...Jewish identity along with her radicalism, expressed in lines from her 1944 collection, Beast in View: "To be a Jew in the twentieth century / is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, / Wishing to be invisible, you choose / Death of the spirit, the stone insanity."6 When...

...two-thirds into this poetic sequence, one comes upon a sonnet identifying the Jew as tragic survivor: To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse, Wishing to be invisible, you choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting...

...campus on the one hand and the potential power of visibility and acceptance on the other. She quotes: To be a Jew in the twentieth century Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse. Wishing to be invisible, choose Death of the spirit, the stone insanity. Accepting,...

...The American Studies Association. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. "To be a Jew in the twentieth century is to be offered a gift," wrote Muriel Rukeyser, the New York-born Jewish poet. "If you refuse, wishing to be invisible, you choose...

...pride, both personal and collective. Kaye/Kantrowitz takes for her base a quote from Muriel Rukeyser, "To be a Jew in the twentieth century is to be offered a gift,"43 and adds that "To be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century is ... is ... well, maybe we don't...