Though U.S. Jews were quick to protest the Knesset's attempt to define "who is a Jew," it is a definition we are obsessed with. - Irena Klepfisz

I took my first trip to Poland; it was in '83; it was the fortieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And I went with my mother -- the only time she returned. And that had a profound effect on me, also. I think that also pushed me more towards trying to reclaim a Yiddish legacy, because I was sort of very -- I was particularly moved by the cemeteries, which were -- the two larger cemeteries that I saw were in Łódź and in Warsaw. And that, I think, also pushed me, because in some ways, that trip and those cemeteries made very clear to me the Holocaust in a way that it hadn't been before. Because the tombstones reflected the life that had been sort of destroyed in a very concrete way. I mean, you -- it wasn't abstract words; it wasn't a photograph; it was -- these were really burial places of actual people and an actual life. And it was something -- I once said it was like looking at a negative -- instead of looking at the photograph, you're looking at the negative. And that was very profound.

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.

I think there’s a strand of people who say you have to speak Yiddish, and you have to speak it correctly. I don’t want the movement to become elitist. It used to be that Hebrew was the loshon ha-kodesh [holy language]. I don’t want Yiddish to become a holy language. I want it to be of the people, which is the way that it always was. I think that’s something to guard against.