those of us who had rich Jewish backgrounds and are not assimilated, but who have been transformed by feminism, gay politics, and the politics of the… - Irena Klepfisz

The Jewish Labor Bund was a non-Zionist organization, so I barely thought about Israel. But if you’re going to be involved with the Left, you’ve got to start thinking about Israel. Melanie and I became very committed to supporting the Women in Black in ‘87. I formed a group here, the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley. We wanted to be identified as Jews protesting.

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.

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.