Irena Klepfisz

[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).

[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.

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".

[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.

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.

[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.