What happened was that Jewish feminists decided to either reclaim some stuff or -- they pushed into the Jewish community -- and people who had been o… - Irena Klepfisz

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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.

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About Irena Klepfisz

Irena Klepfisz (born April 17, 1941) is a Jewish lesbian feminist author, poet, academic and activist living in the US.

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Additional quotes by Irena Klepfisz

I am still a socialist, though I despair at how to express that these days. It's simple, so utterly simple: there ought to be fair distribution of wealth. I think the kind of economic disparity we're seeing now is obscene. I'm not saying anything radical or new. You can read it in the New York Times; the chasm between the rich and the poor has increased endlessly in the last two decades and that's a terrible, terrible thing. It's terrible when you consider what people's basic needs are-whether it's the vaccination of their children or affordable housing and the obscenity of what basketball players or corporation people or HMO presidents get. Nobody needs that much money.

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.

We Jews are living in a strange historical period in which our sense of history is often quite warped. For many American Jews, the Holocaust and Israel have reduced Jewish history to the years 1939-1945, or 1948 to the present. This extremely limited view of Jewish history naturally narrows the concept of Jewish identity and that narrowness is one which we as progressives ought to be countering.

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