For fifty years, Irena Klepfisz has written powerful, searching poems about relatives murdered during the war, recent immigrants, a lost Yiddish writer, a Palestinian boy in Gaza, and various people in her life. A trailblazing lesbian poet, child Holocaust survivor, and political activist whose work is deeply informed by socialist values, Klepfisz is a vital and individual American voice. Klepfisz's new book, Her Birth and Later Years: New and Collected Poems, 1971-2021, is the first and only complete collection of her work.
Join us in person in New York City at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for a conversation with Klepfisz and Rabbi Ellen Lippmann celebrating this new book.
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research is located at 15 West 16th Street in New York.
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Irena Klepfisz (Brooklyn, NY) recently retired after 22 years of teaching Jewish Women's Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of four books of poetry including Periods of Stress, Keeper of Accounts, Different Enclosures, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, and Dreams of an Insomniac (prose). She is one of the foremost advocates of the Yiddish language. A co-editor of The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology, her work has appeared in In Geveb, Sinister Wisdom, Jewish Currents, Conditions, The Manhattan Review, The Village Voice, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Review, and more.
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Ellen Lippmann is founder and rabbi emerita of Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives, an LGBTQ-inclusive, nondenominational congregation in Brooklyn. She was ordained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. Lippmann served as East Coast director of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, director of the Jewish Women's Program at the New 14th Street Y in Manhattan, the first social justice chair for the Women’s Rabbinic Network, and co-chair of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. Lippmann also founded the Soup Kitchen at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and co-founded the Children of Abraham Peace Walk: Jews, Christians and Muslims Walking Together in Brooklyn in Peace.
