world. Whatever may be said against its methods in the past, to-day with the light of science removing all superstition, it is capable of producing the very best. Religion is needed to strengthen and reinforce our moral and ethical leanings."

"A fuller knowledge of our History and Literature will bring to many faith and trust in the good of the world, the joy of living, content in attaining all the possibilities of our present existence — all fundamental principles of our religion."

"Religion is the expression and evolution of the most divine thought that has ever burst into consciousness in the mind of man, revealing the soul, at one with the Soul of the Universe"

"Let us realize the power of individuals, joined for good purposes."

"We get our knowledge by balloon ascensions into the spiritual clouds for a few moments, and we are provided with parachutes to let us down easily again into the material world."