The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance

By Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz and Julie R. Enszer

Political activist and writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitzbrought an insightful eye and a sharp analytical mind to probe the problems facing America at the turn of the century. First published in 1992, the hard-hitting essays in this collection scan the connections across a wide range of issues: whether the topic is class, racism, Israel and Palestine, war, anti-Semitism, violence against women or violence by women, the issue is power—in all its complexity. Now in its second edition and no less relevant nearly three decades later, her work—dedicated, persistent—continues to remind us of the strength in community.
“Beginning at the intersection of sex, race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, Kaye/Kantrowitz asks hard questions in these essays about power, violence, resistance, and victimhood. ... At the core of The Issue Is Poweris a smart, engaged observer of the world who invites us to think and act with her.”—from the new foreword byJulie R. Enszer“
Here is a book for everyone who dares to want to help make history. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitzis passionate, strategic, pithy, generous, realistic, controversial, unquenchable—like the best of our movements for change. As a writer and lifelong doer, she gives us reasons to believe in achievable justice, and maps for acting on that belief.”—Adrienne Rich

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aunt Lute Books
• Release date: Aug 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781939904362

Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, a writer, activist, and professor, was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, and has worked in social change movements since the sixties. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught the first Women’s Studies course in the department. She currently teaches at Queens College in the Jewish Studies, History and Comparative Literature departments. She is the author of several books, including: The Issue Is Power (Aunt Lute Books 1992), My Jewish Face & Other Stories (Aunt Lute Books, 1990), We Speak in Code (Motheroot Publications, 1980), and The Colors of Jews (Indiana University Press 2007). Her writings are widely published and anthologized. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz passed away on July 10, 2018 at age 72.

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BIOGRAPHY

Foreword

What Makes Revolution? Reflections on the Life and Work of Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Julie R. Enszer

1.

Writer, feminist, lesbian, activist, organizer, and theorist, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz published five major works: We Speak in Code, published by Motheroot Press in 1980; the anthology The Tribe of Dina, published first in 1986 by Sinister Wisdom as issue 29/30 of the journal and then by Beacon Press as an anthology in 1989; a short story collection, My Jewish Face & Other Stories, published by feminist press Aunt Lute in 1990; a collection of essays, The Issue is Power, also published by Aunt Lute in 1992; and, finally, her powerful book The Color of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism, published by Indiana University Press in 2007.

While Kaye/Kantrowitz’s books have had my attention in the months since her passing, her ideas were not only shaped on printed pages. Like other revolutionary lesbian feminist figures of her generation—and of other generations—Kaye/Kantrowitz’s ideas and contributions were made both on the page and in the world of political activism, a gritty, lived reality of organizing and showing up as advocate, protestor, witness, and demonstrator for a vision of change in the world. Kaye/Kantrowitz’s life and work in a variety of community institutions—literary, activist, revolutionary—shaped her ideas just as her writing did.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1945. Her parents adopted the surname Kaye prior to her birth; she was born Melanie Kaye then later appended the family name, Kantrowitz, to Kaye, linking the two together with a slash to recognize the multiple histories within her family and within the larger experiences of diasporic Jews and other immigrants to the United States.

2.

Kaye/Kantrowitz’s first book, We Speak in Code, is primarily poems, though the impulse to prose reveals itself in the essay On Being a Lesbian Feminist Artist, which was first published in the feminist art journal Heresies. This essay outlines how lesbian feminists built a sense of connection with other creators, and—if the tradition is not merely aesthetic but is rooted in people’s experience—with a common culture. Kaye/Kantrowitz speaks of passing lesbian feminist books from woman to woman, of celebrating the birthday of Gertrude Stein by reading her work on the radio. Near the end of the essay, Kaye/Kantrowitz writes,

We all have stories, they should be told. One part of my work is to create space for women to read and hear each other’s work. This is not a matter of generosity, or even of sharing privilege. I think the wildest creativity happens when many are engaged. Thus we push each other to new edges, absorb new possibilities, en-courage each other. Moreover, by connecting with women whose experiences have not been voiced or voiced rarely, we expand who we are, not only enlarging our private understandings of women’s experience, but enlarging the community of women makers so that our experience is more fully, more accurately, named, explored, and known.

And changed. We need to know the fullness of female experience on this soil in order to change what has been. We need to ferret out what makes change possible, to record not only our private changes, but the larger changes whirling about us. (10–11)

These sentences, read today, appear as a road map for the work that Kaye/Kantrowitz did over the course of her life. She recognized the importance of stories, particularly women’s stories, to the work of revolutionary change. She also recognized that hearing these stories would expand the role of makers—creators, artists, agents—in the world. In all of her subsequent work, Kaye/Kantrowitz explored how to make change through naming, exploring, and unlocking and understanding new knowledges.

