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Irena Klepfisz
114 quotes
“The '50s were so culturally different than what -- anything that we have now. I mean, there was no bridge between that public school and that shule. In public school, we did Easter -- even though it was, like, ninety-eight percent Jewish, we did Easter, we did Christmas. There was not one mention of anything Jewish. And in the shule, it was like the rest of the world didn't exist.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I sort of liked the kind of Yiddish poetry of like, Morris Rosenfeld. I liked somebody telling a story -- narrative. I liked narrative in poetry.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I write, I will say it out loud to myself over and over again. I want to hear it. I want to hear how it sounds. Not only -- I like to manipulate it on the page and how it looks, but I also want to be able to hear it.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I experienced a lot of homophobia when I came out, around 1974”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's an enormous amount of protectiveness -- of sort of like, the three classic writers. You're not -- can't say that they were sexist. Why? I mean, why were they -- were they really, I mean, the only three men in the last century who were not sexist? It just doesn't make any sense.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things that I did when I went to Poland this summer was, I insisted that there were lesbian -- because I know what's going on over there -- that I insisted that the word "lesbian" be in my bio. And it was interesting -- in Kraków, three young people came up to me, one of them in tears, just ecstatic that I had done it, and that I actually -- I had talked about it.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the time, it was not an easy process to come out in the Jewish community. And very often, I voluntarily was a token. I mean, I knew I was being used as a token. But I think that that's also part of the process. I think you allow yourself to be a token just so often, you know. But I think it's part of a process of people getting adjusted and having a token out there that they can -- that makes it easier for somebody else not to be a token.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The translation of Yiddish literature into English by the -- beginning with, like, Irving Howe, and that totally erased women, so it was even worse in English than it actually was in Yiddish.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I only really became familiar with religious aspects of Judaism when I became active in the Women’s Movement, and I was forced into it. I was working with women who were observant, and I wanted to be sensitive, so I started learning. A friend and I did a feminist Haggadah. I have a whole bunch of xeroxed Haggadahs with all kinds of goddesses on them.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Lesbians started getting organized. I belonged to a group of lesbian writers. There were four of us who decided to start Conditions magazine, for example, and before that we had a group called Di Vilde Chayas [the wild animals], which was a group that had Adrienne Rich, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Gloria Greenfield, and Evelyn Torton Beck, who did Nice Jewish Girls.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Jewish Labor Bund was a non-Zionist organization, so I barely thought about Israel. But if you’re going to be involved with the Left, you’ve got to start thinking about Israel. Melanie and I became very committed to supporting the Women in Black in ‘87. I formed a group here, the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley. We wanted to be identified as Jews protesting.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You’re sort of one person at one moment and another person at another moment. I suppose the only time that you’re ever really complete is when you’re by yourself or in an environment in which you’re not hiding. In the gay community, I was not hiding my Jewishness. Not everybody was interested in my Yiddish work, but nobody was hostile to it. But in the Jewish world, I had to be shut down in certain ways.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s got to be a greater knowledge of diversity in Jewish life.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t think there is an ideal community—there are different kinds, and it shifts. One of the things we make a mistake about is that we want things to be static. You have to recognize when it’s become confining or rigid or prescriptive. You know, people always forget, Hasidim were considered rebels only 250 years ago. They were excommunicated! Everyone thinks they were around, walking in the desert in Palestine. They weren’t! They don’t realize that it’s much more dynamic. That gives me hope, that things change.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the nice things I like to do is to get bilingual books, both in Yiddish and now in Polish...I have, like, poetry which is in Polish on one side and English on the other. And that's sort of an interesting way, also, for me to think about poetry and look at things.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The arts, I think, are very affirming -- affirming, even when they're depressing.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My students always -- when they want to talk about activism, are always worried that they're not -- you know, Well, we only have four or five people. And I tell them, "Don't worry about that." You know, four or five people can do a lot. And you don't know where you're gonna end up.