jewish-feminists

"They draw from each other life and brain remain like burnt out eyeholes long and empty surrounded by lines markings contours of what was once life"

"and that's not what' ll satisfy my hunger no that's not what 'll ease my mind no that's not it."

"The hypnotist was here she spoke of the body tired from all the years serving and doing things for us and I went out from the body and sat on the edge of the bed looked at it and climbed up to lick it stroke it take care of it."

"Yona Wallach was one of Israel’s most important poets and had a profound effect on Israeli culture. Wallach's poetry is characterized by breaking conventions regarding gender, sexuality, and religion, among others."

"The iconoclastic poet, the most eccentric and colourful that Israeli literature ever knew"

"Place a large dam by the wellsprings of the pain gather with it like water watch over it so it doesn't disperse for it is your life."

"Yona Wallach, beyond immersing herself in the immediate and palpable, evokes a near-hallucinatory world of the inner self. She rejects any suggestion of influence from the Hebrew tradition. "I hated Hebrew poetry and literature. It seemed like one big deception. I loved Baudelaire and Walt Whitman. It seems to me that Hebrew poetry misses the point...it conceals everything from us. They didn't speak to us about suffering. They spoke about Bialik, that fat self-satisfied man adored by the entire nation, but they didn't speak to us about madness. Everything was fat, everything was national...I hated Shlonsky and Alterman and all the poetry. I hated Amichai..." And although Dahlia Ravikovich, one of Israel's leading confessional poets and Wallach's contemporary, has used Biblical echoes of spoken Hebrew to dramatize personal struggles, even distorting the sacred to mythologize the self, much of her early lyrical poetry is characterized by classical restraint, Biblical conciseness, and female stereotypes. Wallach dismissed her, saying: "Dahlia isn't involved enough with sex. She's not revolutionary enough...She isn't a feminist.""

"The revolutionary poet who paved the way for the poets of the 1980s was Yonah Wallach. She dared to present a provocative woman with blatant sexuality and expressed a wounded and rejected female soul which turned towards madness and mystery."

"She lived close to the senses and wrote often of the ruthlessness of poetry as a way out of the inner chaos. "I saw that I haven't a defense. That's what rescued me...that's simply life itself...I don't live without poetry. Poetry is natural bread. You also need music. But what saved me was the need to understand life. The thinking about life saved my life. I wanted to decode for myself what I saw, the riddle of the world. That's the way I wrote my understanding.""

"...the most cosmopolitan artist that Israel ever produced without ever having gone out of the country. She preceded her time in her intuitions, with no terminology, in understanding and phrasing cultural, social and political processes."

"Though Wallach died in 1985 at the age of forty-one, her work still exerts a major influence not only on poets writing in Hebrew today but also on the Israeli cultural imagination."

"I weep and strive, strive and weep"

"My body was wiser than I its ability to suffer was less than mine it said enough when I said more"

"It is, however, not only undignified to idealize political victims; it is also very dangerous. One of our political actualities is that the victims of political torture and injustice are often no better than their tormentors. They are only waiting to change places with the latter. Of course, if one puts cruelty first this makes no difference. It does not matter whether the victim of torture is a decent man or a villain. No one deserves to be subjected to the appalling instruments of cruelty."

"Shklar’s was a liberalism motivated not by a summum bonum, an ultimate good, but by a summum malum, an ultimate evil, something to be avoided: namely, cruelty and the fear it inspires. Liberalism’s emphasis on restraint, she argued, should be motivated by the distinctive political evil of living in fear of state violence and cruelty. This was how liberalism could ensure it remained anti-statist in the right way: focused on the most dangerous branches and uses of state power, without giving up on state authority to restrain private cruelty as well."

""Better to have scars than incurable wounds," Grandfather would say"

"To follow one's own path means the rejection of those chosen by others, he knows it, and will remain alone, against wind and tide, tremulous warrior who brandishes his sword in the air to test its weight and mettle."

"He carries islands of peace in his hands; she, a burning river-bed of windmills and storms."

"She was always a child who anticipated things, believed in words yet to be spoken, in days that open to a recent now, in fairy tales. Sometimes she awoke with woodsy breezes in her hair and the amazement of finding herself a stranger to this time and world. What early banishment snatched the taste of immensity from her mouth? In her he recognized a perfume, a tenacious expectancy, perhaps the name of an unexpressed desire. In him she recognized a dream, a search, a brightness that awaits a powerful and inextinguishable irradiation."

