I also became acutely conscious of the extreme effort, the commitment required to keep a language and culture alive in an environment that, at best, … - Irena Klepfisz
" "I also became acutely conscious of the extreme effort, the commitment required to keep a language and culture alive in an environment that, at best, is indifferent. I was particularly stung by the disrespect with which Yiddish is treated by Jews. Historically, of course, this was nothing new. I had always heard stories of the clashes, some of them violent, between the Bund and the komunistn who advocated "normalcy" and assimilation or with the tsiyonistn who pressed for a Jewish homeland and Hebrew as the national language. And in 1963, when I had visited Israel, I myself heard the scorn with which most Israelis regarded Yiddish. To them, Yiddish meant shtetl, and shtetl meant the Holocaust. Never again. We're a new breed here. A different kind of Jew. I consciously thought them anti-Semitic, felt enraged at their lack of understanding and caring. Israel was one place where Yiddish culture might have survived. (The Soviet Union was the other.) But Eastern European Zionists were determined to wipe out the past of all Jews who came to Israel—not unlike the melting pot philosophy in America—and eliminating Yiddish among Ashkenazi was one of the steps toward achieving that goal.
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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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It seems to me that there are sort of multiple American Jewish identities. One is the Zionist identity -- that I'm a Jew because I'm a Zionist, and I don't have to do anything else, but I can support Israel and I'm a Jew. And then, there's the observant one -- the one that's -- you know, you go to the synagogue. And the secularists -- I mean, when my -- when I first wrote my essay, "Secular Jewish Identity: Yiddishkayt in America" in "Tribe of Dina," which was, like, in, I don't know, '83, '84, people came up to me and said, I didn't realize I was a secularist...there was also this other identity which had to do with the Holocaust, and it had to do with either identifying yourself as a survivor or identifying yourself as the first generation or second and now third, where your identity is Jewish because of your connection to the Holocaust.
There's a whole tradition of immigrants, Jewish and non-Jewish, looking at America in a certain way-as a hope and a promise fulfilled. I don't look at it that way. I view it as a place where a lot of people have been ripped off. They don't have full liberties; they don't have economic opportunities.
if you’re ever interested in looking at what happened in the women’s movement, in the lesbian movement, around Israel, you should read Yours in Struggle, which has an article by Barbara Smith, an African-American lesbian, Minnie Bruce Pratt, about being a white Southern lesbian, and Elly Bulkin who does an entire survey of what went on around Israel and Zionism on magazines, on collectives. I mean, it was a breaking. It was one of those issues that just broke people up completely.
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