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

The arts, I think, are very affirming -- affirming, even when they're depressing.

I'm a person who's interested in history in general. I think we should have accurate history, and I think we should look at people that have been erased, histories that have been erased.

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.