Irena Klepfisz Quotes

#1. To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reached out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.

Irena Klepfisz

#2. Jews must learn to say without excuse, without equivocation: despite our history and our powerlessness in the past, despite allthe injustices that we have endured
today, now, the Palestinians are the victims of oppression, and their oppressors are the Israelis.

Irena Klepfisz

#3. Poland remains undzer heym, our home, no matter how bitter the memories, how filled with disappointment and betrayal. Amerike iz goles, America is exile, a foreign land in which I speak a foreign tongue. But I will never live in Poland. I do not want to, though I do not see an end to the mourning.

Irena Klepfisz

#4. I've stopped wanting to do any work at all. All work is bullshit. Everyone knows that. No matter how many telephones and extensions, no matter how many secretaries, no matter how many names in the rolodex. It's all bullshit.

Irena Klepfisz

#5. I have never heard of a tradition among Jews that encourages us to support each others' differences. Quite the contrary. What I've always been taught is that Jews forever see each other as bitter enemies whose differences are irreconcilable.

Irena Klepfisz

#6. The aspirations of most people
security, pleasure, leisure, meaningful work, creative and intellectual pursuits
are to be supported. These desires and dreams are not shameful. In supporting them, we are showing solidarity with working people, for whom these are luxuries and not givens.

Irena Klepfisz

#7. I am an outsider, a lesbian, a shikse. The Jewish community is not my community. But as a Jew
as a Jew in a Christian, anti-Semitic society
the Jewish community is, and will always remain, my community. Enemy and ally.

Irena Klepfisz