Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

"one way to expand protection for sexual freedom is to assert this freedom. If our developing culture does support sexual honesty, then perhaps explicitly sexual art and literature will replace exclusively floral interpretations of our cunts."

"We're all thinking about this. The intifada, and the cooperation between the peace camp Israelis and Palestinians, especially the women; Tienanmen Square. The bizarre events of Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, remind us of a basic, forgotten principle: vast unity across broad lines can challenge the very core of power. (The rise in ethnic chauvinism also reminds us-as do graveyard desecrations in Western Europe; if you can't find a live Jew, defile a dead one-of the longevity of anti-Semitism). The possibilities of breakthrough in South Africa contribute to our sense that what seemed frozen, impossible to budge, is not impervious to change."

"things are in motion. Grace Paley has said, when people stand up, other people discover they've got legs. While there are limits to this kind of analogy (not everyone can stand, or has legs for that matter), the motion is unmistakeable."

"What we are beginning to see glimmers of, and what we must see operating in full force if there is to be a human future-not to be melodramatic, but given the level of environmental disaster, this is our last best shot-is more and more unity across our differences."

"Keeping balance means being very open to change, especially in a time like now when the ground is shifting. It does not mean digging in your heels."

"I think we are entering a time when we need inspiration and vision. We need fresh voices. This means we need people to feel that what they have to say is welcomed, not that they're going to get dumped on the second they open their mouths. We need to create a sense of permission."

"We need a new level of sustained activism-not only symbolic action. There have been too many marches where we get a permit and go home afterwards. What is significant about marches is the promise they offer, a promise of trouble, and it is time to live up to those promises."

"Are we so attached to structures developed years ago as to believe that these are the only structures in which our organizations can function?"

"Progressive Jewishness is about that strand of Jewish tradition which heads toward justice. It must include all the other liberation struggles. Its root is compassion; its assumption, that domination is not only wrong but unnecessary. Progressive Jewishness approaches the world with an ethical imperative and a Marxist slant on constant transformation. Always something needs doing. The world is not a fixed entity but constantly changing, and as progressive Jews our work is to help shape these changes."

"Sometimes I say this myself, like a mantra: WE ARE THE ONLY ADULTS. This enrages and frightens me. What it means to me is no one will do our work for us. No one can show us the way, or make good on our errors. If the Jewish people need spiritual and political redirection-and we do-if the planet needs saving, and the U.S. needs to spin on its axis, we'd better get busy. No one will do it for us."

"When I talk about the long haul I'm talking partly about emulating those wonderful grownups of my childhood: the old Jewish left, some of the most energetic, caring, committed people I've ever met, who through the McCarthy period, which was my childhood, right up through the present never stopped fighting, or stopped and started again, over and over. That is one kind of long haul, how to go on being an activist. And even in a world where almost nothing seemed possible, even then I'd just as soon emulate the women and men I grew up around who refused to stop fighting; because, after all, you never know unless you try."

"we need the vision that inspires us forward. The couple, the nuclear family as the unit of survival, will not do. The single-issue movement will not do. The single-people struggle will not win. We are up against one of the most powerful, impenetrable machines of human history, our government. I am talking, ultimately, not only about preserving women's choice, or fighting hate, or even about peace between Israel and Palestine, but about massive transformation of society. This is what I had forgotten. This is the vision we need to hang on to. The old activists of my childhood who were my models-now I become them, and so do you. We are the only adults. No one will do it for us."

"The more the Israeli and Palestinian movements come into communication and coordination, the more possible peace seems. (p 110)"

"I've been to Palestine. It exists, right next to Israel. The problem is not that Palestine threatens or erases Israel. The problem is that there are Israeli soldiers all over Palestine. (p 172)"

"1. ACKNOWLEDGE CHAOS. 2. EXPERIMENT. 3. TO POLARIZE OR NOT TO POLARIZE 4. DON'T UNDERESTIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMOR 5. LOOK FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO BRIDGE CHASMS 6. DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE STRENGTH OF SUBGROUPS 7. WELCOME THE ENERGY AND COURAGE OF THE YOUNG 8. PAY ATTENTION TO PSYCHOLOGY 9. LOOK TO EXPAND PEOPLE'S SENSE OF POSSIBILITY"

"Anti-communism has been the U.S.'s powerful pro-war tool since 1945."

"We need to talk among ourselves about mistakes, assumptions and new possibilities. We need to be thinking more long range, not to get caught so off guard, so responsive/reactive. We need above all to acknowledge that neither this war nor the state of the world itself is as we knew it. We are confused. Only by admitting our confusion can we begin to build something new."

"New movements are created by and create new forms: unions/walkabouts, which became strikes; civil rights/sit-ins; women's liberation/consciousness-raising groups. The most interesting new political forms, using the term loosely, of the past couple of years have been the lively disobedience of ACT UP and QUEER NATION, the campus rebellions opposing tuition increases and in support of multicultural agendas and-from the war-the Military Families Support Network and the GI Resistance. We need to learn from the most politically bold and creative among us. (We also need to offer concrete solidarity and support to those we learn from, lest learning from mean ripping off.)"

"Malcolm X and Dr. King were probably both murdered because each in his own political development was isolating the racist, moneyed, ruling elite. This sort of polarization retains its sharp edge, but positions most people firmly on our side. In other words, radical politics is not about being hipper than our parents or neighbors. It is about enlarging the circle. It is about being inclusive of practically everyone except those few on top. How do we enlarge our circle? We begin close to home."

"Humor empowers the disempowered"

"Learning a language stretches a long way to help create trust, to strengthen our ability to communicate and to understand another people. It also signals willingness to give up centrality."

