Irena Klepfisz Quotes

A child, of course, assumes that her world is the whole world.

My vision of di froyen fun undzer mishpokhe includes Sephardim who speak Arabic and Ladino, proud lesbians, sabras, rabbis, single mothers, witches, elected government officials, and so many more. Some of them appear before me as individuals, others as shadows longing for daylight to disclose their identity.

Perhaps this experience as a lesbian and feminist is the reason I try to avoid the "us" and "them" division and try to find common ground in both worlds from which to launch various battles. The "us" and "them" division-"us" meaning progressives and "them" being the mainstream-is too simple and veils a more complex reality. It also smacks of smugness and self-righteousness, which I find alienating. It assumes that the progressive world has everything to offer the mainstream and the mainstream's main activity is to unlearn its evil ways. This is neither useful nor accurate. I am, for example, often pained by the ignorance of many Jewish progressives in relation to Jewish history, culture, and religion and wish we would have more contact with the mainstream community and get our Jewishness on firmer ground.

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.

From the age of twenty, my ego has been invested in poetry. For me, the prospect of expression through poetry transforms solitary silence and an empty page into sheer pleasure. I feel unafraid, knowing I can break all the rules, invent my own forms. No matter what persona I take on, my voice remains accessible and recognizable. There is no artifice, no pose, no sense that I have to transform myself into someone else. As a poet, I remain comfortably disrespectful. I experiment, take risks which sometimes work and sometimes don't. For years I have had no such courage in essay writing. It has seemed an iron-clad genre that I could neither escape nor fit into.

My students always -- when they want to talk about activism, are always worried that they're not -- you know, Well, we only have four or five people. And I tell them, "Don't worry about that." You know, four or five people can do a lot. And you don't know where you're gonna end up.

Defining and setting Jewish boundaries, prioritizing Jewish concerns and Jewish needs (especially less concrete ones like identity building) are particularly difficult for those of us who have learned to value and respect other cultures and peoples.

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.

As in the past, the next generation's secularism will not be monolithic, but will express itself in a variety of forms, espousing different politics, different interpretations of Judaism, different conceptions of our relationship to other Jewish communities, including Israel. This secularism will only develop, however, if we are able to pick up the threads of a heritage we are now only dimly aware of. We will guarantee another generation a Jewish future if we educate ourselves about the history of Jews, ancient and modern, about Jewish literature-probably in translation from Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew and all the languages in which secular Jews and observant Jews wrote. We need to know how Jews were politically active in other societies, how they fought for the general as well as for their own good. This knowledge will help establish a secular Jewish calendar of Jewish traditional, historical, and cultural dates around which we can structure our lives and will become the content for the Jewish secularism we want to preserve. Once we have internalized this Jewish content, we can begin to describe our pleasure and rootedness in our culture and history through new poetry, theater, fiction, music, and other arts. And only then will our political commitments, including the two states-Jewish and Palestinian-have a context which allows us to struggle for the right of Palestinians without depleting ourselves, without giving into despair.

I feel a sense of urgency when it comes to Trump and his administration. I’m here today because I’m beginning to see what my parents saw in the 1930s in Europe. I always tried to imagined how it was like for them, but this is the first time in my life when I feel that I’m experiencing something similar. It has enormous echos for me. ‘America First’ is not substantially different from ‘Deutschland über Alles.’ One of the things that scares me is the global rise of right-wing movements in the United States, Europe and Israel. The American alt-right is in dialogue with similar movements in Israel, and this might pose a danger to both Israelis and Americans.

I never thought that as a secular Jew who defined herself through Yiddish culture, my sense of self was inextricably bound up in its existence, that when it was in jeopardy, my own identity was in jeopardy. I never realized that it was the mirror that made me visible to myself as a Jew.

The Jewish Labor Bund was a non-Zionist organization, so I barely thought about Israel. But 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. I formed a group here, the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley. We wanted to be identified as Jews protesting.

I truly believe that as U.S. Jews we must question the nature of our Jewish identity-specifically secular identity, since the majority of Jews are not observant-must start paying attention to what is happening to us now as a people in this country. This is not a diversion away from the Palestinian cause. Our neglect of identity issues has a direct bearing on our feelings and responses to Israeli government policies, and by addressing the former, we, in fact, clear our way through the tangled and confusing attitudes which have distorted our perception of the latter.

What happened was that Jewish feminists decided to either reclaim some stuff or -- they pushed into the Jewish community -- and people who had been outside of it, suddenly, women saw that there was a way in because of these other Jewish feminists...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.

As a child, my first conscious feeling about being Jewish was that it was dangerous, something to be hidden.