As it turns out, these expectations are indeed shared by others in the Jewish community. Several months ago, as part of the opening festivities for the newly-founded Center for Jewish Studies at a local university, there was a panel devoted to the timely nature of this enterprise. During the discussion, one of the panelists noted, they meaning here, I think, other ethnic groups with Centers of their own they took our language, observing that ghetto has its origins in 16th century Jewish experience. As I took it, the moment was instructive. For in the speaker’s undisguised use of what might be called colonial rhetoric the language of us versus them, these comments got me wondering about how the discourse of them could be viewed as wholly distinct from the discourse of us, since it was so thoroughly enmeshed in a Western Jewish Intellectual heritage to begin with from Freud to Derrida. Further, I began wondering about how much of my own thinking might be implicated n such comments, and in the opposite on they assumed, spurring me to ask if the question might not be what can we Jews teach through cultural studies? But what can we learn? At a moment when the air is thick with such familiar terms as exile, Diaspora and home, what can be learned about Jewish identity, aesthetic production and the connection between them? 

My inquiry begins with the trope of exile, first as practiced by George Steiner and then as problematized by post-colonial theorist Edward Said. Said’s scrupulous interrogation of the term makes it possible to: a) think about what accommodations need to be made if exile is to remain a usable tradition to use Eric Hobsbawm’s term; and b) think about alternative models of literary production, in light of exiles emphasis on loss and dissociation. this emphasis necessarily precludes a discourse which can imagine the terms under which versions of community, of home, might be tenable. What I mean to propose is that instead of privileging exile as the defining aesthetic position, Jews consider what might be achieved under the rubric of a diasporic vision. For exile, a position that speaks of perpetual alienation, fails to account for the efforts of a number of poets whose work might be usefully considered within the critical frame ‘Jewish American Writes’ -- including Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and a poet whose work provides the focus of this discussion, Irena Klepfisz. 

As Moses Mendelsshon puts it, meshaneh lashon/meshaneh hainyan. To change the term, is to change the idea. The word lashon is typically taken to mean 'term.' But lashon also means tongue, as in language. In the case of Irena Klepfisz both meanings of lashon are at play. She changes the language and so changes the term, and in changing the term she changes the idea. With her latest experiments in Yiddish/English bilingual verse Klepfisz’s poems become not only the site of a ‘diasporic’ rather than an exilic consciousness, but the meaning of the term diaspora itself must be reconceived. 

As Klepfisz would have it, Diaspora is not simply an extension of exile -- a condition of perpetual scatteredness where identity (individually as well as communal) depends upon the idea of a sacred homeland to be recovered at any cost. Rather, in making Yiddish, a notoriously inclusive language and a language traditionally defined as distinct from Hebrew (lashon hakodesh, the holy tongue), the grounds upon which connections between words and meaning, selves and others are continuously being made and remade, Klepfisz offers a diasporic vision in which cultural identity is under perpetual negotiation. This vision is resonant with the descriptions offered by Stuart Hall in his account of Afro-Caribbean communities and those of anthropologist James Clifford who takes Diaspora to be the site of an unresolved dialogue between continuity and disruption. 

This is not to say that Klepfisz naively or willfully appropriates a ‘foreign’ or alien definition at the expense of a more authentic account. For her vision also resonates with the kinds of revisionist accounts of Jewish identity that is implicit in Regina Schwartz’s inquiries into Israel’s past, with its legacy of rupture and discontinuity, or that is rendered explicit in the Boyar brothers’ tart critique of that dominant trend in Jewish thought which privileges the house instead of the tent, the securely bordered state instead of a more transitory condition. So like the unruly borders of Yiddish itself, Klepfisz’s bilingual poems trouble categorical claims about a pure lineage of cultural discourse. 

