Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The ...season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning "When" are much more numerous than those beginning "Where" of "If." As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was thinking of a son. The womb is not a clock... nor a bell tolling, but in the eleventh month of its life I feel the November of the body as well as of the calendar.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
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 »