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did teach, and I may start again next semester, for ten years at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. And I always sort of considered that part of -- I don't know where the desire came to do that. It's something that I really love doing, and it -- you know, it made me see and opened up a whole part of sort of American justice system and society. But I felt it was very much in keeping sort of with my Bundist connection, even though it had nothing to do with Yiddish or Jews necessarily, or anything else. But it did have a lot to do with fairness and justice.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me, Israel played no important role. And like I say, I mean, I longed for Poland, not for Jerusalem.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We formed Conditions magazine so we felt we were doing something really constructive and something that we really believed in. And we were going to change literature. And I think we did.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think mourning six million without having a clue who they were, where they came from, what their lives are like, is meaningless. I really believe it’s meaningless. You have to know what you’re mourning. And there’s a real resistance, I don’t know what it’s about.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when you go into a bookstore and you look at Judaica, for example, the majority of the books are either on Israel or the Holocaust. Those are the two main topics of books. And that’s a shame. Because there is this incredibly rich history. And also you should know what was destroyed and what was possible. I think that’s one of the things that the Bund did was to show what was possible.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think the thing is that being a secular Jew in a committed, conscious way, not just by default or by absence, but rather with content, is hard work. I mean, you have to work on it. It’s not like you have a synagogue to walk into. You know, it’s not like there’s an institution that you can walk in.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did grow up with a real prejudice against religion. And I think to some degree I still have it. But at the same time, I have to respect the fact that there are intelligent, well-meaning people who, you know, believe it. And I can’t get around that. And if I want them on my side, I have to treat them with respect and with knowledge and not be ignorant in the same way that I would like other people to be respectful of me and not be ignorant about who I am.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the role of poetry in the women’s movement and during the second wave, was just so important and so visible.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I feel a sense of urgency when it comes to Trump and his administration. I’m here today because I’m beginning to see what my parents saw in the 1930s in Europe. I always tried to imagined how it was like for them, but this is the first time in my life when I feel that I’m experiencing something similar. It has enormous echos for me. ‘America First’ is not substantially different from ‘Deutschland über Alles.’ One of the things that scares me is the global rise of right-wing movements in the United States, Europe and Israel. The American alt-right is in dialogue with similar movements in Israel, and this might pose a danger to both Israelis and Americans.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Haaretz (2017)
“no theory about American Jews has been able to express quite as well the nature and power of Jewish identity as the moment when I realized I had passed without a second thought a group of homeless people on a New York City street because I was rushing to a Jewish women's vigil protesting Israeli policies against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. I saw myself instinctively redefining geography and distance, experiencing how much closer Israel, the West Bank and Gaza felt than the 59th Street stop of the Lexington line. Moments like these, integral parts of our daily lives, simultaneously embody theory and concrete experience and I continue to trust them most.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the age of twenty, my ego has been invested in poetry. For me, the prospect of expression through poetry transforms solitary silence and an empty page into sheer pleasure. I feel unafraid, knowing I can break all the rules, invent my own forms. No matter what persona I take on, my voice remains accessible and recognizable. There is no artifice, no pose, no sense that I have to transform myself into someone else. As a poet, I remain comfortably disrespectful. I experiment, take risks which sometimes work and sometimes don't. For years I have had no such courage in essay writing. It has seemed an iron-clad genre that I could neither escape nor fit into.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If someone were to ask me did I think a Jewish Holocaust was possible in this country, I would answer immediately: "Of course." Has not America had other holocausts? Has not America exterminated others, those it deemed undesirable or those in its way? Are there not holocausts going on right now in this country? Why should I believe it will forever remain benevolent towards the non-Christian who is the source of all its troubles, the thief of all its wealth, the commie betrayer of its secrets, the hidden juggler of its power, the killer of its god? Why should I believe that, given the right circumstances, America will prove kind to the Jew? That given enough power to the fascists, the Jew will remain untouched?”