Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was a lesbian-feminist writer and editor born in Brooklyn. She attended City College in New York and the University of California–Berkeley. As a noted activist and writer, she made multiple theoretical contributions to understanding Judaism, lesbianism, and feminism as intersectional identities, extended an awareness of class and economic justice through a Jewish lens, and made visible racial differences within Jewish communities. Kaye/Kantrowitz was the founding executive director of Jews For Racial and Economic Justice and served as a board member for nearly a decade. She advocated Radical Diasporism as a progressive alternative to Zionism.
Family and Education
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Women’s Movement Activism
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Writer and Editor
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Radical Diasporism
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kaye/Kantrowitz braided her consciousness and public persona with multiple identities: secular, activist, Jewish, lesbian, feminist, anti-racist. Between 1990 and 2007, she published her most influential works: My Jewish Face and Other Stories (1990), a short story collection; The Issue is Power (1992), a gathering of essays and speeches; and The Colors of Jews (2007), her analysis of the multiracial aspects of Judaism and prospects for Jews to be effective and robust allies in anti-racist work. Her writing built on her lived experiences and connected intimately with her activism.
In addition to her editorial work, during the 1980s Kaye/Kantrowitz served as co-chair of the New Jewish Agenda Task Force on Anti-Semitism and Racism. In 1990, she moved to New York City to become the first Executive Director of Jews For Racial and Economic Justice (JFREF), a post she held until 1995; she then served on the JFREJ board of directors through 2004 and co-founded Beyond the Pale: The Progressive Jewish Radio Hour on WBAI. In New York, Kaye/Kantrowitz met her beloved partner, activist and organizer Leslie Cagan. She also worked as the director of the Queens College Worker Education Extension Center and taught in urban studies and Jewish studies at Brooklyn College and Queens College.
From her lifetime of activist work, Kaye/Kantrowitz formulated a theory of Radical Diasporism, explicated in her final book, The Colors of Jews. Radical Diasporism is a political analysis of Jewish identity that embraces Jewish tradition, culture, and experience with a commitment to the paradox of “cultural integrity and multicultural complexities.” She explained that Radical Diasporism depends “not on dominance but on balance, perpetual back and forth, home and away, community and outside.” Through Radical Diasporism, she advocated that Jews “make home where we are” with critical and transformative engagements with justice. By emphasizing home and rootedness in the Diaspora and rejecting Zionism, Kaye/Kantrowitz situated Radical Diasporism as a progressive alternative to Zionism. It is her final theoretical contribution as a Jewish feminist lesbian thinker, building on her important previous articulations linking Judaism, lesbianism, and feminism as intersectional identities, extending an awareness of class, racial and economic justice through a Jewish lens, as well as making visible racial differences within Jewish communities.
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz died on July 10, 2018, from complications of Parkinson’s Disease; Cagan, her partner of twenty-one years, survived her.
Selected Works by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
We Speak in Code. Pittsburgh: Motheroot Publications, 1980.
Tribe of Dina. Sinister Wisdom, 1986; Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.
My Jewish Face and Other Stories, San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Book Co., 1990.
The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1992.
The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007.
Antler, Joyce. Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie, and Irena Klepfisz. “Introduction,” Sinister Wisdom 29/30: Tribe of Dina (1986).
Kaplan, Esther, Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark, Donna Nevel, Alisa Solomon. “Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, 1945-2018.” Jewish Currents. https://jewishcurrents.org/melanie-kaye-kantrowitz-1945-2018/ (Accessed June 3, 2021).
Salam, Maya. “Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Feminist, Activist, and Author, Dies at 72.” The New York Times, August 13, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/melanie-kaye-kantrowitz-dead.html (Accessed June 3, 2021).
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