I feel I was very lucky, though, because when I came out, which was in 1973, New York was just hopping. It was exploding. It was after Stonewall. Les… - Irena Klepfisz

I think Yiddish is something the Ashkenazi Jews really turn to to help them define themselves in terms that existed before the war rather than in relationship to the Holocaust or Israel. They're pointing to the issues of language and what language can express and mean and especially if it's a language that is a national language. I think writers have an important function here, and I think some of them are accepting it. (GP: Writing in Yiddish?) IK: Well, at least talking about Yiddish or using a little bit of Yiddish even to make their English less mainstream, to make their English more Jewish. People are beginning to study. I think these small steps are significant. (GP: So in some way you're memorializing that tradition.) IK: I'm hoping that I'm not so much memorializing it as taking it into the present…Through my writing and through encouraging other people-not just writers. I want to "activate it," so that Jews will feel that they're connected to this culture, that they can claim it as their legacy, their heritage. It's what shaped their parents-well, at this point, I'd have to say their Eastern European grandparents and ancestors.

Defining and setting Jewish boundaries, prioritizing Jewish concerns and Jewish needs (especially less concrete ones like identity building) are particularly difficult for those of us who have learned to value and respect other cultures and peoples.

the real issue: how we define our identity as Jews determines our politics and how we express them. As long as we allow either anti-Semitic and misinformed progressives to limit our concept of Jewish identity or reactionary Jewish promoters of nostalgia to limit the sphere of our political action, we will never extricate ourselves from the current identity-versus-politics tangle in which most progressive Jews find themselves. We must claim this area of concern for ourselves, on our own terms. By devoting ourselves to clarifying and establishing a secular identity as it was practiced before World War II we can, in fact, find the very answers which nostalgia and escapism currently block.