Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was born in Brooklyn in 1945 to Jewish parents. Her family had anglicized their surname, changing it from Kantrowitz to Kaye prior to her birth. As an adult and activist, she added Kantrowitz back to her name to honor her Jewish roots and the stories of her immigrant ancestors. However, she decided to keep the Americanized surname in addition; she believed it spoke to Jewish American efforts to assimilate and represented the multifaceted Jewish identity she descended from. Kantrowitz linked her Jewish heritage and religiosity inherently to her activism, seeing them as inseparable and noting that her Jewish upbringing was what mobilized her toward radical work, whether consciously or not.

Kantrowitz’s first experience with activism came during her teenage years in New York City. In the early 60s she was involved with the Harlem Civil Rights Movement, and at age seventeen did work with the Harlem Education Project. She remembered this work as her first experience mobilizing community, a driving force for Kantrowitz to pursue activism in her adult life. She considered herself a ‘conscious Jew,’ a term often used as a self-identifier for Jewish individuals for whom Jewish religious principles inform social justice work in the modern day. Kantrowitz was a member of De Vilde Chayes, Yiddish for ‘The Wild Beasts,’ a New York-based secular Jewish lesbian feminist collective of the early 80s. Cofounded alongside figures like Adrienne Rich and Irena Kelpfisz, the collective worked to respond to antisemitism and Zionism; it aligned itself with the Zionist left of the 1980s, supporting the state of Israel’s existence but critiquing its treatment of Palestinian communities. After the collective dissolved in 1983 Kantrowitz, along with its other members, continued to be active in left wing Jewish circles.

In the 1990s Kantrowitz became the first director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, a foundational Jewish leftist group. She split her time between Jewish and queer teaching, writing, and activism; at UC Berkeley she taught the first women’s studies class the school had to offer, and taught Jewish studies, comparative literature, gender and sexuality studies, and public policy at a variety of institutions. Kantrowitz’s essays and writings appeared in a range of publications, including the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom. Her seminal work, an essay entitled “To Be A Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century,” centered the principles of a ‘conscious Jew’ and a concept known as radical diasporism, which emphasizes the importance of living out Jewish values and traditions wherever one’s home is, not only in an Israeli-Jewish state.

Kantrowitz died in Queens in 2018, aged 72. She was survived by her partner, fellow Jewish activist Leslie Cagan, who remembers Kantrowitz as a figurehead in a changing radical world. According to Cagan, she “helped shape new ways of thinking about Jewish identity as well as the intersections of race, class and gender, ‘before folks used the term intersectionality.’” Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz’s activism across racial, gendered, and religious lines reshaped the place queer Jews held in leftist circles, and the impact of her work remains present today as her essays, teaching career, and work with JFREJ live on.

(This biographical statement was written by Malena Glover from the sources below.)

Biography Date: June 2026

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