Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Image from the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was born in Brooklyn, in 1945, in “a swirling Jewish ghetto/community of first-and-second generation immigrants,” where union support and opposition to McCarthyism was the norm. She was raised to understand that racial prejudice was wrong by a father who had been a member of the Young Communist League, and a mother who had been spat on for her activism against the Korean War. As Melanie wrote in her biographical essay, To be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century: social justice “was my Jewish upbringing, as much as the candles we lit for Hanukkah.”

At age 17, Melanie had her first experience of organizing. It was 1963, as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. She began working for the Harlem Education Project, which was connected to the SNCC-affiliated Northern Student Movement. As Melanie describes the project, they “had organized a tutoring project, several rent strikes, an anti-rat campaign; had pressured schools for decent facilities and a Black history curriculum, and helped to create freedom schools for children to attend in protest . . . It was my first experience with a mobilizing proud community and with the possibilities of collective action.”

It was also her first experience in a non-Jewish environment. During her time with the Harlem Education Project, she met civil rights activists returning from the South. She heard personal stories of incredible oppression – of loved ones lynched, of great grandparents enslaved – as well as of inspiring freedom struggles. The experience led her to become intensely focused on combatting White supremacy. And yet, she was “utterly unaware of racism against Jews.” The Holocaust, at her young age, felt like it was “eons ago, irrelevant.”

In 1966, Melanie left New York for graduate school in Berkeley: “I wanted to get away from NY, from my family, my people, to be part of the radical politics developing on the West Coast.” She threw herself into the antiwar movement; into struggles for racial justice and economic rights; into the women’s rights movement; and after coming out as a lesbian in the early 1970s, into queer liberation. Jewish issues were hardly on her radar.

And yet, she felt out of place and socially awkward in the progressive spaces she inhabited. In 1978, she had coffee with a woman who wanted to work at the rape relief hotline Melanie was involved in. Although the two women had little in common, Melanie experienced a sense of ease in their conversation that she rarely found in movement spaces. She realized it was because they had a shared culture: they were both East Coast Jews. She began to sense that it was important for her to be around Jews, Jewish culture, and to pay attention to Jewish issues.

This sense was solidified over the next few years, during a period of moving around the country. While living in Maine, her house “had a swastika smeared on the bedroom door in what looked like blood.” As more swastikas appeared in the neighborhood, she wrote: “I was becoming very very conscious.” Driving through the South on the way to her new home in New Mexico, the messages on the local conservative talk shows struck fear in her heart. And: as she began writing and speaking more about Jewish issues in the places where she yearned to feel at home – feminist left spaces – she encountered “resistance, overt rejection, ridicule, a willful ignorance . . . the ant-Semitism I was encountering in the women’s movement and on the left hurt me more, not because it was more threatening but because the feminist left was where I needed to be: this added to my sense of isolation as a Jew.”

These experiences led Melanie to realize that she would be better equipped to engage in the issues she cared about, if she grounded herself in the culture and the people she came from. This realization, in turn, informed her ever-deepening understanding of the politics of solidarity. In a critique of the left, she wrote: “Few of us have learned to trust our own rhetoric, that people will fight harder as they also fight for themselves.” She felt that when it came to Jews especially, the left ignored “how much political energy can be generated as groups develop a cohesive identity and analysis.” “True coalition,” she wrote, “forms between groups; the premise is that each group has a strong base in a larger community. Thus Jews who want to work in coalition need not only to know who we are but to be bonded with other Jews.”