In contemporary Jewish thought, George Steiner is among exile’s fiercest advocates. In his 1984 essay, Our Homeland, The Text, Steiner equates Jewish identity with the Book -- the only thing that stands between Jews and total annihilation. But reading the Book the act of textual exegesis is not a simple act of return or restoration, since one is always achingly aware of the distance -- the gap that cannot be traversed -- between theory and praxis, between text and meaning. Even as one may long for a whole, coherent text, one is always in exile. I am tempted to say here that exile is to Steiner what desire is to Lacan -- the engine of all meaningful activity; but that is a topic to be explored at another time. A state (if you will) of perpetual deferral, exile is wonderfully sustaining (Steiner 5). One can cultivate an idealized notion of home (to be glimpsed from afar, but never wholly occupied) and thus, as Norman Finkelstein notes, avoid the entire nasty business of citizenship, border control and public policy that, as Steiner would have it, a ‘small nation-state in the Middle East’ must fact (Finkelstein 102). 

Steiner’s position makes for the kind of aesthetic mandate implicit in Delmore Schwartz’s equation of the modern poet the stranger, alien, the outsider, and the Jew, an exile from his own country, an exile from himself (Eisen 131). This modernist agenda (equating alienation and Jewishness) has been taken up by any number of writers, but an especially extravagant example is to be found in David Antin’s meditation, Writing and Exile. After briefly wondering what he might possibly have to say about Jewish poetry, a bewildering subject indeed, Antin reaches for this old saw: "what I thought I shared... with a lot of people who took their jewishness more for granted was a sense of exile" (sic) (Antin 95). What follows is a piece-meal collection of childhood injuries and adolescent estrangements leavened with a few anecdotal observations about Buber’s Hasidic tales. Antin concludes that exile is inherently written into the humanness of the Jewish tradition which is the Jewish tradition. He then segues into a short rant about exile as thoroughly preferable to the oppressive nationalism practiced by the state of Israel, declaring that writers cannot afford to be part of any nation (Antin 106). I don’t know in what spirit Antin offers these words; to be fair, he may well have intended them to be just as infuriating as I experience them. Nonetheless, in its unqualified use of exile as a trope, Antin’s piece demonstrates the kind of theoretical possessiveness that is being dismantled by cultural theorists such as Edward Said. 

Perhaps Said’s most pointed consideration of exile and home can be found in The Mind of Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile. He begins by asking, If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has that loss been so easily transformed into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture? (Said 49) As a preliminary response, he notes that exile, with its attendant associations of spiritual alienation and perpetual isolation, is commensurate with modernism -- a modernism premised, as we have seen, on a condition of alienated exile which has been troped as Jewishness. this recognition quickly gives way to what I take to be a seminal corrective. For in this age of refuge, a time when so many suffer the real consequences of forced homelessness, to s peak of exile as beneficial, as a spur to humanism, is to belittle its mutilations (50). this point must be taken in, not only by those of us especially engaged in the business of formulating theories of Jewish writing, but by the literary community at large. I do wish to note here that the trope of exile is especially problematic for Jewish-American writing. After all, what American Jew can legitimately claim to live in exile? 

In light of current circumstance, one might expect Said to propose an indefinite moratorium on the use of exile to mean anything other than the miseries of those without a tellable history (52). But this is not so. While insisting upon the difference between real homelessness and the spiritual estrangement of Joyce and Nabokov, Said extends the term to represent a moral alternative to mass institutions looming over much of modern life (53). Although fully aware of the narcissistic perils this alternative implicitly risks, Said argues that to dwell in exile means to know the fundamental fragility of place and to cultivate a radical skepticism towards that condition called home. While he is careful to emphasize in the best (post) modern way the necessary brokenness of things, and to embrace disruption, I suspect that the melancholic air permeating this assertion may be attributed to an unfulfilled longing for home -whole, secure, fixed -as a lost ideal. In this respect, Said’s rereading of exile sounds like the spiritual displacement so central to the modernist mandate, crafted to an inordinate degree by assimilated European Jews. And indeed, Said cites Adorno, among others, as a significant source of his own vision. 