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the Holocaust. I find it almost impossible to write that word because here-in America-the word has lost almost all meaning. And the fault lies with both non-Jews and Jews. It lies with the "American way of life," with the process of Americanization, with American Big Business, with commercialism, with posing, with artificial feelings...I find-and am repeatedly stunned by it-that people (including non-Jews) insist on dredging it up. Writers, for example, who have no feelings or connection to the war, insist on it as literary metaphor, as an epigraph, as some kind of necessary addition. A casual allusion to Auschwitz. An oblique reference to the Warsaw Ghetto. Somehow this "sprinkling" of Jewish experiences is thought to reflect sensitivity, a largeness of heart. And of course it does not. It is simply the literary Holocaust, the Holocaust of words that has nothing to do with fact. It is nothing more than a pose. I must say that my teeth grind whenever I see these gratuitous gestures-usually devoid of any Jewish context, devoid of any sense of the Jewish experience or history.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can I say to people that for the survivors with whom I grew up the Holocaust never ended? That all my life I will feel the loss of never having known my father, never even having a photograph of him after the age of seventeen. That all my life I will feel the loss of aunts and cousins and grandparents I never knew. That my mother still stacks shelves and shelves of food-just in case. That twenty years after the war, when some plaster fell down from the living room ceiling, she froze with fear because she thought we were being bombed...The Holocaust was not an event that ended in 1945-at least not for the survivors. Not for me. It continued on and on because my mother and I were alone.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am also angry that Jews have somehow, during this process, gotten stuck—I'm not sure if that's the right word, but I don't know how else to express it. They have been unable to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, have not learned how to transcend the catastrophe. They've mistakenly thought that to transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it's kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression—not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot end without affirming as strongly as I can my deep feelings of identification and pride in being a Jew. It was Jews who first instilled in me the meaning of oppression and its consequences. It was Jews who first taught me about socialism, class, racism and what in the fifties was called "injustice." It is from Jews that I adopted ideals that I still hold and principles that I still believe are true and must be fought for and put into practice. It was from Jews that I learned about the necessity for resistance. It was from Jews that I also learned that literature is not simply fancy words or clever metaphor, but instead is deeply, intimately connected to life, to a life that I am a part of. It is really almost impossible to compress this inheritance into a single paragraph. But I know its depth and vitality, and I know that I have absorbed it thoroughly into my consciousness.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These early attitudes, the post-World War II push toward assimilation and American Jewry's increased involvement and identification with Israel, have made their mark on the present generation. When I would tell people that I was teaching Yiddish, most-especially Jews-were amused. Over and over again, I heard: "How cute!" I would counter that Yiddish is a language like any other. Generations of Jews in Western and Eastern Europe spoke it and wrote it, just like any other people in any other language. But here in America what had been mame-loshn to millions of Ashkenazi Jews, what had been a medium through which Jewish history, culture, politics, ethics were transmitted, had become a joke, a joke usually made by Jews, a joke now so Americanized it has become the property of the gentile mainstream.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That as a Jew I have a personal stake in the survival of yidishe kultur is not something I am ashamed of. I want yidishe kultur to survive and I intend to contribute toward that end. This commitment broadens my perspective, not narrows it. I believe that only when we ourselves are firmly rooted in our own cultural soil do we understand the commitment of others to their cultures, the binds of loyalty, the benefits of community. Furthermore, maintaining yidishe kultur supports Jewish diversity which feeds me, which continues to make life interesting. My recognition of Sephardic culture, for example, caused an expansion of my own perspective on people in general and specifically on the extraordinary breadth of Judaism and the Jewish experience.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The survival of Yiddish and its culture does not rest on our ability to find the right term for "corn flakes" or "jet lag"; but rather on our ability to find a proper place for yidishe kultur in our lives, a place among other commitments; on our ability to infuse it with our contemporary values and politics learned outside of its boundaries. For example, feminism: women were co-creators and conveyors of Yiddish culture. This fact should be reflected in cultural history, as in contemporary Yiddish institutions and events. Contemporary Jewish feminists have much to contribute and their perspectives should be sought out. The Jews who would say "we don't need them" should think again about history, about the size of the Jewish community. I believe we need each other.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not accept the assumption that there exist two distinct Jewish worlds-progressive and mainstream (or traditional)—all of whose values and norms are always in conflict. My experience as a feminist and a lesbian is that the Jewish world we call progressive has been often as slow and reluctant to deal with feminist and gay issues as the mainstream Jewish world. Some advances have been made and many, though not all, Jewish progressives have reached the stage of paying obligatory lipservice and ensuring token representation at progressive events. But a clear-cut commitment to fighting sexism and homophobia and a dedication to gaining full rights for gays have not evoked the same passions which the struggles for rights of other minorities evoke. Most Jewish feminists and gays that I know remain angry and frustrated by Jewish progressives. Deeply committed to progressive causes, frequently in the vanguard of political action, Jewish feminists and gays find ourselves fighting for the rights of others without the secure knowledge that others will fight for us. Most of the time we fight sexist and heterosexist battles alone in both these worlds.