Mining the Yiddish Archive in Jewish Lesbian Second-Wave Femnist Publishing

• In Event: The Yiddish Primary Source: Reappraisals and New Directions

Abstract

The role of identity politics in the feminist movement remains a hotly debated topic, not least in public fora that debate the presence/absence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in the Women’s March movement and the contemporary feminist movement more broadly. While the emergence of identity politics is generally pin-pointed to the 1990s, already the1980s saw increased conversations among feminists regarding their identities as black feminists, Jewish feminists, lesbian feminists. and how racism and anti-Semitism impacted their lives and their work in the movement. Especially recent oral history and cultural history scholarship by Joyce Antler (Radical Jewish Feminism (2018)) has highlighted the role Jewish women played during the second-wave feminist movement. However, a more nuanced analysis of how Jewish feminist identity is negotiated in texts written DURING the hey-day of the movement remains wanting, especially in regards to examining the role of Yiddish in these explorations and negotiations. On the one hand, Jewish feminists wrote in a variety of personal genres (the personal is political, after all), such as the essay and the autobiography/memoir, to explore questions of Jewish identity and genealogy. On the other hand, they also began to mine the archive of Yiddish literature and culture to create new translations and literary anthologies. Works such as Nice Jewish Girls (1982), Tribe of Dina (1986), Found Treasures (1994) and Yiddish materials in the feminist journal Bridges (1990-2011) and Lilith (1976 — present) show how Yiddish literature was one facet mined for the construction of a positive Jewish feminist identity that supplanted a negative Jewish identity merely constructed on the basis of encounters with anti-Semitism. In my paper I argue that in particular the Jewish lesbian feminist movement (Irena Klepfisz, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Evelyn Torton Beck, Clare Kinberg) employed the translation and publication of Yiddish women’s literature in these anthologies and journals as a mode of strengthening they’re multiply marginalized identities as Jewish feminist lesbians who were not always welcome among mainstream feminists. This turn to Yiddish culture and literature, then, is very much in line with New Ethnicity movements that posited ethnic identity and history as positive markers of Otherness, a turn that Jewish lesbian feminists pioneered among progressive Jewish women.

Author

• Sandra Nora Chiritescu, Columbia University