At the end, she says, if I am a lesbian feminist artist, I am at least equally an activist, happiest when I can be both at once (11). The essay is dated spring 1978. Kaye/Kantrowitz was thirty-three years old.

If this essay offers a manifesta for Kaye/Kantrowitz’s life, the collection as a whole maps the rage, passion, and possibilities of lesbian feminism in the 1970s. In A Movement of Poets, a pamphlet with this influential essay, Jan Clausen noted in relationship to feminism and poetry that poets are the movement (1). We Speak in Code is emblematic of this observation. Poetry within feminist and lesbian communities did not simply express ideas of the movement, it created them.

We Speak in Code is a small, nearly square book, five and a half inches wide, six and three-quarter inches high. On the cover is a statue of a naked woman, her hips pressed forward; she holds a large kitchen knife in her right hand. The visual iconography of the book tells a different story than the title. The visuals are not coded. They represent attacking, dismantling, slaying patriarchy. A recurrent graphic is a drawing of a flower, with teeth at the center where the pistil would be—teeth prepared to bite.

Nearly forty years later, the certainty with which Kaye/Kantrowitz imagines taking on the patriarchy is both heartening and stark. She draws on mythic women to invoke power,

we should dream

how Lilith refused to lie under him

how Judith lopped off his head

how Clytemnestra stabbed him, for killing their daughter

how Procne fed him children in a pie, for raping her sister

how Penthesilea made war. (83)

Drawing women from multiple histories and traditions, Kaye/Kantrowitz recognizes women’s power in their own lives and in the world. For Kaye/Kantrowitz, this power is not only in the past; it exists in the present as well. The poem, August, 1977 concludes with contemporary images of women’s power and empowerment.

We could prowl the streets in packs

like female lions

We could name ourselves

blood to Inez, Joan, Yvonne

and all the women who got away

and all the women who lived through it

and all the women who died because of it

nameless, how many millions

called witches and burned,

how many

millions called—at best—victims

and raped

in this country one every minute

two or three while I read this poem.

* * * * * *

Imagine

there is no rape.

Let half your dreams

slip from you

let the dry throat open, you’re out

after midnight, air

feels cold in your nostrils

smells clear.

The man

at the edge of the park is

no more dangerous

than ducks or geese, silent along the pond

or the tree at the path’s turning

where you leave the path

to sit in the dark

on the wet grass, you wonder

how long before morning

you wonder

why grass smells sweet. (83–84)

Kaye/Kantrowitz deftly merges naming violence, recognizing how patriarchy victimizes women, with the power that women have for resistance. The outcomes of resistance are evoked so beautifully in the final pastoral stanza, where the darkness is peaceful, not frightful, and the sensory experiences of the natural world can be appreciated.

Poetry, for Kaye/Kantrowitz, as for many lesbian feminists, is not only for individual reading and reflection; it is a tool for building community and for communal healing. August, 1977 joins a handful of other poems at the end of We Speak in Code that function as soundscapes for communal ritual.

Kaye/Kantrowitz opens the poem Ritual, written for the Portland Women’s Night Watch August 25, 1978, with these lines:

we stand in a circle

we face out into the dark

we face danger

we’re not afraid

we are so many

we reclaim the night

The final poem of the collection, Ritual: We Fight Back, was originally performed on International Women’s Day 1978 in Portland, Oregon. The poem is an interactive reading with the refrain spoken by the audience, I AM A WOMAN. I FOUGHT BACK (97). Each stanza is the story of a woman who fought back against domestic violence and/or sexual assault. The ritual was originally performed by eight women, wearing face masks with a knife and a wreath of flowers at their feet.

This performative element of feminism and feminist poetry is often forgotten in contemporary accounts of this work. Poets played an important role in the feminist movement and their poems were tools for women to use to build consciousness, build community, take action, and fight back. Imagine the eight women on the streets of Portland incanting together: WE ARE WOMEN. WE FOUGHT BACK. Enchanting. Incantatory. Revolutionary.

3.

