I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Cou...rage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy. There are those who say I'm impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I'm any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am --and this ought to be made very clear--I am a very serious woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use th...eir best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by powe...r enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class. At a time when I had not yet grasped th...e significance of the fact that in my house English was a second language, or that I wore dresses while my brother wore pants, I knew--and I knew it was important to know--that Papa worked hard all day long.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dr. Craigle: A good man, completely reliable. Not given to overcharging and stringing visits out, the way some do. Phil Green...: Do you mean the way some doctors do or do you mean the way some Jewish doctors do? Dr. Craigle: I suppose you're right. I suppose some of us do it, too. Not just the Chosen People.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yiddish acted as the cement that bound the Jewish community together on a socialist foundation. What language we spoke was critica...l. It reflected our identity, our loyalty, our distinctness not only from the gentile environment, but from other Jews as well. The use of Yiddish was an expression not only of love of a language, but of pride in ourselves as a people; it was an acknowledgement of a historical and cultural yerushe, heritage, a link to generations of Jews who came before and to the political activists of Eastern Europe. Above all it was the symbol of resistance to assimilation, an insistence on remaining who we were.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most Jewish feminists and gays that I know remain angry and frustrated by Jewish progressives. Deeply committed to progressive cau...ses, 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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...Jews ... have been unable to absorb the experience of the Holocaust, have not learned how to transcend the catastrophe. They've... mistakenly thought that to transcend means to forget the past, that to think about the present is to abandon the past. That too is a painful mistake, a grave mistake for Jews in America, because it's kept many of them from universalizing their experience, from joining with others who have experienced oppression--not perhaps an exact duplication of Jewish oppression, but nevertheless oppression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...when I have formed the sounds, said the words out loud, those who had assumed Yiddish was a language of the past only, suddenly... felt it had been revived. As my tongue, mouth, lips, throat, lungs physically pushed Yiddish into the world--as I, a Jew, spoke a Jewish language to other Jews--Yiddish was very much alive. Not unlike a lebn geblibene, a survivor, of an overwhelming catastrophe, it seemed to be saying 'khbin nisht vos ikh bin amol geven. I am not what I once was. Ober 'khbin nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But I did not die. I live.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »