Irena Klepfisz Quotes

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.

I do not accept the assumption that there exist two distinct Jewish worlds-progressive and mainstream (or traditional)—all of whose values and norms are always in conflict. My experience as a feminist and a lesbian is that the Jewish world we call progressive has been often as slow and reluctant to deal with feminist and gay issues as the mainstream Jewish world. Some advances have been made and many, though not all, Jewish progressives have reached the stage of paying obligatory lipservice and ensuring token representation at progressive events. But a clear-cut commitment to fighting sexism and homophobia and a dedication to gaining full rights for gays have not evoked the same passions which the struggles for rights of other minorities evoke. Most Jewish feminists and gays that I know remain angry and frustrated by Jewish progressives. Deeply committed to progressive causes, frequently in the vanguard of political action, Jewish feminists and gays find ourselves fighting for the rights of others without the secure knowledge that others will fight for us. Most of the time we fight sexist and heterosexist battles alone in both these worlds.

I want my Yiddish involvement to be rooted in my life, in the present, want it to be infused with my contemporary politics and concerns, with the special quality of Jewish American experience. Di yidishe svive in the American environment. One world, not two. That's what will keep Yiddish alive for me.

The survival of Yiddish and its culture does not rest on our ability to find the right term for "corn flakes" or "jet lag"; but rather on our ability to find a proper place for yidishe kultur in our lives, a place among other commitments; on our ability to infuse it with our contemporary values and politics learned outside of its boundaries. For example, feminism: women were co-creators and conveyors of Yiddish culture. This fact should be reflected in cultural history, as in contemporary Yiddish institutions and events. Contemporary Jewish feminists have much to contribute and their perspectives should be sought out. The Jews who would say "we don't need them" should think again about history, about the size of the Jewish community. I believe we need each other.

That as a Jew I have a personal stake in the survival of yidishe kultur is not something I am ashamed of. I want yidishe kultur to survive and I intend to contribute toward that end. This commitment broadens my perspective, not narrows it. I believe that only when we ourselves are firmly rooted in our own cultural soil do we understand the commitment of others to their cultures, the binds of loyalty, the benefits of community. Furthermore, maintaining yidishe kultur supports Jewish diversity which feeds me, which continues to make life interesting. My recognition of Sephardic culture, for example, caused an expansion of my own perspective on people in general and specifically on the extraordinary breadth of Judaism and the Jewish experience.

history has frequently forced Jews to cope with fragments and, as a result, we have learned how to create new contexts, new structures, new wholes-this process, as in the case of Yiddish itself, sometimes taking centuries. It is, I think, part of our resilience, part of our great capacity to transform when we have the will.

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.

in July, 1983-thirty-seven years after having left-I returned to Poland with my mother on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the varshever geto oyfshtand, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Though I had been raised in almost a khurbn kultur, a Holocaust culture, I was totally unprepared for the experience. In Poland I saw the shadows of Jewish-Polish culture and was able to infer from them the magnitude of what had taken place. It was like stepping into a negative rather than a photograph. I was overcome by the sudden realization of the scale of the loss.

These early attitudes, the post-World War II push toward assimilation and American Jewry's increased involvement and identification with Israel, have made their mark on the present generation. When I would tell people that I was teaching Yiddish, most-especially Jews-were amused. Over and over again, I heard: "How cute!" I would counter that Yiddish is a language like any other. Generations of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe spoke it and wrote it, just like any other people in any other language. But here in America what had been mame-loshn to millions of Ashkenazi Jews, what had been a medium through which Jewish history, culture, politics, ethics were transmitted, had become a joke, a joke usually made by Jews, a joke now so Americanized it has become the property of the gentile mainstream.

I also became acutely conscious of the extreme effort, the commitment required to keep a language and culture alive in an environment that, at best, is indifferent. I was particularly stung by the disrespect with which Yiddish is treated by Jews. Historically, of course, this was nothing new. I had always heard stories of the clashes, some of them violent, between the Bund and the komunistn who advocated "normalcy" and assimilation or with the tsiyonistn who pressed for a Jewish homeland and Hebrew as the national language. And in 1963, when I had visited Israel, I myself heard the scorn with which most Israelis regarded Yiddish. To them, Yiddish meant shtetl, and shtetl meant the Holocaust. Never again. We're a new breed here. A different kind of Jew. I consciously thought them anti-Semitic, felt enraged at their lack of understanding and caring. Israel was one place where Yiddish culture might have survived. (The Soviet Union was the other.) But Eastern European Zionists were determined to wipe out the past of all Jews who came to Israel—not unlike the melting pot philosophy in America—and eliminating Yiddish among Ashkenazi was one of the steps toward achieving that goal.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.