If someone were to ask me did I think a Jewish Holocaust was possible in this country, I would answer immediately: "Of course." Has not America had o… - Irena Klepfisz

When the Jews finally staged the uprising in April 1943, the Polish underground refused them almost every form of assistance. Even though they were facing the same enemy, even though their country was occupied, the Poles could not overcome their anti-Semitism and join the Jews in the struggle for the freedom of both groups, and instead chose to stage a separate Polish uprising more than a year later.

There's an enormous amount of protectiveness -- of sort of like, the three classic writers. You're not -- can't say that they were sexist. Why? I mean, why were they -- were they really, I mean, the only three men in the last century who were not sexist? It just doesn't make any sense.

There was a thousand-year-old tradition in Poland that I feel far closer to than the religious traditions based on Torah and Talmud and halakha. Now much of that tradition is religious. But it represents my history, my Polish Jewish ancestors. Poland is the center of my Jewish cultural roots, and the destruction of that center in Eastern Europe has created the deprivation of my life. My mission is to try to figure out how to continue here. So in that sense I don't accept the Zionist premises of Diaspora and homeland-that dichotomy. I feel Jews can be Jews anywhere. They might have to work on it in different ways depending on the contexts, hostilities, support, and so on. But they have to figure it out. So, yes-neither Israel nor the Bible is the core of my Jewish Identity. (GP: Can you say what it is? Is it memory?) IK: For me it is language and culture. What the Jewish Labor Bund called national cultural autonomy…Language by itself really doesn't mean anything to me. It's because a language is the medium of a whole culture, of a literature, of a politics (socialism) that language-Yiddish-takes on meaning. Now the question for me is what happens to that combination of language and culture here in the United States. I'm someone who is currently active in translating. I don't want that Yiddish heritage lost to the Jews here who can't read Yiddish. So simultaneously when I translate I'm also proselytizing for people to study Yiddish so that they can read the original. What I don't know is whether we can in fact have a secular culture-meaning one not based on religious practice and ritual or on religious texts-here in the United States as they did in Europe. They had the Yiddish language to define it, we do not. Of course, I'm hoping we can and will.