I very much admired the people that went on the Birthrights and interrupted them, the trips, and insisted on asking questions and then were forced of… - Irena Klepfisz
" "I very much admired the people that went on the Birthrights and interrupted them, the trips, and insisted on asking questions and then were forced off. I think that was just great. I have to say, I think there is, it’s not only anti Zionism, I think it’s a general, that there’s a very young generation now, and I don’t know where they are culturally or secularly, but I think politically that they have stopped being afraid of the Jewish establishment and they have refused to accept what they’re being told. And they’re challenging. And that, I think, is just wonderful. Because they don’t want to say the Holocaust is untouchable and you can’t compare anything and blah, you know that. And they don’t want to say you can’t let me talk about Palestinians, you know, I’m going to talk about them, I’m not going to be silenced.
English
Collect this quote
About Irena Klepfisz
Irena Klepfisz (born April 17, 1941) is a Jewish lesbian feminist author, poet, academic and activist living in the US.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
Additional quotes by Irena Klepfisz
I am also angry that Jews have somehow, during this process, gotten stuck—I'm not sure if that's the right word, but I don't know how else to express it. They have been unable to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, have not learned how to transcend the catastrophe. They've mistakenly thought that to transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it's kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression—not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression.
Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotewise collections.
the real issue: how we define our identity as Jews determines our politics and how we express them. As long as we allow either anti-Semitic and misinformed progressives to limit our concept of Jewish identity or reactionary Jewish promoters of nostalgia to limit the sphere of our political action, we will never extricate ourselves from the current identity-versus-politics tangle in which most progressive Jews find themselves. We must claim this area of concern for ourselves, on our own terms. By devoting ourselves to clarifying and establishing a secular identity as it was practiced before World War II we can, in fact, find the very answers which nostalgia and escapism currently block.
Loading...