Kaye/Kantrowitz edited Sinister Wisdom with Michaele Uccella beginning in the winter of 1984 with Sinister Wisdom 25. They begin their editors’ note for the first issue with their triple passion: women, creativity, and liberation (Sinister Wisdom 25, 2). This triple passion is evident in all of the issues Kaye/Kantrowitz edited. Uccella and Kaye/Kantrowitz edited two issues of Sinister Wisdom together, then Kaye/Kantrowitz began editing the journal singly, though with a community, like the one she envisioned many years earlier, surrounding her. In each of the Notes for a Magazine, Kaye/Kantrowitz names women working with her on the journal. One striking aspect of her editorship is the inclusion of many people in the life of the journal and how Kaye/Kantrowitz consistently recognized her beloved community in the pages of the journal as they collectively engaged in the daily work necessary to make the journal a reality.

Over the eight issues that Kaye/Kantrowitz edited, Sinister Wisdom published a range of lesbian feminist writers, artists, and activists including Sudie Rakusin, Paula Gunn Allen, Juana Maria Paz, Beth Brant, Judy Grahn, SDiane Bogus, Jacqueline Lapidus, Samuel Ace (Linda Smukler), Susan Stinson, Achy Obejas, Etel Adnan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cheryl Clarke, Jan Hardy, Terri Jewell, Janice Gould, Barrie Borich, Donna Allegra, Chocolate Waters, Teya Schaffer, Melinda Goodman, Sapphire, and Irena Klepfisz. Reflecting on the array of work published during her tenure, Kaye/Kantrowitz wrote,

I brought to SW, as did Michaele, a greater emphasis on class issues and on the experience of working class women. I’m proud of this. I’m especially proud to have continued the impetus built by Beth Brant’s guest editorship of A Gathering of Spirit, to include Native women’s voices. I’m proud of the focus format for SW, the work on childhood sexuality and sexual abuse in SW 27; on fat and body image and on work in SW 28; of Irena Klepfisz’s and my co-editorship of SW 29/30, The Tribe of Dina, and of collecting Jewish women’s voices. (Sinister Wisdom 31, 3)

Issues edited by Kaye/Kantrowitz reflect the best editorial impulses; they satisfy the readings and attentions of the editor—as with the series of poems published in Sinister Wisdom 32 organized under the rubric Ceremony, where Kaye/Kantrowitz offers more poems that celebrate and ritualize lesbian lives—and they expand the larger conversations within and outside reading communities. Kaye/Kantrowitz’s profound commitment to issues of peace and social justice are also present in the pages of the journal. For example, she dedicated Sinister Wisdom 28, published in the winter of 1985, to Barbara Deming, noting that her death this last year leaves many lesbians, fighters for justice, women concerned about survival on this planet, bereft (3).

Perhaps most notable among the issues edited and published by Kaye/Kantrowitz is the one she co-edited with Irena Klepfisz, Sinister Wisdom 29/30, titled The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. Originally, Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz envisioned this project as an anthology, not as an issue of Sinister Wisdom. The two wanted to expand the conversation initiated by Evelyn Torton Beck’s Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology. As the project evolved, they realized that publishing it as a special double issue of Sinister Wisdom made sense. Nice Jewish Girls opened a conversation about Jewish lesbians, about homophobia within Jewish communities, and about anti-Semitism in feminist and lesbian communities. To say that Nice Jewish Girls changed conversations and altered people’s lives is an understatement; the same can be said about The Tribe of Dina.

The vision for The Tribe of Dina evolved as Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz worked on it. Originally envisioned as an expansion of conversations initiated by Nice Jewish Girls and another anthology of feminists responding to religious doctrines in Judaism, what they published is a sustained engagement with lesbianism, feminism, Judaism, and social justice activism with a substantial section of the final book dedicated to work by Israeli feminists. The years between the publication of Nice Jewish Girls in 1982 and The Tribe of Dina in 1986 were tumultuous as a result of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Kaye/Kantrowitz describe this as an event which had a profound effect on American Jews, as on Israelis. And it had its impact on the women’s movement as well, fueling anti-Semitism and dividing Jewish opinion (Sinister Wisdom 29/30, 7). With those international events as a backdrop, Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz edited The Tribe of Dina to explore histories of Jewish women, contemporary cultural concerns of secular Jewish women, the stories of Israeli women, and modes of activism and engagement to challenge anti-Semitism in feminist and lesbian communities and in the broader U.S. Like Nice Jewish Girls, The Tribe of Dina traveled widely within feminist and lesbian communities and was embraced by Jewish women. In 1989, when the original edition from Sinister Wisdom sold out, Beacon Press reissued it.