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps this experience as a lesbian and feminist is the reason I try to avoid the "us" and "them" division and try to find common ground in both worlds from which to launch various battles. The "us" and "them" division-"us" meaning progressives and "them" being the mainstream-is too simple and veils a more complex reality. It also smacks of smugness and self-righteousness, which I find alienating. It assumes that the progressive world has everything to offer the mainstream and the mainstream's main activity is to unlearn its evil ways. This is neither useful nor accurate. I am, for example, often pained by the ignorance of many Jewish progressives in relation to Jewish history, culture, and religion and wish we would have more contact with the mainstream community and get our Jewishness on firmer ground.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“since Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatilla camps' massacres, I have experienced a slow disorientation around my Jewish identity. Israeli policies have caused me to question the adequacy of how I defined myself as a Jew. Like those Jews who until '82 were not focused on Israel, I felt discomfort and then rage about Israel's relationship to Palestinians and an increasing urgency about working to resolve the conflict. With great resistance, I have accepted that events in Israel and in the Occupied Territories-no matter how I defined myself as a Jew-affect my vision of myself as a Jew, my Jewish pride, my sense of how Jewish issues are to be prioritized.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though the Middle East is "far away," Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza remain close to our hearts, to our Jewish identity. We discuss the U.S. government's role in the region, the connections between defense spending and the homeless, between Third World people's solidarity with the Palestinians and the tensions between Jews and other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. But these are not, I believe, at the core of our involvement. Israel retains a special place on our list of priorities because it is a Jewish state and we are Jews and cannot disengage ourselves from its fate. It pushes us psychologically, gnaws at our sense of personal responsibility. It keeps us constantly focused and conscious of our Jewish identity.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For some, the symbolic gesture of unequivocally supporting Israel (morally and/or financially) has been the core and sole expression of Jewish identity. As they begin-with great resistance and probably in secrecy-to question that support, they find themselves unable to define their Jewishness, particularly if they are not observant. Other Jews, active for the first time on a "Jewish" issue by opposing Israeli government policies, are also struggling to define their Jewishness and explain their emotional involvement with a country which, until now, they never identified with. The "far away" crisis is triggering the recognition of an emptiness in the Jewish self.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eastern and Western European Jews and struggling Jewish immigrants here in the States were neither completely passive nor pacifists in World War II or before that. Before that--? Jewish men served in various European armies, sometimes willingly, sometimes by force. Jewish workers-men and women-staged strikes, often violent. Various Jewish political groups organized self-defense organizations. Political enemies fought each other with weapons which were not limited to words. To claim otherwise is to erase the historically documented active Jewish participation in European life as well as the less picturesque Jewish underworld of gangsters, alcoholism, prostitution, violence, wife and child abuse.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Irena Klepfisz (born 1941) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As in the past, the next generation's secularism will not be monolithic, but will express itself in a variety of forms, espousing different politics, different interpretations of Judaism, different conceptions of our relationship to other Jewish communities, including Israel. This secularism will only develop, however, if we are able to pick up the threads of a heritage we are now only dimly aware of. We will guarantee another generation a Jewish future if we educate ourselves about the history of Jews, ancient and modern, about Jewish literature-probably in translation from Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew and all the languages in which secular Jews and observant Jews wrote. We need to know how Jews were politically active in other societies, how they fought for the general as well as for their own good. This knowledge will help establish a secular Jewish calendar of Jewish traditional, historical, and cultural dates around which we can structure our lives and will become the content for the Jewish secularism we want to preserve. Once we have internalized this Jewish content, we can begin to describe our pleasure and rootedness in our culture and history through new poetry, theater, fiction, music, and other arts. And only then will our political commitments, including the two states-Jewish and Palestinian-have a context which allows us to struggle for the right of Palestinians without depleting ourselves, without giving into despair.”
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