Irena Klepfisz, Ph.D.

Irena Klepfisz, Jewish lesbian activist, poet and scholar, was born on April 17, 1941 in the Warsaw Ghetto to Michal and Rose Klepfisz. In late 1942, during the preparations for the Ghetto Uprising, Michal smuggled Rose and Irena out to Warsaw's Aryan Side, placed Irena in a Catholic orphanage, and arranged for Rose to become a maid with a Polish family. Michal was killed April 20, 1943, the second day of the Ghetto Uprising on. A year later, during the Polish Warsaw Uprising, Rose fled the city with Irena to the countryside where they lived in hiding among Polish peasants. After the war, they lived in Lodz and then moved to Sweden in 1946. In 1949, Irena and her mother emigrated to the U.S. They settled in the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx amongst Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors who, before the war, had been ardent activists in the Jewish Labor Bund.

A fateful element of Klepfisz’s early development was immersion in different languages. Polish was her mother tongue and she continued speaking to her in Polish till the age of 18. As a child in Lodz she first heard and understood the Yiddish spoken by her mother's friends. In the Swedish house which was shared by other survivors, Klepfisz continued speaking Polish and hearing Yiddish; when she started school, she became fluent in Swedish. She first learned English when she moved to the U.S. and started attending the local public school; at the same time, she was also enrolled in an afternoon Yiddish shule. The formidable use of language in poetry and prose, along with teaching and translating Yiddish, were integral to her lifelong work.

Klepfisz enrolled in the City College of New York City where she studied with Yiddish linguist Dr. Max Weinreich; she graduated in 1962 with a B.A. degree and honors in English and Yiddish. In 1970, she completed her Ph.D. in Victorian Literature at the University of Chicago. Later, she did postdoctoral studies in Yiddish at YIVO, the Institute for Jewish Research, in New York City (1976-1978).

Klepfisz boldly and creatively wove together lesbian identity, feminism and the Yiddish language in her activism and writings. She self-published and came out in her first book of poetry Periods of Stress in 1975. In 1976, she co-founded and began co-editing Conditions, a women's literary magazine emphasizing writings by lesbians. She was a contributor to Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (Persephone Press, 1982) and that year published her next book of poetry Keeper of Accounts (Persephone Press, 1982). That same year, Klepfisz and several other contributors to Nice Jewish Girls were part of a short-lived Jewish lesbian collective Di Vilde Chayes (Wild Beasts) which addressed anti-Semitism and issues around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1985, she published in England Different Enclosures: Poetry and Prose of Irena Klepfisz (Only Women Press). With Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Klepfisz co-edited The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, which, affirmed the depth of secular Jewish women's participation in Jewish life and gave strength to feminist struggles in the Jewish community. Originally published in 1986 as a double issue of Sinister Wisdom, The Tribe of Dina was reissued by Beacon Press in 1989.

Her next book of poetry, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems Selected and New, included an introduction by Adrienne Rich and was nominated for a Lamda Prize in Poetry (Eighth Mt. Press, 1990). Eighth Mountain also published a companion prose volume Dreams of an Insomniac: Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes with an introduction by Evelyn Beck. In this collection, Klepfisz addressed issues of Jewish identity, childness and compulsory motherhood, the contributions of Jewish lesbians to the Jewish community, and spoke out against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, anti-Semitism, Jewish homophobia, compulsory, and the commercialization of the Holocaust .

In 1988, in solidarity with the Israeli Women in Black who were protesting their government's response to the First Intifada, Klepfisz together with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley co-founded the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) and began circulating a newsletter listing protests and contacts across the U.S.; in 1990, JWCEO published The Jewish Women's Call for Peace: A Handbook for Jewish Women on the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict (Firebrand Press). That same year, Klepfisz was named Executive Director New Jew Agenda (NJA); NJA closed its offices in 1992.

Klepfisz and Gloria Anzaldua met in the early 1980s. Inspired by her friendship with Gloria and her bilingual writings, Klepfisz began to focus on the role of Yiddish and Yiddish culture in her past and present life, and to experiment embedding Yiddish into her English poetry and prose. As a scholar and translator, Klepfisz played a leading role in recovering the work of Yiddish women writers. She served for many years as the Yiddish editor for Bridges magazine and contributed the introductory essay to Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers (1994), the first anthology of women’s Yiddish prose. In 1995, with support from the National Council of Jewish Women, Klepfisz organized a two-day conference "Women and Yiddish: A Tribute to the Past, Directions for the Future"; later she co-edited the proceedings. Klepfisz also brought Yiddish voices to life in two musical productions, Bread and Candy: Songs of the Holocaust, a Musical Drama for Five Voices (1990), and Zeyere eygene verter/Their Own Words: Yiddish Women's Voices (1994). Both were performed at New York's Jewish Museum. Klepfisz's work helped shape a queer Yiddish cultural and political movement.

Caught in the economic crisis of the 1970s, Klepfisz was often forced to return to office work to support herself. As her poetry and activism became better known, she was invited to give readings, talks and a visiting lecturer in English, Jewish, and Women's Studies Departments in various universities; she was a frequent facilitator of poetry workshops inside and outside of academia. In 1996, she was hired as an adjunct in the Women's Studies Department of Barnard College and continued in that position teaching courses on Jewish women's history, literature and cultures until her retirement in 2018. During that period, she also taught for 10 years English and Women's Studies in the college program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison for women

In 2016, Klepfisz received the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award. In 2019, The Forward named her one of that year's "Sexiest Jewish Intellectuals."In 2020, Klepfisz was inducted into the New Orleans’ Saints & Sinners LGBTQ+ Literary Festival's Hall of Fame, honoring significant figures in LGBTQ+ literature. In 2022, she published another poetry collection, Her Birth and Later Years: Poems New and Collected 1971-2021 (Wesleyan UP), which received the 2023 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry.

Klepfisz was partnered with painter Judith Waterman for almost 40 years--until Judith’s death in 2014. They shared a loft in Brooklyn and a house in upstate New York. Still residing in their loft, Klepfisz is currently trying to preserve Judith's artwork and make it better known.

(This biographical statement written by Mark Bowman from the sources below and was edited by Klepfisz.)

Biography Date: January 2026

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