Reflecting on the impact of The Tribe of Dina in Sinister Wisdom 31, only a year after its initial publication, Kaye/Kantrowitz wrote,

[A]t at a time when the women’s movement had barely finished polarizing along Zionist/anti-Zionist lines, and then shutting up or down on the issues behind the words, I’m proud that SW has continued to represent these issues. Sometimes this has drawn heat, for a variety of reasons, but through these risks I have come to realize I can live through disapproval even from my own people, lesbians or Jews, and to affirm the living value of controversy. (3)

These words provide one window into the controversies in which writers were embroiled in the mid-1980s, but the window seems small, perhaps even with frosted glass. In fact, disagreements about Israel and charges of anti-Semitism played out publicly in the years leading up to the publication of The Tribe of Dina. Feminist newspaper off our backs published statements, exchanges and letters between members of Di Vilde Chayes, a Jewish lesbian group in which Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz were members, and Women Against Imperialism. It was a public controversy that escalated with great heat and passion. (For a more complete account of this controversy see Joyce Antler’s Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement, pages 307–310). Publishing The Tribe of Dina in the aftermath of this particular controversy and editing the book amid broader national and international conversations about Israel and the Palestinian people was an extraordinary act of courage and political commitment by both Kaye/Kantrowitz and Klepfisz. Through The Tribe of Dina, both women demonstrate their commitments to dialogue, public conversation, reading, writing, and thinking. These commitments enriched Jewish women, feminist communities, and by extension many others. A year later, affirming the living value of controversy demonstrates Kaye/Kantrowitz’s commitment to political struggle and debate and her lifelong willingness to take risks and engage.

Kaye/Kantrowitz edited Sinister Wisdom through the summer of 1987. At that point she, like the other editors before her, handed the journal over to the next editor and publisher, Elana Dykewomon. In the final issue she edited, Sinister Wisdom 32, she wrote,

I think about the role of Sinister Wisdom in this, for lesbians, isolated lesbians, lesbians in prison, lesbians all over the U.S. and beyond; I think of Dina and what it’s meant for Jews; I think of Beth’s Gathering, what it meant to Native Americans in 1983 when it first came out and what it still means. All this work is about resisting assimilation, resisting the great American whitewash. I know Sinister Wisdom is a tool for the making of culture and culture is bread, culture is roses, culture is inspiration, inspiration is the breath of resistance, resistance is how we survive who were never meant to survive. (128)

Like the sentences from On Being a Lesbian Feminist Artist, these sentiments offer a vision for Kaye/Kantrowitz’s continued development as a cultural changemaker.

4.

In the years immediately after editing Sinister Wisdom, Kaye/Kantrowitz published two books with Aunt Lute: a collection of short stories, My Jewish Face & Other Stories, and this essay collection, The Issue Is Power. While these two volumes are published as two separate books with a genre distinction, they are together similar expressions of Kaye/Kantrowitz’s political, artistic, and cultural vision: both make visible the conditions of daily life for people to take action and improve their lives and the world.

Divided into four sections covering, food, war, diaspora, and the Jewish left, My Jewish Face & Other Stories brings readers characters that celebrate continuity of Jewish life while making visible lesbian and queer lives. In Runaway Bunny, while the speaker’s sister Naomi grieves her son Luke going to college, missing the baby in her lap, the speaker mulls over her lifetime of trying to escape her mother. In Our First Talk: 1986, readers encounter different approaches to activism. The speaker celebrating rebellion, creativity, a whirling energy as battering rams against the status quo contrasted with Daisy, fabulously responsible and low on humor, politely appalled by any sign of wildness. Then there are Ruthie, Nellie, and the crowd at Spengler’s as a boycott is organized to protest working conditions of mustard producers in The Woman in Purple. Action and activism emerging in a grocery store line recasts the mundane as a site for transformative change.

Kaye/Kantrowitz brings readers an eclectic array of characters in her fiction—some we want to know, some we already know, some we know and want to not see again. All of her characters engage in the daily dramas of their lives—of our lives—offering possibilities for change and new directions and illuminating new political possibilities and opportunities. The stories in My Jewish Face & Other Stories capture the heart and soul of an activist world—one that existed in a past that Kaye/Kantrowitz helps to excavate in the stories of Some Pieces of Jewish Left: 1987 and one that continues to be relevant, particularly in her stories about family discussions of Israel. The stories also remind readers of the power of fiction, both as a site of social change and also as a powerful tool for writers to hone their craft. While Kaye/Kantrowitz’s work as an essayist, theorist, and cultural commentator may be more widely known, discovering her creative work as a poet and short story writer exposes how the inventive spark kindles the revolutionary flame.

5.

