Irena Klepfisz Quotes

Eastern and Western European Jews and struggling Jewish immigrants here in the States were neither completely passive nor pacifists in World War II or before that. Before that--? Jewish men served in various European armies, sometimes willingly, sometimes by force. Jewish workers-men and women-staged strikes, often violent. Various Jewish political groups organized self-defense organizations. Political enemies fought each other with weapons which were not limited to words. To claim otherwise is to erase the historically documented active Jewish participation in European life as well as the less picturesque Jewish underworld of gangsters, alcoholism, prostitution, violence, wife and child abuse.

Like most activists and artists, I have difficulty establishing priorities. The tension between being active in the world and needing solitude is one all of us struggle with. I find myself discussing this tension with other Jews, particularly in regard to our activism on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Not an abstract discussion.

Though the students in my public school were probably ninety-five percent Jewish, not once between the second and eighth grades do I remember a single teacher-Jew or gentile-discuss a Jewish topic or issue, holiday, leader. All things Jewish belonged outside the walls of P.S. 95. And with the parents' consent.

Emphasizing the seemingly more pious stories of Sholem Aleykhem and Peretz, stressing Jewish passivity over action, obedience to tradition over rebellion (and therefore upholding observance), many supporters of Yiddish and Yiddish culture have wrenched yidishkayt out of the active, political and radical context in which it flourished and thereby neutralized and depoliticized it.

In looking back, I wonder why something so basic as di yidishe kultur, so intimately connected to my life, has been so difficult to maintain, to be actively loyal to. Why have I experienced so many setbacks?...The problem stems from American society, which does not tolerate cultures outside the mainstream and does everything, materially and psychologically, to weaken them. Whether to Spanish-speaking or Chinese-speaking or Yiddish-speaking children, the message is monotonously the same: Change your name. Americanize. Forget the past. Forget your people.

For some, the symbolic gesture of unequivocally supporting Israel (morally and/or financially) has been the core and sole expression of Jewish identity. As they begin-with great resistance and probably in secrecy-to question that support, they find themselves unable to define their Jewishness, particularly if they are not observant. Other Jews, active for the first time on a "Jewish" issue by opposing Israeli government policies, are also struggling to define their Jewishness and explain their emotional involvement with a country which, until now, they never identified with. The "far away" crisis is triggering the recognition of an emptiness in the Jewish self.

The '50s were so culturally different than what -- anything that we have now. I mean, there was no bridge between that public school and that shule. In public school, we did Easter -- even though it was, like, ninety-eight percent Jewish, we did Easter, we did Christmas. There was not one mention of anything Jewish. And in the shule, it was like the rest of the world didn't exist.

I experienced a lot of homophobia when I came out, around 1974

I think mourning six million without having a clue who they were, where they came from, what their lives are like, is meaningless. I really believe it’s meaningless. You have to know what you’re mourning. And there’s a real resistance, I don’t know what it’s about.

I write as much out of a Jewish consciousness as I do out of a lesbian/feminist consciousness. They are both always there, no matter what topic I might be working on. They are embedded in my writing, embedded and enmeshed to the point that they are not necessarily distinguishable as discrete elements. They merge and blend and blur, for in many ways they are the same.

The use of Yiddish was an expression not only of love of a language, but of pride in ourselves as a people; it was an acknowledgement of a historical and cultural yerushe, heritage, a link to generations of Jews who came before and to the political activists of Eastern Europe. Above all it was the symbol of resistance to assimilation, an insistence on remaining who we were.

The Jewish Labor Bund began as a kind of socialist movement aimed at Jewish workers and evolved into -- very quickly, actually -- it evolved into a kind of socialist, self-consciously culturally identified movement, so that they weren't just -- that it wasn't only interested -- or understood that just either having better wages or better working conditions was really not enough, and that people needed schools and libraries and sports organizations and theater and art and literature in order to lead a kind of enriched life...The Bund was always -- was very strongly, before the war, anti-Zionist, and I was raised -- I don't know if I was raised anti-Zionist, because already by the time I was conscious, Israel already existed and the Bund made its peace with the fact that there was an Israel, but I never had the Zionist idea that I was -- that my home was there. I always felt that my home was in Poland...I want to make sure that it gets remembered. I want to pass it on to other people.

Let us not take the attitude that because of our politics we must remain pure and not mix with the Jewish rabble-the mainstream. Let us be as willing to meet with Jews in small community centers in our neighborhoods as we are to meet with Palestinians. The work to be done at these centers and synagogues is as critical as the work needed to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

I think poets are our most important defenses against linguistic corruption. They are the reinventors of language, the defenders of language, who insist that how you express yourself, how you convey your experience, actually matters in the world.

di bavegung, "the movement," has pushed, encouraged, and given me space, like it has to many women who lacked confidence in their skills and in the value of their perspectives. Above all, it challenged me to present publicly what I discuss privately, to raise issues that I care about and that are central to my experience as a feminist and lesbian, as a Jew sorting out my identity and my relationship to Jewish history, as an American Jew defining my relationship to events in the Middle East.