At thirteen I tried silence. At sixteen I tried anonymity. I have since learned these are not the only options. - Irena Klepfisz

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.

There was a thousand-year-old tradition in Poland that I feel far closer to than the religious traditions based on Torah and Talmud and halakha. Now much of that tradition is religious. But it represents my history, my Polish Jewish ancestors. Poland is the center of my Jewish cultural roots, and the destruction of that center in Eastern Europe has created the deprivation of my life. My mission is to try to figure out how to continue here. So in that sense I don't accept the Zionist premises of Diaspora and homeland-that dichotomy. I feel Jews can be Jews anywhere. They might have to work on it in different ways depending on the contexts, hostilities, support, and so on. But they have to figure it out. So, yes-neither Israel nor the Bible is the core of my Jewish Identity. (GP: Can you say what it is? Is it memory?) IK: For me it is language and culture. What the Jewish Labor Bund called national cultural autonomy…Language by itself really doesn't mean anything to me. It's because a language is the medium of a whole culture, of a literature, of a politics (socialism) that language-Yiddish-takes on meaning. Now the question for me is what happens to that combination of language and culture here in the United States. I'm someone who is currently active in translating. I don't want that Yiddish heritage lost to the Jews here who can't read Yiddish. So simultaneously when I translate I'm also proselytizing for people to study Yiddish so that they can read the original. What I don't know is whether we can in fact have a secular culture-meaning one not based on religious practice and ritual or on religious texts-here in the United States as they did in Europe. They had the Yiddish language to define it, we do not. Of course, I'm hoping we can and will.

The word "secularism" is simply not part of this generation of Jewish students' vocabulary. With few exceptions, they define their Jewishness solely in relationship to Zionism (whose secular origins they don't even consider) and/or to the synagogue. Extremely conscious of the Holocaust, they commemorate Yom Hashoah, but are ignorant of Jewish European history before 1939. They've heard of Yiddish and know the word shtetl and are familiar with the names Sholem Aleykhem and I. B. Singer, but know nothing of the extensive cultural or political history associated with any of these. Born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this next generation is, of course, the product of its upbringing, which almost never included Jewish secular culture and history. Raised in assimilated or semiobservant homes, educated till their bar or bat mitsve in Sunday Hebrew schools (which most of them disparage), contemporary Jewish college students are totally cut off from a Jewish heritage which was thriving just forty years ago.