The Issue Is Power, first published by Aunt Lute in 1992, embodies lesbian feminist political practice and theory from the 1970s and the 1980s. The Issue Is Power is akin to Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Pratt’s Rebellion, and Smith, Pratt, and Bulkin’s Yours in Struggle. The Issue Is Power, like the other collections of essays, combines lived experience by the author with observations from political work and reflects on this embodied theory to discover insights into the world, particularly how it is organized and how it might be changed.

Subtitled Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance, this book is thick, gathering Kaye/Kantrowitz’s work over approximately fifteen years. Organized into five parts—a framing essay for the collection, a collection of three essays about violence against women and naming it war; essays on being a radical Jew in the late 20th century; an essay on Israel and Palestine; a series of feminist essays subtitled While Patriarchy Explodes; and then a collection of reviews—The Issue Is Power traces Kaye/Kantrowitz’s political attentions, activist work, and intellectual foundations. Reading it in 1992 was a transformative experience for me; rereading it this past month confirmed its continued relevance and power.

Beginning at the intersection of sex, race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, Kaye/Kantrowitz asks hard questions in these essays about power, violence, resistance, and victimhood. She refuses the ideology of pacifism, yet constantly returns to it to explore the nature of humanness and balance. She draws on rich histories to explore the contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism and how they are perpetuated and challenged in various communities. She also insists that history be of use to her as an activist and intellectual.

At the core of The Issue Is Power is a smart, engaged observer of the world who invites us to think and act with her. This book also maps Kaye/Kantrowitz’s activist engagements from the anti-domestic violence movement, the anti-rape movement, the New Jewish Agenda, Palestinian solidary work, anti-war work, and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, where Kaye/Kantrowitz was the founding executive director.

One tension of creative work is the focus it requires, even demands. Creative work requires an artist to focus on the creation of something new to the exclusion of what exists now in the world; for political people, that focus can sometimes appear to exclude the problems that exist in the world today. Kaye/Kantrowitz’s work demonstrates how to refuse such exclusions; she responds to the tensions of creation by maintaining focus and engaging broad and powerful vision. A central strategy for managing this tension is the practice of solidarity. Kaye/Kantrowitz writes that solidary is how to build a movement:

Solidarity requires the bonding together of a people engaged in common struggle. But solidarity also means standing alongside another struggle, not because you feel guilty but because you recognize it as your own; it means using what you have on behalf of the struggle. (To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century, 108)

She further distills solidarity practice with this explanation: "if your friends, if your sisters are suffering you put everything you have into the struggle to free them because you need their freedom as your own (italics in original, 109). Kaye/Kantrowitz concludes, What is best in people is a sturdy connection between respect for the self and respect for the other: reaching in and out at the same time" (109). Kaye/Kantrowitz insists repeated on both/and; she holds space for engagements that are rich, complex, layered.

In a later essay reflecting on Culture-Making and classic lesbian books, Kaye/Kantrowitz links solidarity and sex, using work by Judy Grahn and Adrienne Rich. Kaye/Kantrowitz advocates that lesbian culture must allow for both solidarity and sex because

[f]rom our deepest eroticism to our hardest struggles: if we know ourselves and each other, and that our lives depend on one another, we will cherish the courage to be there when another woman needs you; we will teach our daughters and our students to believe, and to act on the belief, that Any woman’s death diminishes me [a line from Adrienne Rich].

She concludes with the passage from Grahn’s poem A Woman Is Talking to Death where the speaker responds to the question, Have you ever committed any indecent acts with women? with this sentiment: Yes I have committed acts of indecency with women and most of them were acts of omission. I regret them bitterly (187).

6.

Kaye/Kantrowitz’s final book, The Color of Jews, published by Indiana University Press in 2007, is in many ways a synthesis of her lifetime of activism and thought. The Color of Jews first interrogates the ostensible whiteness of Jews. Kaye/Kantrowitz argues through both the historical record and the lived experiences of Jews in the United States that there is a rich multiracial heritage among Jews and urges the recognition and embrace of that reality. In the final part of the book, she argues robustly against Zionism as another form of failed nationalism. Instead she articulates a vision of diasporism for Jews. Kaye/Kantrowitz writes,

Diasporism is committed to an endless paradoxical dance between cultural integrity and multicultural complexities. Diasporism depends not on dominance but on balance, perpetual back and forth, home and away, community and outside, always slightly on the edge except perhaps at intensely personal moments in the family created by blood or by love, or at moments of transcendent solidarity. (199)

Her signature political practice of solidarity, an ideology forged in feminist anti-violence work during the 1970s, plays a key role in diasporism both in process and outcome. Solidarity for Kaye/Kantrowitz is both a political practice, an action, and an organizing principle. It is also transcendent, a moment of being, to use a Woolfian phrase the literary scholar in Kaye/Kantrowitz might appreciate. Present in this final book is a synthesis of Kaye/Kantrowitz’s multiple modes of thinking and acting that she used to engage in the world.

