Irena Klepfisz (born April 17, 1941) is a Jewish lesbian author, academic and activist. [1]
Irena Klepfisz (born April 17, 1941) is a Jewish lesbian author, academic and activist. [1]
Klepfisz was born in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 17, 1941, [2] the daughter of Michał Klepfisz, a member of the Jewish Labour Bund (Yiddish: der algemeyner yidisher arbeter bund), and his wife, Rose Klepfisz (née Shoshana Perczykow; 1914-2016). [3] In late April 1943, when she had just turned two years old, her father was killed on the second day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Yiddish: varshever geto oyfshtand). [4] [5]
Earlier in 1943, Klepfisz's father had smuggled Irena and her mother out of the ghetto; Irena was placed in a Catholic orphanage, while her mother, using false papers, worked as a maid for a Polish family. [6] After the uprising, her mother retrieved her from the orphanage and fled with her into the Polish countryside, where they survived the Second World War by hiding and concealing their Jewish identities, aided by Polish peasants. [2] [6] After the war, the remaining family moved briefly to Łódź before moving to Sweden in 1946. Irena and her mother immigrated to the United States in 1949. [7]
Klepfisz attended City College of New York, and studied with distinguished Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, a founder of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. [8] Klepfisz graduated CCNY with honors in English and Yiddish. [9]
In 1963, she attended the University of Chicago to do graduate work in English Literature. [10] Irena Klepfisz received a Ph.D. in English in 1970. [7]
Irena Klepfisz has taught English, Yiddish, and Women's Studies. [7] In 2018, she retired from her position as a professor at Barnard in New York City. [11]
Today Klepfisz is known as a Yiddishist, but her מאַמע־לשון (mame-loshn, literally "mother tongue") was Polish; as a child she also learned Swedish. She began to learn Yiddish in Łódź in elementary school after the Second World War. She learned English after emigrating to the United States. In The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, which she co-edited with Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Klepfisz describes the experience, up to age 16 or 17, of having "no language in which I was completely rooted". [10]
Irena is well known for her translations of Yiddish poets Kadya Molodowsky and Fradl Shtok. [2]
Klepfisz has worked as an activist in feminist, lesbian, and secular Jewish communities. She was active in New Jewish Agenda (1980-1992) and was the last Executive Director, laid off in 1992. [12] [13] She is also co-founder of The Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (JWCEO). [6] Along with Nancy Bereano, Evelyn T. Beck, Bernice Mennis, Adrienne Rich, and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Irena Klepfisz was a member of Di Vilde Chayes (English: The Wild Beasts), a Jewish feminist group that examined and responded to political issues in the Middle East, as well as antisemitism. [14] [15]
Klepfisz began publishing her poems in 1971. She was a founding editor of Conditions , a feminist magazine emphasizing the writing of lesbians, and also was a co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology (the other co-editor was Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz). Klepfisz has also been a contributor to the Jewish feminist magazine Bridges, [16] and wrote the introduction to Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers. A collection of Klepfisz's poetry and prose was published under the title Different Enclosures in 1985. [17]
She also authored an essay collection, Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes, published by The Eighth Mountain Press. [18] She is the author of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New (with an introduction by Adrienne Rich), published by The Eighth Mountain Press, which was nominated for a Lamda Prize in Poetry in 1990. [19] [20]
In the fall of 2022, Wesleyan University Press published Klepfisz’s Her Birth and Later Years: Poems New and Collected 1971-2021, [21] which won the 2023 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry [22] and was a finalist for The 2022 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. [23]
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
Mary Dorcey is an Irish author and poet, feminist, and LGBT+ activist. Her work is known for centring feminist and queer themes, specifically lesbian love and lesbian eroticism.
Chava Rosenfarb was a Holocaust survivor and Jewish-Canadian author of Yiddish poetry and novels, a major contributor to post-World War II Yiddish Literature.
Aunt Lute Books is an American multicultural feminist press based in San Francisco, California. The publisher also seeks to work with and support first-time authors.
Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.
Sinister Wisdom is an American lesbian literary, theory, and art journal published quarterly in Berkeley, California. Started in 1976 by Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Ellenberger (Desmoines) in Charlotte, North Carolina, it is the longest established lesbian journal, with 128 issues as of 2023. Each journal covers topics pertaining to the lesbian experience including creative writing, poetry, literary criticism and feminist theory. Sinister Wisdom accepts submissions from novice to accredited writers and has featured the works of writers and artists such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich. The journal has pioneered female publishing, working with female operated publishing companies such as Whole Women Press and Iowa City Women's Press. Sapphic Classics, a partnership between Sinister Wisdom and A Midsummer Night's Press, reprints classic lesbian works for contemporary audiences.
Michał Klepfisz was a chemical engineer, activist for the Bund, and member of the Jewish Morgenstern sports organization. During World War II he belonged to the Jewish Combat Organization, fighting the Nazi German forces in Poland. He was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and was posthumously decorated by the Polish government in exile with a Silver Cross of the Virtuti Militari.
Conditions was a lesbian feminist literary magazine that came out biannually from 1976 to 1980 and annually from 1980 until 1990, and included poetry, prose, essays, book reviews, and interviews. It was founded in Brooklyn, New York, by Elly Bulkin, Jan Clausen, Irena Klepfisz and Rima Shore.
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz was an American essayist, poet, academic, and political activist.
Onlywomen Press was a feminist press based in London. It was the only feminist press to be founded by out lesbians, Lilian Mohin, Sheila Shulman, and Deborah Hart. It commenced publishing in 1974 and was one of five notably active feminist publishers in the 1990s.
Camp Boiberik was a Yiddish cultural summer camp founded by Leibush Lehrer in 1913. In 1923 the camp purchased property in Rhinebeck, New York where it would remain until closing in 1979. It was the first Yiddish secular summer camp in America at the time.
Marcia Falk is a poet, liturgist, painter, and translator who has written several books of poetry and prayer.
Evelyn Torton Beck has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Kadia Molodowsky was a Polish-American poet and writer in the Yiddish language, and a teacher of Yiddish and Hebrew. She published six collections of poetry during her lifetime, and was a widely recognized figure in Yiddish poetry during the twentieth century.
Fradl Shtok was a Jewish-American Yiddish-language poet and writer, who immigrated to the United States from Galicia, Austria-Hungary, at the age of 18 or 19. She is known as one of the first Yiddish poets to use the sonnet form; and her stories, which were less well received than her poems in her lifetime, have since been recognized as innovative for their exploration of subjectivity, and, in particular, for their depiction of Jewish female characters at odds with traditional roles and expectations.
Feminist poetry is inspired by, promotes, or elaborates on feminist principles and ideas. It might be written with the conscious aim of expressing feminist principles, although sometimes it is identified as feminist by critics in a later era. Some writers are thought to express feminist ideas even if the writer was not an active member of the political movement during their era. Many feminist movements, however, have embraced poetry as a vehicle for communicating with public audiences through anthologies, poetry collections, and public readings.
Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity is a 1982 essay by American poet and activist Adrienne Rich. The poem explores Rich's patrilineal Jewish heritage and her maternal Protestant heritage, as well as issues of Jewish identity, antisemitism, racism, whiteness, class, the Holocaust, and Jewish assimilation.
Kathryn Ann Hellerstein is an American academic and scholar of Yiddish-language poetry, translation, and Jewish American literature. Specializing in Yiddish, she is currently a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her research focus on Yiddish women writers, notably Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, and Celia Dropkin.
Di Vilde Chayes was a New York-based secular Jewish lesbian feminist collective that examined and responded to antisemitism and Middle Eastern politics. The collective spoke out against antisemitism in the lesbian and feminist movements and critiqued anti-Zionist activists.
