Jews From The United States

"How many know that the UN Commission on the Status of Women is the work of Latin American and Caribbean feminists, leaders in a Pan-American women's movement between the two world wars? It was these women, Minerva Bernardino from the Dominican Republic, Amalia Castillo de Ledon from Mexico, Isabel P. Vidal from Uruguay, and Bertha Lutz from Brazil, not white US feminists fighting overly narrowly conceived gender equality, who helped to establish the category of women as a global class whose human rights need defending. ("My Feminism")"

"abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses."

"The spiritual is whatever allows us to notice the miraculous nature of life, how it keeps coming back, asserting itself in the midst of destruction. Whatever allows us to notice that life is in fact bigger than all the mean-spirited cruelties and brutalities of unjust societies. Something large enough to entrust our sense of future to, so that we don't become mired in struggle."

"All solidarity movements must work hard to counteract the pull to think for the constituencies they ally themselves with. Those with privilege often have a hard time abandoning the conviction that they are more competent than those they want to support. As adults, we need to listen to children more than we talk to them. We must back the initiative of children themselves, secure resources and share skills, respect their right and ability to lead themselves, and learn to let them lead us. This process, more than anything, will bring into our awareness and let us begin to repair the disempowerments of our own childhoods. As we do so, we will begin dismantling one of the most powerful ways that oppression reproduces itself."

"Storytelling is a basic human activity, with which we simultaneously make and understand the world and our place in it."

"However the abuse is perpetrated, the result is the same: abuse does not make sense in the context of our humanity, so when we are abused, we must either find an explanation that restores our dignity or we will at some level accept that we are less than human and lose ourselves, and our capacity to resist, in the experience of victimhood."

"we write from necessity, that our writing is a form of cultural and spiritual self-defense. To live surrounded by a popular culture in which we do not appear is a form of spiritual erasure that leaves us vulnerable to all the assaults a society can commit against those it does not recognize. Not to be recognized, not to find oneself in history or in film or on television or in books or in popular songs or in what is studied at school leads to the psychic disaster of ceasing to recognize oneself. Our literature is documentation of an existence that doesn't matter a damn to those in charge. And like the forged passports of my paternal Jewish relatives, from time to time it saves our lives."

"We tolerate and accept for children a level of disenfranchisement that we would protest for any other constituency. Childhood is the standard for acceptable powerlessness. "They're just like children" is the classic statement of paternalistic racism and patriarchy. "Don't treat me like a child" is the outraged cry of the disrespected. We talk about the ways in which various groups are not admitted to full adulthood, how women were, and in many places still are, permanent legal minors, how the colonized are considered naïve, not ready for self-governance, deprived of sovereignty with the same air of protectiveness we extend to children."

"the arguments against the enfranchisement of children are identical to those used to oppose suffrage for women, immigrants, former slaves, the illiterate, and the poor in general. "They are innocent and cannot understand politics. They will be taken advantage of and manipulated by the political interests of those more sophisticated than they. They aren't ready for the responsibility." But what readies people for responsibility is being allowed to take some. People become informed and savvy about those areas of life where they can exercise some power. It is powerlessness that creates passivity. When children are treated with respect, given choices, and expected to have opinions that matter, they develop opinions and make choices. I wonder what it must have been like, what dignity it must have conferred on children of the Iroquois Confederacy that any child over three was welcome to speak about matters of group importance in the tribal council. One of the most politicizing experiences of my life was the summer I spent in Cuba when I was fourteen. Overnight I found myself in a country in which fourteen-year-olds could make major life decisions-for instance, to join the merchant marine, drill with the militia, or choose special vocational training without parental permission."

"Childhood is the one political condition, the one disenfranchised group through which all people pass. The one constituency of the oppressed in which all surviving members eventually stop being members and have the option of becoming administrators of the same conditions for new members."

"One element of imperial history is that events tend to be seen as caused by extraordinary personalities acting on one another without showing us the social roots and contexts of those actions. For example, many of the great discoveries and inventions we are taught about in elementary and high school were being pursued by many people at once, but the individual who received the patent is described as a lone explorer rather than part of a group effort. Rosa Parks didn't "get tired" one day and start the Montgomery bus boycott. She was a trained organizer, and her role, as well as the time and place of the boycott, was the result of careful planning by a group of civil rights activists. Just as medicinal history must restore individuality to anonymous masses of people, it must also restore social context to individuals singled out as the actors of history."

