Bettina Aptheker on Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

“"I need the stories of our resistance," wrote Melanie Kaye in Nice Jewish Girls, "laced through the horror as an amulet, inspiration and warning." She told stories of the Jewish women in the anti-Nazi resistance: in Auschwitz, in Ravensbruck (where I had stood stricken and silent when I was fifteen), in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. "Those were Jewish women," she wrote. "I come from Jewish women who fought like that."”

“I first met Melanie many years ago when she visited the University of California, Santa Cruz campus. I had been using her co-edited book “The Tribe of Dina” in my classes and admired her greatly for all of her work. Though on separate coasts we stayed connected through mutual comradeship, friendship, and projects. Her writings were of immense importance to me, and most recently “The Color of Jews,” which is an absolutely brilliant work that shatters so many stereotypes while affirming and re-visioning the Jewish diaspora.”