What then do Said’s reflections mean for Jewish poetics? One of the benefits of the relatively broad arena of exchange facilitated by multiculturalism is that it discourages whatever impulses a group may have to claim exclusive rights to a discourse or set of concerns. With the recognition that exile does not necessarily belong to us, comes the freedom to assess its virtues and its liabilities. We can ask to what extent is any given position part of what Eric Hobsbawm might call a usable tradition? 

Alain Finkielkraut, in The Imaginary Jew, accepts the challenge posed by Said’s critique. He takes a hard look at the failures of contemporary diasporic Jewry to develop and sustain a coherent sense of itself as a distinct entity, independent of Israel. The Diaspora, seated front row, watches the continuation of as well as the transformation of its own history. The Jewish state is that mythic character that joins the roles of victim and hero into one. In spite of its secular manifestations, Zion -- orphan and avenger -- proves to all the world’s Jews that their adventure is unfinished and that their uniqueness has not yet toed the line’ (130). This is Finkielkraut’s devastating account of Diaspora at its parasitic worst, projecting its own image onto a mythic incarnation of Israel without making an account of its own specificities. 

Finkielkraut’s deft analysis makes manifest a significant lacuna in Jewish ideology -- the absence of an adequate theory of Diaspora as a viable condition of being. Indeed, the term Diaspora has been virtually synonymous with that of exile. The equation is particularly evident in Hebrew where the same word galut is used to describe either condition. To live exposed (the literal translation of the Hebrew) has meant to suffer not only the physical hardships attendant upon the loss of home, but to endure a highly attenuated relation to God the divine principle of meaning. this condition of perpetual estrangement is only barely remedied by way of a densely woven web of rules legislating social life. As the Talmud says, Since the destruction of the Temple , all we have is the four cubits of the Law. 

Diaspora, as a condition of lack, is at the heart of Finkielkraut’s own lament for contemporary Jewry. In a dazzling and disturbingly resonant move, Finkielkraut links this condition to one of Jewish culture’s more infamous stereotypes -- that of the Jewish Mother: The Diaspora is the world she prefers. A perverse incarnation of the matriarch Rachel who, as prophetic tradition would have it, weeps with her children in exile, the Jewish Mother (best known to Finkielkraut from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint ) serves as an emblem of loss out of which contemporary Jewish identity is born. Her elegiac cry Don’t leave me which Finkielkraut glosses as don’t forget your origins implies that in Diaspora (as currently construed) forgetting or losing a primary connection to Jewishness is as necessary and as inevitable as the process of individuation itself (105). 

In diagnosing Diaspora as a condition of lack, embodied in the ever mournful Mother, Finkielkraut identifies a crucial opposition long implicit in the dominant constructions of Jewish identity an account which sets an idealized vision of home as whole against that of exile/diaspora as perpetually broken. The opposition is in dire need of dismantling; and indeed thus diagnosed, remedies are not far behind. One way to reconceive Diaspora requires us to rethink the status of mother in Jewish discourse -- and such is the project represented in Irena Klepfisz’s recent experiments with Yiddish, a language colloquially known as the mame loshen, the mother tongue. 
Her life is a remarkable linguistic odyssey. Klepfisz, born in the Warsaw ghetto, grew up speaking Polish: she and her mother survived by passing as Poles. After fleeing Poland, Swedish replaced Polish, and with their subsequent move to the United States, English replaced Swedish. Although surrounded by Yiddish as a child, it was not, strictly speaking, Klepfisz’s first language. Therefore her interest in Yiddish does not in any simple way represent a nostalgic return. Instead it is a highly constructed effort to claim Yiddish as the site of identity -- personal as well as collective. (Can it ever really be any other way?) 