"His foot wounded, once again, on the sole, right where he was beginning to step with joy"

"To speak of Judaism in such global terms as the "Jewish tradition" as belonging solely to the Ashkenazic or the Sephardic is absurd. That which is Jewish does not rest on blood or race, nor does it rest on uniformity of origin, nor even less on rigidity of thought and action. If we speak of philosophy, then the Sephardic tradition is the weightier; if we speak of a certain mysticism or of the resurgence of literary themes, then the Ashkenazi tradition is closer to our own times. But where fidelity to Torah or the oral tradition is concerned, both visions, and within both these visions, the multiplicity of their views, form the continuous circle that has maintained living Judaism to this day. Neither Ashkenazim nor Sephardim have the exclusive privilege of having preserved Judaism. It is the good fortune of Judaism that opposition and contradiction are its germinative elements. Ought we then to continue to foment in our children an antagonism which is not only anachronistic but-considering the narrow dwelling-ground-effectively disperses our communal identity for others as well as for Jews themselves, with respect to our continuing desire to be a source of living waters."

"The afternoon bubbles, and flows stealthily towards the lap of night. A lukewarm sky envelops the city, like a caress on a check, a pleasure of solitude that relieves eyes and ears."

"To the brink of what edges does a kiss lead?"

"I began as a poet in the 1960s, and became a feminist poet in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, I discovered I was a feminist Jewish poet."

"Anger has always played a role in poetry. Without anger there would be no Dante, no John Milton, no Jonathan Swift, no Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams]]—to name a few large examples. All satire derives from anger. Most of the poetry written in Eastern Europe in the postwar period is charged with anger...What is relatively new for poetry is women expressing anger, which horrifies many readers because it is such an unfeminine thing for women to do. Women are supposed to be nice and courteous, and leave the violence to men...The anger in twentieth-century women’s poetry, beginning with Plath and continuing with Adrienne Rich and many others, especially Black women, has been thrillingly salutary, cleansing the air."

"Let us never suppose that the structures of our human minds can contain God."

"I grew up as a third-generation atheist-socialist Jew. My religious training consisted of being told that religion was the opiate of the masses."

"I am opposed to Orthodoxy in all its forms. Orthodoxy—“right” thinking, “right” dogma—depends on the assumption that your group, your authorities, already know everything there is to be known about God and what God wants us to do in this world. Orthodoxy pins God down to petty human formulations and pretends they are changeless and eternal. What could possibly be more arrogant?"

"I’d like to see new codes of morals that have less to do with respecting authority and berating sin, and more to do with human kindness and the celebration of both love and sexuality. I’d like to see the end of dualism. I’d like to forget about heaven and hell and concentrate on trying to improve life for everyone on this earth. I’d like everyone to recognize that worshiping a God in man’s image is idolatry. I would like every feminist to see herself as a midwife engaged in the task of re-birthing God the Mother who was swallowed by God the Father in pre-history."

"The problem is that Orthodoxy has most of the best lines. This means that feminists, both men and women, will ultimately have to create language as powerful and resonant as the language used in religions today. New liturgy, new psalms, new tales, new parables, new revelations, new scriptures—standing beside the old, drawing from the old, yet embodying alternative spiritual realities. We are very far from this now. Most of the writing that attempts to be progressive is flat and uninspiring."

"Part of the task, of course, is simply insisting that female experience is human experience and worthy of being explored in literature. Before the women’s poetry movement, topics such as pregnancy and childbirth, mother-child relationships, sex, love, and marriage from a woman’s point of view, illness and aging from a woman’s point of view, were not considered “universal” enough for poetry. Ha ha ha. Women were silenced and condescended to when they wrote using the material of their own experience. But as Shostakovich said (speaking of Yevtoshenko’s Babi Yar poem mourning the massacre of the Jews of Kiev during World War II, defying the official cover-up), “Art destroys silence.” To bring what is silenced into speech is to make a space."

"It seems to me that poetry helps women claim spaces for themselves whenever the poet is true to her experience, true to her sensation and emotion. Our thinking does tend to be dominated—colonized, you might say—by the history of patriarchal thought and language, but it is still possible to think independently if you make up your mind to do it and be vigilant."

"The idea that eroticism and spirituality should be separated is a travesty of both. Read the Song of Songs, a poem which is utterly erotic and utterly spiritual. Or read the great Persian poet Rumi. Or the Hindu Mirabai. All mystical poetry is erotic, uses erotic language, because it desires fusion with God. This is true of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu devotional writing. And all lovers see the beloved’s face and body as divine."

"My writing is always a gamble. I take the risk of going deep into myself, trusting that if I can go deeply enough, and translate the complex of feelings within myself into articulate language, it will be meaningful to others. We are all islands, but connected—so to speak—on the ocean floor, where human experience is very much shared in common."

