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Tom The Lion - Amber (Official Video)

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Azoy hot geredt Zaratustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated into Yiddish by Chaim Zhitlowsky, Warsaw 1930. The National Library of Poland. 

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Onanizm (Onanism), a Yiddish booklet by Prof. A. L. Mendelson printed in Warsaw in 1929.

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Mandolin Orange - Boots of Spanish Leather (Bob Dylan Cover) - Audiotree…

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No, może nie całkiem czerwony, a biało-czerwony (muszą nam Państwo uwierzyć na słowo). Bo dawniej autobusy dzieliły się na „czerwone” miejskie i „niebieskie” PKS-y. Wzięło się to od kolorów, na jakie malowano tabor w powojennych latach. Dopiero później pojawiło się więcej barw a z nastaniem kapitalizmu także reklamy na autobusach. Starsi ludzie długo jednak mówili (a może mówią nadal?) „czerwony” na autobusy MPK…

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都林泉名勝図会 巻之一 74頁

東寺 御影供

御影供の日に朱雀野より嶋原を見わたして

油とる物とは見えぬ花菜かな　山吹五橋

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Acid Ghost - I Don't Need You

Using me everyday wishing you'd realize and stay but no one is better than him.

You look at me and you turn away wishing you'd smile at me everyday but no one is better than him

I DONT NEED YOU you spit me out again

Buy you stuff and it's diamond black you tell me you'll buy me stuff back but you never bought anything for me

I take you home from a perfect night you thanked me and then you left my sight but no one is better than you

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Cover of a 1937 Warsaw edition of Shreklikhe soydes (Fearsome secrets), a novel by Martin Leon about the Warsaw underworld.

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Secular Feminists Fight Assimilation

At a time when the American student movement was coalescing against the U.S. war in Vietnam, the 1967 war in the Middle East polarized young Jewish radicals. Israel, the David against the Goliath forces of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria surprised the world with its swift and decisive victory. Young American Jews, both veterans of Zionist youth movements and those who had not felt any previous connection to the Jewish community or to Israel, found themselves identifying with Israel. “Weeping with joy” at the liberation of the Western Wall, they were surprised to discover “how deeply touched they were by Israel’s prewar trauma and its swift reprieve from destruction.” Few had imagined that they had strong feelings about Israel. “There was practically audible cheering in the neighborhood,” added Cheryl Moch, one of the founders of the Jewish radical collective Brooklyn Bridge. “I was raised to believe that Jewish men went like sheep to the slaughter, that they weren’t manly. There was a shame factor being Jewish growing up in the fifties and sixties. But all it took [to change it] was the Six-Day War.”

But other young radicals believed that Israel emerged from the war as an “oppressor,” a “tool of American imperialism.” These men and women considered pro-Zionist views “chauvinistic” and counterrevolutionary. At the 1967 National Conference for New Politics in Chicago in late summer, a majority of participants supported the anti-Zionist resolution that condemned Israel as an “imperialist aggressor.” The same conference that had shaken Shulamith Firestone and Jo Freeman with its disregard for women’s issues became a defining moment for Jewish radicals who acquiesced in anti-Israel denunciations and those who were stunned by them. Some Jewish radicals, trying to find explanations for the hostile attitudes to Jews and Israel and to align their own “feelings with their politics,” began to meet in small groups to discuss Jewish issues. The events of June 1967 put a halt to their “ethnic amnesia”; they could no longer ignore the fact of their Jewish difference. “We were still radicals, Socialists, opposed to the war, exploitation and racism, committed to building a new society. But we were also, we now perceived, Jews. What did that mean? What was the significance of this new consciousness?” “What identity should American Jews develop?”

Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism :Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. pp. 243-244.