"The oppression of children is the wheel that keeps all other oppressions turning. Without it, misery would have to be imposed afresh on each new generation instead of being passed down like a hereditary illness. Children enter the world full of expectation and hope. They are not jaded. They are not cynical or resigned. They see clearly what custom has made invisible to us and are outraged by all injustices, no matter how small. It is through the agency of former children that the revolutionary potential of current children is held in check."

"History is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains our present, and how the ways in which we tell it are shaped by contemporary needs."

"This is why we write: to see ourselves on the page. To confirm our presence. To clear a space where we can examine the lives we live, not as the sexy girlfriends, petty crooks, and crime victims of TV cop shows, and not as statistical profiles in which hardship, bravery, and resourcefulness lose all personality, but in our own physical and emotional reality. Where we can pull apart and explore this complex relationship we have with the island of our origins and kinship and this vast many-peopled country in which we are writing a new chapter of Puerto-Ricanhood. This necessity gives shape to our literature, to our urgent poetry of the streets, our ever so autobiographical fiction, our legends of collective identity. Most of what we write, we write under pressure."

"All historians have points of view. All of us use some process of selection by which we choose which stories we consider important and interesting. We do history from some perspective, within some particular worldview. Storytelling is not neutral. Curandera historians make this explicit, openly naming our partisanship, our intent to influence how people think."

"Without any form of political representation, children remain in many senses the property of the adults in their lives."

"Just as the individual recovering from abuse must reconstruct the story of her undeserved suffering in a way that gives it new meaning, and herself a rebuilt and invulnerable sense of worth, the victims of collective abuse need ways to reconstruct history that restore a sense of our inherent value as human beings and immunize us against the elite mythology that our only worth is in our ability to make them rich."

"I grew up within the anti-colonial movements of that period. I knew about the Algerian revolution. My father has this amazing mind for history and politics and would tell stories all the time. I knew about the Algerian revolution. I knew about Vietnam. We received Peking Review. I read children’s stories from China, stories from the Cuban Revolution. I had a sense of us being part of a global movement of people with whom I felt a tremendous sense of kinship. I also thought all radicals were Jewish. I was really shocked to discover that Pete Seeger was not Jewish...It was shocking to find out that there were right-wing Jews and that there were so many people who were not Jews who were radicals."

"Human beings seek integrity like water seeks its level, grow toward creative and just solutions like plants grow toward sunlight, sometimes by crooked paths, but always reaching."

"I grew up in a Marxist home at a time of international decolonization struggles, my imagination filled with Cuba and Vietnam, Angola and Guinea-Bissau, Chou En-Lai's China and the Bolivia of El Che. I grew up listening to groups of young men talking excitedly about strategy and theory in our living room, while women sat silent, or, if they spoke, were ignored. I grew up with a mother who was a feminist without a movement, who moved farther and farther from those meetings where her comments kept being attributed to my father. I also grew up in a barrio with very few options for women, where intelligence and curiosity were restricted to the daily struggles and the doings of one's neighbors, without room to make other choices than young and plentiful childbearing, agricultural and household labor, food stamps and a pot of gandules."

"We are so vulnerable in our pleasures and desires."

"the seductiveness of the victim role; the thin satisfactions that come from a permanent attitude of outrage...Victimhood absolves us from having to decide to have good lives. It allows us to stay small and wounded instead of spacious, powerful and whole. We don't have to face up to our own responsibility for taking charge of things, for changing the world and ourselves. We can place our choices about being vulnerable and intimate and effective in the hands of our abusers. We can stay powerless and send them the bill."

"Only through mourning can we reconnect to the love in our lives and lose our fascination with the ones who harmed us."

