the Bund was started with 13 people in a crummy attic and Vilna and it became a mass movement. And I know it from my own experience of what happened … - Irena Klepfisz

The multitude of Jewish options that existed before World War II are ones which most nonobservant U.S. Ashkenazi Jews are hardly familiar with, much less recognize...Before World War II many Yiddish-speaking European Jews were already rejecting observance and secularism. Eager to assimilate, they deliberately abandoned their Jewish language and culture. The well-known letters (Bintl Brif) of Der forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), the thirties English stories of Anzia Yezierska, and the more modern forties and fifties Yiddish stories of Kadia Malodowsky describe this assimilation minutely.

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.

what the Jewish lesbian encounters are the typical conservative stances. Closed doors. Silence. Disgust.