What an amazing life! What a huge, many-faceted gift to us all!
I’m not sure where I first met Melanie, but I think it was at a National Women’s Studies Conference in the mid-1980s. And in the various political struggles in New York. And in JFREJ, of course. It is hard to separate all these decades of commonality into dated moments.
Melanie comes alive in her essay, “To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century,” published in The Tribe of Dina, the wonderful 1986 anthology she edited with Irena Klepfisz. Rereading it, I keep wanting to ask her questions.
Early on in that auto-biographical essay she wrote “My mother often says, ‘When Melanie was three years old, I knew it would be Melanie against the world, and I was betting on Melanie.”
—Sherry Gorelick, Women in Black Union Square, JVP, Jews Say No