For the rest of her life, Melanie strengthened her bonds with Jewish communities and Jewish organizing. She did so partly because connecting with Jewish communities was a personal need of hers, and partly to mobilize those communities around the issues she cared about. That included building support for Palestinian human rights: Melanie lamented that although many Jews embraced progressive policies, “on this one issue, Israel/Palestine, it’s still acceptable at the Jewish center to forget that Palestinians are people, too.” She worried that Israeli dehumanization facilitated antisemitism around the world, writing that: “While anti-semitism is never the fault of Jews, the brutality of the Israeli occupation . . . has got to pump up Jew-hating.” In Wrestling With Zion, she imagines showing up to the Israeli consulate to reject her “right to return” to Israel, saying: “I do not believe the solution to anti-Semitism is the creation of another hated minority so that I can enjoy the privileges of majority. Far from feeling protected by Israel, I feel exposed to danger by the actions of the Israeli state.”

In her final book – The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism – Melanie brought an important focus to the racial and ethnic diversity of the Jewish experience. She also continued to deepen her politics of solidarity by theorizing an ethic of “radical Diasporism,” which pushed back on the notion of Israel as the Jewish homeland. “Where Zionism says go home,” she writes, “Diasporism says we make home where we are.” Melanie emphasized that by embracing Diasporism, Jews can also find commonality and build solidarity with other diasporic peoples… including Arabs. As her partner Leslie Cagan summarizes, Diasporism calls for people to bring the “fullness of their traditions and values”, and “put them into practice wherever they are.”

In theorizing Diasporism, Melanie built on the Jewish “principle of doikayt – hereness – the right to be, and to fight for justice, wherever we are.” She goes on to connect some powerful dots between Diasporism, Doikayt, and solidarity: “Doikayt means Jews enter coalitions wherever we are, across lines that might divide us, to work together for universal equality and justice.” Diasporism also teaches “the salient lesson of the Holocaust, which is: build with allies an urgent and powerful opposition to all hatred . . . trying to forge strong coalitions is our best defense. Not Jewish defense leagues. Not an ever more powerful Israeli Defense Force. Not billions of U.S. dollars for the Israeli government to purchase weapons from U.S. arms manufacturers.”

Melanie’s path towards developing and living out these principles began when she joined the New Jewish Agenda in the early 1980s, where she served on the steering committee and co-chaired its Task Force on Anti-Semitism and Racism. The organization was one of the few American Jewish organizations to immediately oppose the 1982 Lebanon War. During this period, Melanie also co-edited the groundbreaking, multicultural lesbian literary & art journal Sinister Wisdom, where she devoted an entire issue to the Palestinian refugee experience. Her work with Sinister Wisdom exemplifies another essential dimension of Melanie’s life: that of the feminist poet and activist artist. As Lambda Literary’s tribute to her beautifully evokes, Melanie “recognized the importance of stories and particularly women’s stories to the work of revolutionary change . . . 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.” When Melanie passed the torch of editorship to Elana Dykewomon in 1987, she wrote: “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.”

In 1990, Melanie became the founding director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), which fostered a progressive Jewish voice and organizing space in New York City. JFREJ emphasizes that her legacy “centered our work in a deeply feminist, queer, anti-racist, multicultural, class-conscious analysis. The word ‘intersectionality’ did not yet have wide currency, but Melanie communicated the concept and put it into action.” JFREJ was one of the few Jewish groups at the time that was organizing against anti-Arab prejudice, and that was building relationships of solidarity with Arab American communities. This allowed JFREJ to better support those communities in the wake of 9/11, when anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudices skyrocketed. With JFREJ, Melanie also founded Beyond the Pale: The Progressive Jewish Radio Hour; organized workshops for confronting White privilege, racism, and antisemitism; and launched a series of radical Jewish history conferences.

Throughout her life of activism, Melanie was also a professor, teaching broadly about racial and gender justice and Jewish studies. This included teaching the first Women’s Studies course ever at Berkeley. She was a beloved mentor to many. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz died in the summer of 2018, after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. “Everything about Melanie’s life,” her partner Leslie Cagan wrote, “– her very being – was grounded in the deepest empathy and the strongest commitment to solidarity I have ever seen.”

“Solidarity is the political version of love.” Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Additional Resources

Articles by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz:

Books by Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz: