'Milk' captures doomed life of gay, Jewish politician
By Iris Mann
http://www.jewishjournal.com/films/article/milk_captures_doomed_life_of_gay_jewish_politician_20081210/"I'M FROM WOODMERE. I'M JEWISH. I'M GAY."
Harvey Milk often carried a sign with those words on marches during his activist days in the 1970s, his nephew Stuart Milk says. The first openly gay man in the country to be elected to public office "was not religious or observant, but Harvey absolutely identified himself as a Jew," he said.
The San Francisco County supervisor, who was murdered in his City Hall office in 1978, also enjoyed conversing in Yiddish with Sharyn Saslafsky, who would come into his camera store in San Francisco's Castro district as a customer or just to shmooze.
"Although neither of us spoke it fluently," Saslafsky recalls, "we had fun using Yiddish to tell stories, laugh and talk about different things. We would use it interchangeably with English, correctly or incorrectly.
"We would also talk about Yiddishkayt, about what Judaism stresses," she continues. "That was clearly very important to Harvey. I believe his concern for justice, fairness, equality and ethical behavior came from his Jewish background."