7.

Lately, I have been working on poems that puzzle about what makes revolution, particularly, what and how does revolution happen in the time of Trump. I do not have answers to these questions, but the poems demand, if not answers, some gestures to answers. A few months ago, these same poems demanded some sex, an orgasm, here and there in the manuscript. As I wrote sex and folded orgasms into the manuscript, I realized that my answers about revolution often turn to sex. As a young woman, there was a revolution in being a lesbian, in talking about it, in expressing positive lesbian sexuality. As a middle-aged woman, I recognize that revolution is not going to come through an orgasm. Mine, or yours. So I have been contemplating what instead makes revolution.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a powerful thought partner for these ruminations. Her work, particularly in My Jewish Face & Other Stories, The Issue is Power, and The Color of Jews, offers no easy answers to any questions, but it provides rich meditations on the complexities of the questions and on the conditions of the world that shape the questions and possible answers. Her work offers a rich world to enter to think about questions with multiple layers and with refusals for easy answers. Through prose, story, and lived experiences, Kaye/Kantrowitz’s work grapples with complexity and invigorates readers who engage with her to embrace the difficult, the complex, the uncertain, as meaningful expressions of human life.

Her years of activism demonstrate the power of living within a vision of a world with no simple answers. I imagine that Kaye/Kantrowitz woke every single day seeking answers to questions like, What makes revolution? What makes change? How can I make the world better for women, for lesbians, for queers, for Jews, for Black people, for all? Every single day. What makes revolution? What makes change? She woke asking the questions and knowing there were no simple answers, yet, within her life, work and writing are answers, not simple, not complete. She left thoughts and ideas and words to piece together; from these, we might ask our own questions, from these, we might find our own answers.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz died on July 10, 2018 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 72 years old.

When Kaye/Kantrowitz passed the journal Sinister Wisdom on to Elana Dykewomon in 1987, she ended her letter to Elana with this wish: May you survive well together (Sinister Wisdom 32, 128). Now, without Kaye/Kantrowitz, we are left to find a way to survive without her.

Julie R. Enszer

October 2019

A version of this essay first appeared on LambdaLiterary.org on August 22, 2018.

Introduction

I. THEMATIC CONNECTIONS

1.

First I learned about rape. I mean, I always knew, cannot remember learning.

First I learned about the Holocaust. I mean, I always knew, cannot remember learning.

2.

When did I learn the meaning of these things? That rape happened not rarely but all the time. That battering, incest, sexual harassment formed a pattern. That it was built in. That even when the reality did not touch me directly, I was still driven by fear of that reality—all the freedoms I didn’t choose: the walks not taken, the bar not stopped in even though I had to pee so bad. The risks I took when I was 17, 19, 20 years old: coming home on the subway at 3:00 in the morning, hitchhiking, accepting a place to crash from this or that man. I would in my twenties, married and dissatisfied, remind myself I was lucky because he works steady, doesn’t drink, run around, or beat you.

When did I learn the meaning of these things? That the Holocaust was an exaggerated but logical extension to a pattern. About pogroms, including the one in Kielce, Poland, in 1946—after the Holocaust. That it was not a long time ago but just before my life began. That my mother was screamed at for causing the war. That America didn’t want the Jews, nobody wanted the Jews. That they starved gassed shot millions of people and shovelled their bodies into ovens. That the sun went on shining and ordinary people went about their lives. That some people still say it didn’t happen. That some people still say it’s too bad Hitler didn’t finish the job.

3.

Imagine 1969. Imagine women naming rape as a political fact of patriarchal oppression.

Imagine the fear women have of the term and the concept and the feeling, manhating. Men get raped too, we say. And they do. But who rapes them? We hesitate to place responsibility squarely where it belongs. Clarence Thomas as Anita Hill’s victim? William Kennedy Smith as Patricia Bowman’s victim?

Imagine Jews just now naming the Holocaust. Imagine trying to talk about it without saying the word Nazi.

4.

In 1982 I was speaking about women and violence, and a woman—another Jew, as it happened—asked if I thought it was a contradiction to be a feminist and a pacifist. I answered quickly, without thought: First of all, I think it’s a contradiction to be a Jew and a pacifist.

This is where I begin.

5.