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Maximalists, Minimalists, Intersectionalists

Like attitudes toward race, ethnicity, color, and culture, Jewish women’s choice between maximalist or minimalist approaches to Jewish feminist identity was a matter of background and personal predilection. These choices could seem baffling, irrelevant, or of deep significance. Moreover, the decision as to where to place oneself on the spectrum of Jewish feminist identity could change over time and vary in different circumstances. For example, feminist antipornography activist Andrea Dworkin, who never affiliated with a Jewish group, told an interviewer in 1980, “Everything I know about human rights goes back in one way or another to what I learned about being a Jew.” She recalled a time in childhood when she witnessed the collapse of a concentration-camp survivor who had been in the midst of narrating her experiences to Dworkin’s family. “Later, when I began to think about what it means to be a woman,” Dworkin asserted, “it was that experience that I called on. Everyone’s history is central to the way they think…. In my particular case, my Jewishness is the background that’s most influenced my values.” Yet her opinions on Israel, Jewishness, and Judaism remained ambivalent and fluid. The difficult task of locating Jewishness as a contributing factor to feminism and its salience in personal and public identity unfolded in a conversation between Fran Moira, an editor of the women’s liberation magazine off our backs, and Jewish lesbian feminist writer and scholar Evelyn Torton Beck in 1982. "I don’t know how my voice as a Jewish woman is different from my voice as a woman,” Moira told Beck. “It’s not that one’s background doesn’t make any difference,” said Moira. “I feel a close identification with Jewish history, with certain ways of being, … but… I don’t see where all that matters to what we’re doing now, how we relate to one another, and what we want. I see us all being equally aware of what we would consider the injustices in the world.” “There’s a big difference between just being Jewish and being consciously Jewish in the world,” Beck replied. “In a way, it changes our whole experience.” That conversation encapsulates the varied experiences of Jewish radical feminists recounted in this book. The rich and diverse set of narratives that emerges highlights a multiplicity of identity patterns and activist engagement during these formative decades.

Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism :Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. pp. 20-21.

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The Ambiguities of Racial, Class, and Cultural Belonging

Yet Jewish women’s liberationists were more likely to have experienced the personal impact of privilege than of social and economic deprivation. Scholars such as Karen Brodkin have suggested that Jews transitioned over the course of the twentieth century from “racial other” to “not-quite-white” to “white,” distinctly American categories that were socially constructed on the basis of the racial binary between blackness and whiteness but also carried class implications. For Brodkin, becoming fully “white” allowed a previously marginalized minority to reap the rewards of power and material success but came at the price of adopting mainstream social norms, particularly regarding gender, about which Jewish women were ambivalent. Some Jewish youth dissociated themselves from the culture of prosperity in which they had been raised. “By being radicals we thought we could escape our Jewishness,” commented Mark Rudd, who led the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. “Left-wing radicalism was internationalist, not narrow nationalist; it favored the oppressed and the workers, not the privileged and elites, which our families were striving toward.” Jewish radicals retained a sense of themselves as never quite blending in. “We Jews at Columbia — and I would guess at colleges throughout the country — brought the same outsider view to the campuses we had been allowed into. We were peasant children right out of the shtetls of New Jersey and Queens,” Rudd said. Although he did not recall a single conversation in which radicals discussed their Jewishness, he said, “all of us were Jewish”: “[SDS] was as much a Jewish fraternity as Sammie.” Many second-wave feminists sensed that as Jews, their backgrounds differed from those of other movement activists. Childhood encounters with anti-Semitism and the experience of McCarthyism, which targeted Jewish political and labor activists, and especially the influence of the Shoah imparted a powerful sense of difference. Some radical feminists had direct experiences with the Holocaust as the children of refugees or as child refugees themselves, while others had close relatives who had perished or been displaced. A generation of young women who grew up in the lingering shadow of World War II instinctively grasped the importance of collective action as a bulwark against violence and victimization.

Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism :Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. pp. 16-17.

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Jewish Universalism versus Jewish Particularism

The Jewish radical feminists who helped create the women’s libera­tion movement of the late 1960s had even less reason to emphasize their Jewish upbringings than did the Jewish women of NOW, the National Women’s Political Caucus, and other liberal second-wave organizations. A full generation or younger than Friedan and Abzug, they had grown up in postwar rather than Depression America, their Jewish families generally well integrated into the mainstream. Most had made it into the middle class, though some occupied its insecure lower rungs. Beginning in the late 1940s, anti-Semitism began to decline, and although it never disappeared completely, Jewish children generally grew up without fac­ing the open prejudice that some members of the previous generation had encountered. Coming of age in a world where religion increasingly seemed to be a private matter, particularly and symbolically after the election of John F. Kennedy as president in i960, the rising feminists of the late 1960s did not fear the stigma of Jewishness — or pay much atten­tion to their Jewish identity at all. They believed that the struggle that they had to engage concerned their place as women in a world of pervasive gender inequality. It was sexism, and not the limits of ethnicity, that called them into battle.

Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism :Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. p. 15.

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chairlift - bruises

-ax and TOS

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In 1939, the Bund was the most popular Jewish party in Poland. Four years later, its members had mostly been murdered in the Holocaust. Irena’s father, Michael, became a bomb maker for the Jewish Fighters Organization, and died charging a German machine gun in the Warsaw ghetto revolt. Her mother, who she called Mama Lo, almost did not survive Irena’s birth. She was so ill that, for the next six months, she entrusted Irena to the care of Michael’s sister Gina. A fellow Bundist who worked for the resistance, rescuing Jews as they waited to be loaded onto boxcars, Gina died during the war from a stomach operation, which she received while passing as Aryan. When the priest read her the last rites, she told him “I am a Jew,” as a final act of self-assertion. “Such a will to be known can alter history,” Irena wrote in her poem “Solitary Acts.” In photos, Gina resembles a tomboy Greta Garbo, dressed in a suit, her hair slicked back: a gorgeous, ideal butch. Gina “was probably a lesbian,” Irena told me. When the fate of the ghetto became undeniable, Mama Lo smuggled Irena to the Aryan side of Warsaw to place her at a Catholic orphanage, then kidnapped her back from the nuns and kept the two of them alive in the countryside until the war’s end.

After the war, Mama Lo made the same choice as the vast majority of Polish Jews, leaving the country first for Sweden and then for the Amalgamated Housing Projects in the Bronx, which were filled with fellow Bundists. The Bronx kids, themselves Jewish, bullied Irena for her European dress and accent. She grew up between three languages. At home, her mother spoke Polish, a language many survivors rejected as that of their betrayers. Five days a week, she studied Yiddish at a school run by the Workman’s Circle, a secular Jewish mutual aid society entwined with the Bund. In school, she struggled with English. Secretly, she began to write poetry.

Irena attended CUNY, when it was still called The Harvard of the Proletariat, and when it lifted countless working-class smart alecks (my Puerto Rican father included) into the middle class. She got her master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. It was the first time she ever had friends who were not Jews. She wrote about walking through nighttime Chicago in the aftermath of urban renewal, when vibrant Black and mixed-race neighborhoods were turned to rubble, their inhabitants forced elsewhere. She called it “the American hollowness… the incessant grinding down of lines for stamps, for jobs, for a bed to sleep in, of a death stretched imperceptibly over a lifetime…. The Holocaust without smoke.”

Irena’s lesbian world had much in common with the vibrant Bundist subculture in which her parents came of age. Like the Bund, queer women shut out of the mainstream built their own universe out of love and grit. “No institutions wanted us [the gays and the feminists] in any kind of way,” Irena told me, so she and her friends built their own platforms. By the 1980s, lesbians had created a national network of bookstores, newspapers, coffeehouses, bars, archives, and literary presses, to which Irena contributed with enthusiasm, particularly striving to make spaces for lesbian Jews. She started Out and Out Books with three friends, contributed to the first Jewish lesbian anthology, and co-founded the literary leftist magazine Conditions, which published some of the most exciting feminist intellectuals of the era — Barbara Smith, of the Combahee River collective, and Borderlands author Gloria Anzaldúa.

A conversation with Anzaldúa triggered a new direction in Irena’s work. Anzaldúa often used untranslated Spanish in her writing, refusing to cut off her Chicana heritage to conform to white American sensibilities. Anzaldúa asked Irena why, since she grew up with Yiddish, she did not do the same. Irena began to use the language within her English poetry, as a chorus, a dagger, or refrain. Perhaps her best-known poem of this sort is “Etlekhe verter oyf mame-loshn / A few words in the mother tongue,” where she delineates the roles — Jewess, lesbian, whore, gossip, and little wife — that traditional society forced women to wear like straightjackets.

Growing up in the anti-Zionist, Bundist milieu, “Israel was not on my map,” Irena said. But after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and massacres supervised by the Israeli Defense Forces in Sabra and Shatila, she felt that the subject of Palestine could not be avoided. She met with Israeli and Palestinian feminists, and, with a few friends, started the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation, or JWCEO. It was a strictly DIY affair — often they stood on a street corner near the famous bagel joint Zabar’s and passed out fliers denouncing the occupation. “People would say the worst things to us, like ‘I wish you had died at Auschwitz,’” Irena told me. “I’d never heard Jews talk to each other that way. It was sobering. And, sometimes it was really good, because we really engaged people.” The JWCEO went on to inspire groups around the country. Irena is now a supporter of the one-state solution, of a single state in Israel-Palestine which would give equal rights to all, regardless of religion or ethnicity. Her Birth and Later Years includes a poem in memory of Razan al-Najjar, the Palestinian nurse murdered by an Israeli sniper during 2018’s Great March of Return in Gaza. However, her most astute piece on Palestine was written about a much earlier event — the 1967 war, where the quick Israeli victory inspired a poisonous joy in even the Bundist survivors: Didn’t we all glow from it our sense of power finally achieved? The quickness of the action the Biblical routes and how we laughed over Egyptian shoes in the sand how we laughed at another people’s fear as if fear was alien as if we had known safety all of our lives.

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The Radical Jewish Feminists, and Why They Never Spoke of Their Jewish Identities

Antler is an adherent of the “big tent” approach to respecting voices on all sides of the often polarizing debate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but she recognizes that not all women activists share her Zionist views. She was keenly aware of the involvement of individual Jewish women in radical feminism, but it was not until about 20 years ago that she began to appreciate the significant numbers. Antler estimates that two-thirds to three-quarters of the women in these collectives were Jewish. “That is history. And it wasn’t being told,” she recalled thinking.

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The issue of anti-Semitism within the women’s movement

The issue of anti-Semitism within the women’s movement surfaced at three UN World Conferences on Women held in Mexico City, Copenhagen, and Nairobi during the UN Decade for Women, 1975-1985. A “Zionism is racism” plank passed at the Mexico City conference in summer 1975 set the stage for the Zionism-is-racism UN General Assembly resolution a few months later, shocking many previously unidentified American Jewish feminists into a new awareness of their Jewishness. At the International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen in 1980, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism resurfaced in even more blatant forms, with openly anti-Semitic attacks on Jewish women from Third World delegates and the passage of a resolution calling for the elimination of Israel. Although a Zionism-is-racism resolution was defeated at the UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi five years later, harsh condemnations of Israel and ubiquitous anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rhetoric alarmed Jewish attendees and colleagues in their home countries.

Tensions over these issues escalated within the United States as well, with accusations of anti-Semitism and racism splitting apart longtime alliances, including many African American and Jewish women. These difficult conflicts spurred consciousness-raising about the intersections of ethnicity, race, religion, sexual identity, class, and other differences. Many Jewish women discovered themselves as Jewish feminists for the first time. Unlike many earlier women’s liberationists and Jewish feminists, they adopted a dual agenda composed of struggles against both sexism and anti-Semitism.

Joyce Antler, Jewish Radical Feminism :Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018. pp. 10-11.