"A movement, even a radical movement, is also an institution with its own set of leaders, power dynamics and hierarchy."

"Some of the bravest political work in this country and around the world has happened because people often too young to grasp their own mortality stick their necks out. The job of the rest of us is to rise to the occasion of their bravery. The young inspire the middle-aged and old with courage, and they project our vision where it belongs, into the future."

"history is shaped by people operating as people do, making choices with their consciousness limited by material reality and by their perceptions of material reality. This means by their perceptions of possibility too. Simply put, if people don't think change is possible, they won't try."

"Few have written about the joy of political life, the sense of comradeship and achievement. As activists we need to believe in vision and imagination; communicate a sense of possibility. Bleakness is not the whole story, and escape is not the only alternative. Change is possible."

"We should be nosing around our neighborhoods, communities and cities, our workplaces, schools and children's schools for issues which are compelling in themselves and which provide opportunities for developing leadership, skills, militancy and growth. There is no dearth of issues. How much hunger, how many homeless and jobless, how much depleted ozone, how much fouled water, how many oil spills, how much rape, battering and other hate crimes, how many schools closed or lacking books, how much cancer, AIDS, tuberculosis and other devastating disease....and I am only talking about the richest, most privileged nation in the world. How we fight, how we enlarge our circle of fighters, will determine our ability to build collective power sufficient to turn things around. Or we are lost."

"second-wave feminism produced a bevy of writers determined not to abandon the public world to men, or to devalue the private world usually inhabited by women."

"War reduces things to a very simple level. Maybe this is why patriarchy likes war: the simplicity of it. The longing for good guys and bad guys, the goal-directed win-or-lose male adventure-and of course for this country it's almost always been win."

"What the writer must value-the small life, the daily life, the significance of the individual consciousness and experience-are exactly what war violates."

"We cannot be dutiful and creative at the same moment. This doesn't mean the alternatives are either a slavish political correctness or total inattention to political issues and consequences."

"consider that your ultimate goal may not be quantitative."

"It seems to me to be fully alive is to seek justice. Otherwise, what's the point?...Why should anyone read a book by someone who doesn't care about justice?"

"This book departs from several assumptions with the explicit intent of changing them. That all Jews came from Eastern Europe and spoke Yiddish. That Jewishness is only religion; that secular Judaism is a contradiction in terms; that real Jews are born Jewish. That calling (all) Jews "white" explains anything. That calling (all) Jews people of color explains anything. That American Jews and African Americans used to be best friends and are now enemies. That Jews and Arabs were always enemies and could never be friends. That life in the diaspora has always been a vale of tears that all Jews aspire to escape. I write this book to overturn these assumptions, but also to strengthen the identity and practice of Jewish antiracism, including the often buried strand of economic justice. To heighten understanding among Jews of diverse backgrounds/cultures/ethnicities that we need each other in part because of our differences. To help Jews grasp that those Jews who are cultural minorities within a hegemonic Ashkenazi community are often best equipped to help the Jewish world reckon with our multiculturality, and to know that this multiculturality is an enormous asset when it comes to combating racism and anti-semitism and to building social justice coalitions. I name this identity and practice of Jewish anti-racism Diasporism."

"The common Jewish practice is to name our experience differently from those with whom we might share it. Jews say anti-semitism, not racism against Jews; Jews say Zionism, not nationalism for Jews. We cling to the term Holocaust as ours only, anxious about whether other genocides deserve the name. All this separate naming makes it harder to identify and analyze commonality and difference."

"Diasporism joins those who see borders as lines to cross. Who seek the memory or possibility or value of motion, fluidity, and multiple vision."

"I name this ideology and practice Diasporism as a deliberate counter to Zionism. Zionism/Jewish nationalism is one choice Jews make, but not"

"I posit a Jewish identity that embraces diversity and resists a closed circle. My hope is to join a debate about home, diversity, and justice."

"At the NYU "Women's Liberation and Jewish Identity" conference, Kaye/Kantrowitz distinguished between "minimalist" Jews and "non-Jewish Jews," aligning herself with the latter, whom she sees as "boundary crossers" and "rebels," transcending a narrow, constricting Jewishness but belonging to Jewish tradition. She prefers the term "Diasporists" for people such as herself who recognize Jewish "identity as simultaneously rock, forged under centuries of pressure, and water, infinitely flexible.""

"I need the stories of our resistance," wrote Melanie Kaye in Nice Jewish Girls, "laced through the horror as an amulet, inspiration and warning." She told stories of the Jewish women in the anti-Nazi resistance: in Auschwitz, in Ravensbruck (where I had stood stricken and silent when I was fifteen), in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. "Those were Jewish women," she wrote. "I come from Jewish women who fought like that."

"I first met Melanie many years ago when she visited the University of California, Santa Cruz campus. I had been using her co-edited book “The Tribe of Dina” in my classes and admired her greatly for all of her work. Though on separate coasts we stayed connected through mutual comradeship, friendship, and projects. Her writings were of immense importance to me, and most recently “The Color of Jews,” which is an absolutely brilliant work that shatters so many stereotypes while affirming and re-visioning the Jewish diaspora."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Kaye/Kantrowitz is a courageous activist and thinker"

"Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is passionate, strategic, pithy, generous, realistic, controversial, unquenchable-like the best of our movements for change."

"The narratives recorded here are part of the effort to chronicle the lives of Jewish women activists in what Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz calls the Jewish "political diaspora." The experiences of Jewish women civil rights activists are an integral part of a collective Jewish and activist heritage, one that must remain alive and accessible to future generations."

"'the white man's burden' was a polite name for imperialism."