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 feminist and gays find ourselves fighting for the rights of others without the secure knowledge that others will fight for us.

...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.

How do we work together? For if we want liberation for women, then we're committed to building a society in which these distances--of class and economics--dissolve, and all our authentic differences--cultures, personalities, sexualities, talents, and aspirations--emerge and are equally nourished.

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.

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.

What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.

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 feminist and gays find ourselves fighting for the rights of others without the secure knowledge that others will fight for us.