My Jewish Face and Other Stories
My Jewish Face & Other Stories chronicles the coming of age and coming out of a daughter of the Jewish left. Wandering from Brooklyn to Harlem and Berkeley in the sixties, from the intense feminist politics of the seventies to the isolation and regathering of activism in the eighties, Kaye/Kantrowitz's women struggle for lesbian community, for proud Jewish identity and always for justice steeped in compassion. As humanly warm and funny as they are serious, these stories will reach with great hope and energy across generations and across cultures.
I like this book a lot. It’s full of history, herstories and plain stories—and in beautiful combination and variety—all bringing the truth, the angry adversarial truth, the happy love-finding truth of our women’s movement years. —Grace Paley, writer and activist
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a lesbian writer who does not stint in these fictional explorations. Her writing sacrifices neither clarity nor depth. As she recreates the contexts of our lives she gives us back our own voices. —Judith McDaniel, poet, essayist, activist
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s stories are urgently, often brutally honest…I came away from My Jewish Face as if from a roomful of vivid and articulate people who have discovered they have nothing left to hide. I value Kaye/Kantrowitz’s voice for everything it says that comforts and everything that hurts—this is a sharp, sad, funny document of difficult times and I hope it falls into many, many hungry hands. —Rosellen Brown, novelist and poet
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 & OtherStories (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.
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