The Issue Is Power

2nd Edition The Issue Is Power

Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Foreword by Julie R. Enszer

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Aunt Lute Books Print ISBN: 9781951874001 P.O. Box 410687 ebook ISBN: 9781939904362 San Francisco, CA 94141

First Edition Second Edition Cover Art: Melissa Levin Senior Editor: Joan Pinkvoss Cover and Text Design: Pamela Wilson Artistic Director: Shay Brawn Design Studio Managing Editor: A.S. Ikeda Typesetting: Joan Meyers Cover Design: A.S. Ikeda Production: Jayna Brown, Patti Casey, Typesetting: A.S. Ikeda Martha Davis, Chris Lymbertos, Cathy Production: Maya Sisneros, María Nestor, Renée Stephens, Kathleen Mínguez-Arias, Cindy Ho, Emma Wilkinson Rosenbaum

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie, author. Title: The issue is power : essays on women, jews, violence and resistance / Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz ; foreword by Julie R. Enszer. Description: 2nd Edition. | San Francisco : Aunt Lute Books, 2020. | Revised edition of the author’s The issue is power, c1992. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019056837 (print) | LCCN 2019056838 (ebook) | ISBN 9781951874001 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781939904362 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jewish women--United States. | Feminism--United States. | Lesbianism--United States. | Antisemitism--United States. | Power (Social sciences) | Jewish-Arab relations. Classification: LCC HQ1172 .K39 2020 (print) | LCC HQ1172 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/8924073--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056837 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019056838

Printed in the U.S.A. on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For the movements of the nineties which must free us

Acknowledgements

After my first book came out, I swore to say something general the next time around, avoid naming people and suffering from omissions later. Yet, especially with these essays, I feel the weight of what I’ve received from others. Friends who read essays, speeches, reviews, sometimes in chaotic form, and offered advice, criticism, encouragement. Strangers who wrote notes thanking me for my work; others, who became friends, who used their time to organize events, workshops, tours for me to present my work. Women who housed and fed me, picked me up and dropped me off at airports. All of this supplied me not only, sometimes, with money, but always with information about the various communities of lesbians, women, Jews, and progressives. Bernice Mennis has been there at critical times with her huge heart and clear vision. Sally Covington offered a critical, sane, and supportive voice. Margaret Blanchard gave the most useful advice when it came to rewriting the masses of material on violence: start in the middle. Tania Kravath provided, in her steady commitment to making art, an image for the joy and necessity of hard work. Helena Lipstadt has always urged, go deeper. Irena Klepfisz was for years my comrade and inspiration in gerangl. Lisa Weisbach, Alissa Blackman, Naomi Winiwarter, Erica Moore and Sarah Feldstein brought me to Oberlin for sev- eral fruitful exchanges. Laura Wernick has been an apt and energetic comrade. Rochelle Ruthchild told me a million times I was a talented writer and I should keep doing it. Linda Vance was with me for the writing of many of these essays, which have been sharpened by her keen intelligence. My sister Roni Natov has been unswervingly loving and loyal. Sarah Jacobus has been a sister in a struggle and a kindred spirit. Vera Williams, dear friend and long-time pacifist, pushed me to think carefully about violence. Gloria Anzaldúa has consistently modelled commitment to writing as a life-organizing principle; in addition, Gloria, an old friend, and Chrystos, a new one, gave me courage to write honestly about violence. Sharon Jaffe encouraged me through her own commitment to both activism and culture; she has invariably heard my words exactly as intended, and besides sent me an essay by James Baldwin at a critical moment. I thank Mindy Shapiro, of Swarthmore-Bryn Mawr-Haverford Hillel, Clare Kinberg of Bridges, and Felice Yeskel, of the Program for Gay and Lesbian Concerns at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, each for her distinct commitment to progressive Jewish life, and for help in bringing my work to its audience. Naomi Shihab Nye, for her poems, sisterhood, and heart. Naomi Nim for work we shared designing workshops on anti-Semitism and racism. Dalia Sachs and Chaya Shalom, from the Israeli women’s peace movement, for their passionate commitment to both Israel and Palestine, and for their friendship. Kathleen Saadat for steady determination to neglect no issue or community. Richard Wiener for political comradeship, and for the meeting in Crown Heights we went to together. Evelyn Beck for her groundbreaking work on Jewish issues in the feminist and lesbian movement, and for Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, where so much began. Toby Miroff for her listening and her intuition. Maureen O’Neill, for her fidelity to writing, for thoughtful criticism on the violence essay, and for her faith in me. I thank Joan Pinkvoss for her devotion to women’s publishing, for her hard work, her editorial care; Joan and Cindy Cleary for hospitality and friendship, and all the women at Aunt Lute whose labors bring books into the world, especially Chris Lymbertos and Jayna Brown, who supervised production for this one. Sarah Bolden for her photographs. Martha Davis for copy-editing, and Patti Casey for speed-demon proofreading. Finally, I acknowledge the tutelage of the late and much-missed Lil Moed, whose lessons resonate for me and so many of us. A few institutions also need to be thanked. The Women’s Resource and Action Center at the University of Iowa has demonstrated an ongoing commitment to include Jewish issues (and I thank the Jewish women whose struggles bore fruit in the WRAC’s commitment). The MacDowell and Millay Colonies, where I worked on earlier versions of the women and violence essay, provided space and solitude, not to mention heat, electricity, and hot water in a time when these things were not normal parts of my life. And the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, where I dotted the final i’s of this book, has been unfailingly generous and flexible. New Jewish Agenda, with whom I was active in local chapters in Vermont and Manhattan, as well as on the National Steering Committee for two years; and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, in New York City, where I work as director, have granted me recent opportunities to turn theory into action.

The Issue Is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance

Foreword��i

I. Introduction �� xv

II. Women, Violence, and Resistance: Naming It War 1979–1992 ��1 Men’s War Against Women ��5 Blocks to Resistance ��17 Forms of Resistance ��42

III. To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century ��75 Some Notes on Jewish Lesbian Identity ��77 Ani Mamin ��90 To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century ��93 Class, Feminism, and “The Black-Jewish Question” ��117 We Are the Only Adults: Making Change, Keeping Balance, and Progressive Jewish Politics for the Long Haul �� 133 Jews, Class, Color, and the Cost of Whiteness ��141

IV. I’ve Been to Israel and to Palestine��153

V. While Patriarchy Explodes ��179 Culture-Making: Lesbian Classics in the Year 2000? ��181 The Issue Is Power: Some Notes on Jewish Women & Therapy ��195 The Next Step: Coalition Building in the Nineties �� 203 Opening Talk for Swords Into Plowshares: Jews for Middle East Peace ��211 Anti-Arab Racism ��215 Some Notes on the Gulf War �� 220 Nine Suggestions for Radicals or Lessons from the Gulf War ��227 While Patriarchy Explodes: Writing in a Time of Crisis ��235

VI. Reviews ��243 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa ��245 Yiddish Songs of the Holocaust by Ruth Rubin �� 248 Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life by Louise Levitas Henrikson / Love in the Promised Land by Mary Dearson �� 252 The Other Side by Mary Gordon / Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee �� 258 What Dinah Thought by Deena Metzger �� 264 Jump and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer �� 268

BIOGRAPHY ��275