Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

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

Several essays from this collection, such as "Women and Violence: Naming it War"; "Jews, Class, Color, and the Cost of Whiteness"; and "To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century" have been widely anthoglogized and taught in Women's Studies, Race Theory, Jewish Studies, American Studies, and Philosophy courses, as well as for anti-hate training.

"Writing on Jewish women and therapy, offers some subtle insights into the complex relationship many Jewish women have with their ethnic/religious identity. She also argues that the myth of Jewish powerlessness perpetuated by Jews is as nefarious as the myth of Jewish power promulgated by anti-Semites.
"The strongest piece--on women and violence--is also the most troubling, from its implicit equation of violence against women with the Holocaust to its apparent espousal of vigilantism. But Kaye/Kantrowitz convinces that women should not be pacifists, as much through her articulate rage as through her marshaling of evidence of how endemic violence against women is in our society. She exhorts women who shun violence even in self-defense to ``imagine putting the knife in his flesh''--just the imagining alone is an empowering act, she says, in a world in which the legal/political /sexual deck is stacked against women."
-- Publishers Weekly


Books

The Colors of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism (Indiana University Press)
"Every once in awhile a book comes along and smacks you in the face with its wisdom, intelligence, and compassionate politics. The Colors of Jews is such a book." ––Chandra Talpade Mohanty

"In her calm, reasonable, assured voice, with formidable intellectual clarity, a wealth of reading, a fine ear for balancing argument, statistic and anecdote, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz throws open to questioning every assumption about the meaning of race, identity, justice and history. . . ." ––Tony Kushner



Essays
The Issue Is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence, and Resistance (Aunt Lute, 1992)
"You are in for a challenge--an intellectual feast and a strategic call to action"--Response
Fiction
My Jewish Face& Other Stories (Aunt Lute, 1990)
"Her writing sacrifices neither clarity nor depth."-- Judith McDaniel
Multi-genre Collection
The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (Beacon Press, 1989)
"A vigorous, stimulating celebration of a multifaceted Jewish womanhood." -- Publishers Weekly
Poems
We Speak in Code (Motheroot Publications, 1980)
"These poems fix impermeably those crucial moments when change happens. . . a way-making book." -- Tillie Olsen



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