the role of poetry in the women’s movement and during the second wave, was just so important and so visible. - Irena Klepfisz

When it comes to the bottom line, the Moral Majority is Christian. So is the Ku Klux Klan. So is the Nazi Party. And I am completely stymied that large segments of the Jewish population have not absorbed these simple basic facts.

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.

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.