Irena Klepfisz, Speaker (2024)

Irena Klepfisz taught Jewish Women’s Studies at Barnard College for 22 years. She is the author of four books of poetry including A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, and a collection of essays Dreams of an Insomniac. She was a co-founder the literary Conditions magazine and co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology. She has been an advocate of the Yiddish language and active in its renaissance and her poetry (English and bilingual) and essays on Yiddish women writers and intellectuals have appeared in Jewish Currents, Bridges, In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, The Manhattan Review, and The Georgia Review. Since the early 1980s, she has been politically active in working for peace between Jews and Palestinians. She was a member of the lesbian group Di vilde khayes (The Wild Beasts) and co-founded The Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO). She served as Executive Director of New Jewish Agenda (NJA) and later worked with Brit Tzedek. In 2023, her most recent poetry collection Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021 was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award in poetry and winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.