"Racism frames violence within communities of color as inherent to our identities because it denies the cumulative impact of genocide, slavery, lynching, and other forms of organized violence, enforced poverty and segregation, and the systematic denial of opportunities. It is only by recognizing the traumatic impact of oppression that we come to see that all violence, all dysfunction arises from historical causes. It was the identification of those sources that radicalized former street gangs, giving rise to powerful movements like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords."

"Healing takes place in community, in the telling and the bearing witness, in the naming of trauma and in the grief and rage and defiance that follow."

"While the false memory theoreticians attempt to establish that pain is ahistoric and traumas leave no trace of themselves in our lives, the traumatized keep finding ways to insist that pain has documentable origins, that when someone is hit, it hurts, and that injuries leave scars."

"It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be."

"As in the case of the false memory movement, the privileged accuse the disempowered of oppressing them. Teaching the histories, cultures, and thought of the 99 percent violates the "freedom" of privileged white heterosexual men by forcing them to participate in a world in which their interests and perceptions are not the exclusive priority of everyone."

"Who could bear to hold privilege that meant the suffering and death of others if they had not been trained from early childhood to see these others as unreal and undeserving? Who would tolerate for even an hour the inhuman conditions imposed by the privileged if they had not been trained from early childhood to feel themselves not fully entitled to life?"

"There are people who move into the cultures of others with such grace and respect that the friction of foreignness virtually disappears, who can un-self-consciously love the unfamiliar as if it were the most natural thing in the world."

"The denial of our interrelatedness is killing this planet and too many of its people."

"Memory, individual and collective, is one of the most important sites of social struggle. The "false memory" movement of the 1990s that sought to deny authority over memory to sexual abuse survivors; escalating attacks on teaching the history and literature of indigenous people and People of Color, that frame sharing any information about oppression or the cultures of the oppressed as violence against "Western civilization"; Holocaust denial that pretends the attempted Nazi genocide against primarily European Jews, Roma, lesbian, gay, and disabled people never took place; the bizarre pseudoscience of misogynist politicians claiming that pregnancy results only from consensual sex-these are all examples of the attempted erasure of collective memory and knowledge and represent backlashes against powerful popular movements attempting to wrest control of history from the ruling class."

"consider the almost hallucinatory fantasies of wealthy members of Congress that teenage African-American welfare mothers, a small minority of the welfare-receiving population, and consuming a minuscule fraction of the public budget, are responsible for bankrupting the economy, growing rich at public expense by having babies in order to pad their AFDC checks. Excluded from decent employment and denied the most basic necessities so as not to slow down the astronomical rise in income of the top 10 percent, these young women are held publicly accountable for the pillaging of our common resources by the greedy."

"There is nothing as sustaining as legacy, as fore-mothers on whose lives we can build."

"In a massive act of projection, they [slavers] often described the African people who did every stitch of their work for them as lazy; seriously believed that slaves needed European people to set them tasks and make them useful."

"One of the first things a colonizing power, a new ruling class, or a repressive regime does is attack the sense of history of those they wish to dominate by attempting to take over and control their relationships to their own past...A strong sense of their own history among the dominated undermines the project of domination. It provides an alternative story, one in which oppression is the result of human behavior, of historical events and choices, and not natural law."

"language is born from history."

"If there was widespread recognition that many people are depressed because oppression makes us miserable, and that large numbers of people are getting sick because of the reckless use of toxic chemicals for profit, more of us might become inspired to organize, and resist the policies that make us sick and sad. (In the article "some thoughts on environmental illness")"

"Recovery from trauma requires creating and telling another story about the experience of violence and the nature of the participants, a story powerful enough to restore a sense of our own humanity to the abused."

"We can't surrender whiteness or maleness, heterosexuality, or the reality of having been born into money, but we can dismantle the lies we have been taught about what those things mean, consciously build relationships of equality and respect with people who are not privileged where we are, assume they know more about that piece of the social landscape than we do, and learn from them. How to acknowledge the injury privilege does to those who have it as well as those who lack it, how to make it clear, to ourselves and to those who have what we do not, that relying on each other instead of our unearned extras is ultimately joyful and deeply rewarding, that the real losses happened long ago, when the privilege was accepted-these are fundamental questions for a much needed theory of solidarity, of how to reweave the torn fabric of our interdependence. ("Class Privilege and Loss")"

