The Poetry of Cultural Re-Creation: A Conversation with Irena Klepfisz on Jewish and Gender Identity
Thursday, June 23, 7:00 – 8:00 PM ET
Irena Klepfisz is a lesbian poet, essayist, political activist, Yiddishist, and a practicing secular Jew. Born in 1941 in the Warsaw Ghetto, Klepfisz spent part of the war in a Polish Catholic orphanage and part in hiding with her mother until liberation. After a three-year stay in Sweden, they immigrated to the United States in 1949 and settled in the Bronx among Yiddish speaking Holocaust survivors who had been active Jewish Labor Bundists (Jewish socialists) in interwar Poland. Klepfisz attended New York City public schools, Workmen’s Circle Yiddish shules, and earned her BA at the City College of New York and MA and PhD at the University of Chicago. For ten years, she taught college courses at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She recently retired after twenty-two years of teaching Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College.
Klepfisz co-founded and co-edited the influential feminist magazine Conditions, was a member of the lesbian collective Di vilde khayes/The Wild Beasts, co-founded the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation, served as Executive Director of New Jewish Agenda and organized the groundbreaking conference "Di froyen: Women and Yiddish," sponsored by National Council of Jewish Women.
For many years, Klepfisz served as the editor of Yiddish material for the Jewish feminist magazine Bridges. She is the co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, the author of Dreams of an Insomniac(essays), and four books of poetry, including Keeper of Accounts and A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, which was nominated for a Lambda Award.
Klepfisz received grants in poetry from New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Most recently she was a recipient of the Dreaming in Yiddish Award from the Adrienne Cooper Foundation and was inducted into LGBTQ writers Hall of Fame of the Saints & Sinners Festival.
Irena’s latest book, Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems 1971-2021, which will be out at the end of the year, can be preordered. Hardcover: $28.00; Ebook: $21.00. Order from weslpress.org and use code QAWP for a 30% discount for the hardcover.
Co-sponsored by: Avodah, Carolina Jews for Justice, Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, Congress for Jewish Culture, Jewish Community Action, Jewish Women's Archive, Congress for Jewish Culture, Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Keshet, Kolot Chayeinu, Lilith Publications, Moving Traditions, New Voices Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, Yiddish Book Center, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