I bring to this question of violence and victims three lessons. I have mentioned only two: violence against women and the Holocaust.

Here the lessons of what it means to be a victim reinforce each other. Victims resist every way they can. To understand, look inside the experience for resistance, for dignity, for survival. Learn, in the words of Meridel Le Sueur: sometimes survival is an act of resistance. But pacifism is a luxury. Victims must fight back. Violence in the hands of victims may prevent violence.

When it comes to liberation from brutal violent murdering oppression, Malcolm X was exactly right. Any means necessary. You use what you can. Everything you can. Do I regret the German lives taken by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? It would be an obscenity for me to do so.

Do I regret the life of Francine Hughes’ husband, or Jennifer Patri’s, or Joan Little’s jailer, or Inez Garcia’s rapist? It would be an obscenity for me to do so.

6.

And the third lesson, the lesson by which I re-evaluate: Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The haunting question asked by Jerome Segal in Creating a Palestinian State: do victims only wait their turn?

What does it mean to be a victim? How does one/can one use violence to free oneself? And then how does one stop? When is one strong enough to stop?

And the stunning question that encompasses all other questions: Is history of no use?

I write because I need history to be of some use.

7.

To bring the past into the present means understanding the whole steady sickness of the nation-state. The ghost of the Holocaust says be tough, no one’s your friend, no one gives a shit about you but your own.

Where is the voice to oppose that voice, to assert the present, to make possible the future?

How to remain human—which means not only feeling deeply but acting morally. To escape the paradigm of oppression with its brutal shallow dualism of victim and victimizer. Women, as a group, have not yet had to struggle with the other side of power, though as teachers, employers, owners, and most of all as mothers we have tasted it.

The language that justifies oppression is the language of congressional committees. They are evil, we are threatened, we need more weapons money men men men. Men in power.

Someday it will be women in power. And then?

Who would have believed Jews would use power to drive out another people, to squash a people’s uprising?

Who would believe even a few Black people in Crown Heights would chant Heil Hitler?

8.

On the other hand, who would believe the story Naomi Shihab Nye told me, of her father, born in Palestine, emigrated to the U.S. He flew back to attend the funeral of his brother, who had been Mayor of Sinjil, a West Bank village. The Israeli soldier checking his passport at the Tel Aviv airport said Welcome home.

Who would believe the story Bernice Mennis told me of a young man in the prison class on autobiography: white, Italian, he wrote his paper on Richard Wright’s Black Boy. At first he hated the book, and later realized it made him angry, because the pain Wright describes reached him and he felt guilty. Or another story from Bernice, another young man in the class, African American, who read Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz and said at first he thought, why are we always hearing about the Holocaust, never about the Middle Passage and slavery. Levi made him see the Holocaust as itself.

In these stories, there is room for everyone. No one’s suffering mutes or crowds anyone else’s. Hearts enlarge instead of shriveling.

Where are the stories we will struggle to believe of men who stand against male bonding, male privilege, male maleness to oppose the violence of their species? I see my nephew’s rage at sexism. I can’t believe what happens to women, he says over and over. Is there a new generation of boys raised to cherish women as equals?

And how do we balance then against now against later? To hang on to our own anger, hatred even, long enough…but no longer?

II. WRITING

I was the kid who would escape Flatbush because I was smart. And I did. But all the way through graduate school I, who loved literature and who had found reading always the most blissful escape, was plagued by the knowledge that I was not a very good writer. I was told this by my short story teacher at CCNY and by my lit crit professors at UC Berkeley; my writing, they said, was Germanic. Ironic, prophetic. I was trying to write like them.

Not until the women’s liberation movement revealed the I voice of women and unlocked my vocal cords did a less Germanic, more Jewish voice emerge. The very circumstances that have made it possible for me to write have been political, and always I have wrestled with the relationship between art and politics—the relationship that is and the relationship I seek.

The theme that circles these essays, the continuous thread through them is, of course, power. Power between women and men and the need to disrupt the imbalance; power as the partial result of violence-as-tool; power as the mark of the Jew, the too-powerful, scapegoated for all power imbalance. And the result: the woman, the Jew, the abused child taught, on every level imaginable, to fear her own power.

What happens when she begins to contact her power?

What happens when we begin to contact our collective power?

I’ve dated these essays because they are a journey, one step at a time. These writings come from a fifteen-year span of my life. A certain amount of inconsistency, on the one hand, and repetition, on the other, seem inevitable. From the beginning I have written about the need for utter transformation, new language, new modes, theory and practice together. Some writing which I tried—and failed—to contain in essays came naturally when I turned to fiction. I found in fiction that I didn’t have to be right, didn’t have to have all the answers. Contempt dropped out and compassion and complexity dropped in. In preparing this collection I have tried, where appropriate, to return the interrogative mood to the essays.