"Only when we fully and honestly examine our histories and the power dynamics we have inherited from them can we truly decide to throw our lot in with each other, not for the short term but for the widest possible vision of a liberated future. ("Puerto Ricans and Jews")"

"Last word: Nowadays there is a lot of talk of the patria grande, the greater American homeland, and the unifying dreams of Bolívar, but I have never trusted that word patria. Nations emerged when the obedience and loyalty once sworn to individual aristocrats had to be transferred to an entire class, and it's not a coincidence that patria comes from the same root as "patriarch," "patrimony," "patriarchy." The loyalty I swear is not to nations or governments. My loyalty is to a far broader and deeper integration. I am faithful to the web of vital connections between all that lives, and being faithful to that web requires practicing ecological ethics, requires defending whoever needs it, requires interweaving intimate and communal sovereignties in what could perhaps be called the matria, from the same root as matriz, "womb," the reestablishment of kinship. Only so, spinning and weaving that fine, strong, relational gauze, will we be able to bind our wounds, mine, those of my people, and those of my planet. ("Histerimonia" p203)"

"What dishonors my relatives is the fact of checkpoints in their names, of mass arrests, collective punishment, home demolitions, the theft of territory and resources, to rid the land of Palestinian people, so it can be farmed and built on by Israeli Jewish settlers. I am one of many Jews who believe only justice will bring peace, and who face tremendous pressure and personal attacks for saying so. Today, my Jewish kin who believe repression is the price of survival are acting on old fears of standing alone against terrible threats. ("BDS and Me")"

"The Cuban press, every day there were articles about Africa and Latin America and Asia, and people were educated. They knew what the political struggles in different African countries were. They knew about — you know, you’d go through the Daily International page and it was like, in Chad, this is happening. In Burundi, this is happening. In Costa Rica — it was like somebody had pulled back the veils and there was a whole world out there."

"A real assessment of the history of Puerto Rican-Jewish relations has to begin by examining the relationships already in place among Christian, Muslim, and Jewish residents of Iberia long before 1492. It must consider the Jews of North Africa, from Egypt to Morocco. It must take into account the Jewish seafaring merchants of Majorca, conquered by Aragon in 1344, and the school of mostly Jewish cartographers and cosmographers, now at the service of Christian aristocrats, whose maps, charts, and compasses made possible the seizure of the Canary Islands, in what became the dress rehearsal for both American genocides and plantation slavery. ("Puerto Ricans and Jews")"

"Taking responsibility for our place in the social relations of power doesn't mean volunteering to go under. It means dedicating ourselves and our resources to unmaking the structures of inequality, jumping from the burning building of piracy into a net held by many hands. ("Class Privilege and Loss")"

"Radical collective memory is a major threat to the status quo. Those of us who are elders need to take seriously our soil-building responsibilities, not by lecturing the young but by engaging in deep conversations, listening to their burning concerns, questions, and confusions and offering up our segment of the long road for consideration. In a time of geographic mobility, fractured memory, and the instant media reshaping of events, many of the younger radicals I talk with are hungry for intergenerational relationships. They need access to our experience, not as a set of instructions but as a mineral-rich environment in which to grow. ("Building Radical Soil")"

"Unnecessarily specialized language is used to humiliate those who are not supposed to feel entitled. It sells the illusion that only those who can wield it can think. ("Certified Organic Intellectual")"

"In the eighteen years since I wrote "The Tribe of Guarayamín," there have been significant changes in in the politics of indigenous identity in the Americas. Most powerful among them is the resurgence of Latin American sovereignty, with a strong core of indigenous leadership, much of it female. Evo Morales, an Aymara man, is president of Bolivia, with a new Constitution that renames it as a plurinational state, in recognition of its indigenous nations. Universities, radio stations, courtrooms carry on their business in indigenous languages, and long idle lands of latifundista families have been reclaimed and distributed to campesinxs, some of whom have become, under the new indigenous autonomy laws, self-governing communities for the first time in five hundred years. ("Taíno Citizenship")"

"European Americans in this country need to find out against whom their whiteness has been structured, both historically and in the present. ("Raícism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice")"