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 empt… - Irena Klepfisz

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

(What is the most amazing thing about life?) IK: That it persists despite its fragility. Everything sort of hangs by a hair's breadth and yet somehow it manages.... You hear such horrible stories about people's lives...war, abuse, poverty-that anybody survives is remarkable. Audre Lorde once said, "None of us were meant to survive." There's truth to that, and I remain amazed that so many of us do. It's extraordinary that we can even walk around and function in a minimal way, much less in a productive way. For whatever turmoil goes on internally with people and the pain that they experience at night in their dreams, they still manage somehow to construct lives during the day which are meaningful to other people and to themselves.

Just as we must not allow our strong commitment to developing Jewish secularism to detract from the struggle in the Middle East, that conflict cannot be used to allow assimilation to take over our lives.