By her own account, Klepfisz’s earliest reputation was that of a Holocaust poet. Wondering if she could indeed write about anything other than exile and chronic loss, Klepfisz abandoned the role of the wailing woman (a strongly inscribed cultural position) in favor of feminist concerns. During the last five years she has turned to Yiddish to heal this split between these two parts of herself -- woman and Jew. For Yiddish can bespeak a more varies, inclusive version of Jewish community. Yiddish was never the exclusive property of digroyse gelernte. It was a language of a people of different ideologies, education, commitment, as much the language of gangsters and shopkeepers as that of poets and intellectuals. It was never a private cult(Klepfisz, Dreams 160). 

In a striking cross-cultural move, Klepfisz finds inspiration for her own bilingual verse in the work of Chicana poet-activist Gloria Anzaldua and her great emancipatory manifesto, Boderlands/La Frontera. Yiddish, of course, has its own tradition of multi-lingual verse -- the boundaries between Hebrew and German are especially porous. But Klepfisz finds that she needs to do some border-crossing of her own to discover how to make Yiddish more like ‘home’ (Klepfisz, Dreams 173). 

The relation between Klepfisz’s bilingual experiments and those of Anzaldua merits a much fuller discussion than I can offer within the scope of this essay. For now, I want to briefly suggest what is to be found in this particular mirror of the other (Adler 469). Anzaldua’s statement that We have a tradition of migration, a tradition of long walks, certainly puts in question the notion of ‘Wandering’ as a uniquely Jewish trope (11). This is not to say, however, that Borderlands diminishes the coffers o f Jewish meaning. Instead it interrupts the normative narrative of Jewish identity, which, as the Boyarins (among others ) note, tends to emphasize fixedness of place, making it possible to recover that version of community signified in the term evrim: the people who were known by others as border crossers (Adler 467, Eisen 3-18). I do not mean to imply that Jews have prior claim to the ‘border’ as a trope identity. Like exile, border-crossing has specific geographical and cultural significances that must not be obscured through extended metaphor. (Indeed, I am aware of the need to be extremely cautious here as I live and work in Southern California, a border zone, and home to millions of so-called illegal(Hispanic immigrants.) Nonetheless, this kind of cross-cultural traveling can be enormously productive. While the terms may not be new, Anzaldua’s radical refusal to mournfully represent herself as homeless, insofar as home is constructed and lived in language (multiple languages -- Chicano, Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, English), has evocative potential for those of us too weak to represent Diaspora as something other than lack. 

Klepfisz’s own vision of linguistic homemaking is significantly less celebratory. Unlike Chicana-Spanish, for example, which is a fully lived language, Yiddish is the fading legacy of a world inhabited largely by ghosts. It is a diminished thing described thus by Saul Bellow: fragments -- nonsense syllables, exclamations, twisted proverbs and quotations or in the Yiddish of his long-dead mother, trepverter -- retorts that came too late, when you were already on your way down the stairs. (Harshav 144) For Klepfisz this identification with the dead mother is especially apt; she is acutely aware of the severe history of marginality haunting the legacy of Yiddish women’s writing. The mother tongue, Yiddish was commonly known as the domain of women, girls and ignorant men. As it became a language of literary import, male authors sought to suppress these feminine associations -- an effort that extended to a dismissive view of women writers (Hellerstein 12). Klepfisz gives voice to this exclusion in the monologue Fradel Schtok. Fradel Schtok, as we learn in Klepfisz’s prefatory note, traversed cultural boundaries to introduce the sonnet into Yiddish. Ultimately she left off these bilingual aesthetic ventures and began to write exclusively in English. Three years after the switch she was institutionalized and died in a sanatorium. How Fradel Schotk went mad and died for want of her mother tongue, a tragedy only implied in the biographical sketch, is made vivid in Klepfisz’s poem: 
 

Think of it: heym and home the meaning 
the same of course exactly 
but the shift in vowel was the ocean 
in which I drowned 

Klepfisz A Few Words, 228
 

Do 
here 
ot do 
right here 
muz zi lebn 
She must live. 

(Klepfisz, A Few Words)