"Acts of violence enter my poems because we live in a violent world."

"I typically don’t work in fixed forms, because I like a poem to have a feel of improvisation about it."

"Experiment is valuable but so is tradition."

"For Jews, God is an option."

"Part of the task of the artist is to reach across boundaries, to love and empathize with the other, the stranger."

"poetry has to have that feeling of newness, freshness, openness to the future. It is a way of responding to time, to history-your personal history, and the world's. A way of writing a kind of hopefulness into the form of your work."

"The whole point is that the mind-body dichotomy is stupid. It's old, it's philosophically enshrined, but it's stupid. Mind and reason aren't superior to emotion and the body. Read Blake, who was the first poet in the English language able to say this in poetic form. Read Whitman. And men are not in fact particularly rational, nor are women in fact particularly emotional. These are myths. Self-fulfilling myths which need a little alteration. I seek to be a rational and spiritual and emotional and physical creature. So do you, I hope. I'd rather not have someone tell me I'm forbidden to be cerebral because I'm a woman, and I'd rather you didn't think you're forbidden to experience deep feeling because you're a man."

"all art is political. Either it is politicial or it is wallpaper. I like to say that poetry which takes no risk is like wallpaper. It makes a pleasant background...Homer is political. Dante is political. Shakespeare is political. Milton is political. But it is usually only the art that comes from dissenting or revolutionary movements that gets called political...Of course, art is not merely political-it is many other things too. That's what makes the difference between art and propaganda. Propaganda is good for the moment, but art stays good, stays fresh, when the moment has passed. Tsvetayeva is a beautiful example. So is Akhmatova."

"I write as a poet for a general audience, I write as a woman, I write as a Jew, and there are communities of readers for whom these identities are deeply important. Still, I never permanently shake the old sorrow of feeling in some way essentially isolated. I suppose it goes with the territory of any creative life."

"For me the idea of an "Écriture feminine" is nonsense. It's true that the various discourses of high culture have indeed more or less thoroughly excluded female participation, for at least two thousand years. But I think it is completely absurd to reduce language-human language, which is like God, with its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere to the tiny orderly emissions of academic men. Nonsense! Language is generated everywhere. In the kitchen, the butcher shop, the factory, the prison, it sprouts and flourishes. Language is our birthright: we find the loopholes in authoritative systems, we twist the lion's tail, we drill down to the water table, we steal and mask, we transform and morph the tradition. Every creative person does that. Women as a class do it too. Yes, of course, every marginalized group comes up against an "oppressor's language." The language of authority, whose main message for us is "thou shalt not." We need to recognize that. But we also need to see how full of complication language is, how full of potential for us. Language is not a brick wall. It's a swamp of unpredictable new growths, it's a stew, it's an ocean."

"Jewishness is not a single thing, it is multiple and full of inconsistencies."

"Ultimately, even Orthodoxy is bound to change. Every tradition remains alive by changing, even though every tradition likes to represent itself as permanent and changeless. Orthodoxy itself has changed over the centuries, and will go on changing as Orthodox women become more active as students of Talmud, which is already starting to happen both here and in Israel. And yes, I do believe with the theologian Judith Plaskow that a purely male God is nothing but an idol made in man's image, so if we want to avoid idol-worship, our understanding of God has to change."

"I believe that the most important homage one can pay to the dead is to try to help life prevail: to love the great whirlwind of life, to praise it, to nourish it, never to try to reduce it to something less than life. I hope my writing shows this. When I was pregnant with my first child, I found myself thinking often about the vileness of war in general and the horror of the Holocaust in particular, and wrote the line "whoever has died, I make this child for you." Adorno is exactly wrong, I think: after the Holocaust, one not only can write poetry, one must. Hatred and death are to be fought against with all the strength of one's life-and in my case, that means through art."

"I don't think of poetry as therapy for the poet. Poetry can be therapeutic for its readers, by articulating for them what they cannot say for themselves, and enabling them to understand their experience as belonging to a larger pattern. But not for the poet. Spilling one's guts isn't what it's about, either. Finding the truth that lies beneath or behind the truth you already know, finding a form for it, creating a piece of beauty-that is the poet's task. You might say that poetry is diagnostic, rather than therapeutic. Poetry is a diagram of reality. A distillation of reality, that may make us free. You might also notice that there is a fair amount of joking in those poems. I think it is important to leaven tragedy with levity. That's something I learned from Allen Ginsberg."

"Much more killing has been done by people who believed in heaven than by those who didn’t."

"No writer should be without writing cohorts. You go mad. Even Emily Dickinson, famous for weaving a web of solitude round herself, had numerous literary friendships."