But many of these essays are purposeful, written to cover certain territory: speeches for an occasion, pieces for a particular issue of a particular journal. I have often had a clear idea of audience and purpose. In the last few years, speaking to and doing workshops with students, my sense of purpose has happily extended. There is a new generation of radicals. There is a generation of Jews hungry for a sense of itself as both radical and Jewish (though I have sometimes been shocked by the degree of self-hate among many progressive Jews, young and not so young). There is a generation of women whose strength, competence and confidence awes me. They stand firmly on the ground my generation created for them. I have learned a great deal from them. I thank them especially for the window they offer into the future.

Women, Violence, and Resistance: Naming It War 1979–1992

Women, Violence, and Resistance: Naming It War 1979–1992

I. MEN’S WAR AGAINST WOMEN

Naming It War

Changes and Limits

Refocusing the Issues

II. BLOCKS TO RESISTANCE

Imagination: To Consider Violence

Fear of the Self/Fear of Our Power⁷²

Women, Men and Patriarchy

Lesbian Violence

Remothering

III. FORMS OF RESISTANCE

From Defense to Resistance

Creating a New Consciousness

Impatience

NOTES

For:

Inez Garcia Joan Little Yvonne Wanrow Jennifer Patri Claudia Thacker Sharon McNearney Evelyn Ware Janice Hornbuckle Hazel Kontos Lenore Coons Carolyn McKendrick Margaret Pratt Wanda Carr Francine Hughes Diane Davis Agnes Scott Marlene Roan Eagle Miriam Greig Gloria Maldonado Julia Parker Price Bernestine Taylor Darlene Lis Virginia Tierce Elizabeth Mae Fulmer Gloria Timmons Evelyn Graham Jenna Kelsie Roxanne Gay Dessie Woods Shirley Martin Alta Bryan Patricia Evans Cathy Thomas Barbara Jean Gilbert Janice Painter Donna Ferth Nancy Stilson Barbara Carpenter Judy Wagner Georgia Wondel Nada Alayoubi Christina Pratt Sharon Crigler Lorilyn Allan Janet Billey Barbara Eacret Idalia Mejia Sandra Lowe Janet Hartwell Eva Mae Heygood Betty Jean Carter Lea Murphy Beverly Ibn-Thomas Mary Melerine Maxine Waltman Eva Diamond and all defenders of the self.

Prologue

March 17, 1992. I am working on final revisions of the essay on violence. I read in the New York Times about Shirley Lowery, stabbed to death by her ex-lover. Shirley Lowery was 52, African American, divorced for almost 20 years. She’d earned money as a domestic worker to raise her five children, took care of her sick father until he died. Then she got a job as a bus driver, a huge step forward.

A man on the bus flirts with her. She has been alone for how long—17, 18 years? They become lovers. He moves in. Two years later her daughter finds out the man was raping, terrorizing, threatening to kill her mother. She helps her mother move out, hide, get a restraining order. And when Shirley Lowery shows up in court to apply for a two-year injunction, the man is waiting. He stabs her 19 times.

What haunts me is the bright smiling picture of Shirley Lowery with her round cheeks. It’s her words quoted by her daughter, Vanessa Davis: My mother was embarrassed about what was happening to her. But when we moved her out, she said she felt free for the first time in a year. She said, ‘If he kills me tomorrow, at least I know what it’s like to be free again.’

What haunts me is the picture of Vanessa with her husband and infant son: Vanessa’s face, bleak, staring away from the camera, the husband sweetly focused on the baby. It seems Shirley Lowery raised her daughter with a sense of options that her daughter then fed back to her to help her escape. But options weren’t enough. He wouldn’t let go.²

What haunts me also are the statistics. Millions of women beaten every year by male partners. At least 20% of all women seeking emergency hospital assistance are injured by domestic violence.³ In 1990, of 4,399 women murdered in the U.S., 30% were killed by boyfriends or husbands.

Almost four women every single day. Each with her own story.

I. Men’s War Against Women

Frances Thompson (colored) sworn and examined. By the Chairman: 2919. State what you know or saw of the rioting. [Witness] Between one and two-o’clock Tuesday night seven men, two of whom were policemen, came to my house. I know they were policemen by their stars. They were all Irishmen. They said they must have some eggs, and ham, and biscuit. I made them some biscuit and