In this intimate podcast, Irena Klepfisz talks about her new book, creativity and resistance, coming out, and her experience of being a lesbian Jew in New York in the 70s and 80s.

Through her exclusive conversation with Ula Chowaniec, she shares personal memories and touches upon the lesbian activist and literally movements of her time, how political urgencies shaped her thinking, her relationship with Yiddish, while she recites some of her groundbreaking poems.

Irena Klepfisz is a feminist, lesbian and secular Jewish poet, Yiddish translator and teacher of Jewish Women Studies. She is the author of Her Birth and Later Years, Periods of Stress, Keeper of Accounts, Different Enclosures, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue and Dreams of an Insomniac. Ula (Urszula) Chowaniec is a Research Honorary Fellow at University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

The podcast is part of the Lavender Languages Institute programme of the Pickle Bar. The program is supported by Bezirkskulturfonds by the department of Art and Culture of the Bezirksamts Mitte von Berlin. Audio editing by Norbert Lang