"Israel Isn't David ... It's Goliath".

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Irena Klepfisz, writer

Irena Klepfisz was born in Warsaw in 1941. Her father, Michal Klepfisz, was a hero in the Warsaw Uprising, the most famous effort by Jews to fight back against the Nazis.

Like almost all of the half million Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, he did not survive. But, as Irena Klepfisz put it in her 1990 poetry collection, A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, "he chose deliberately, in split-second consciousness, his own style of dying."

Here's what happened: On April 20, 1943, some resistance fighters were trapped in an attic, and a German machine gunner was training his sights on them. Thirty-year-old Michal threw himself on the machine gun, silencing it, and the trapped Jews were able to escape. A little while later, after the resistance fighters had cleared the Germans out, they found his body "with two neat rows of bullet holes across the stomach," according to one written account that Klepfisz cites in her opening poem, "Searching for My Father's Body."

Klepfisz spent part of the next two years in an orphanage, but her mother, Rose, who had false Aryan papers, got her out and took her into hiding for the rest of the war. In 1946, they went to Sweden. When Irena was eight, they came to the Bronx and lived near other Holocaust survivors and members of the Jewish Labor Bund (her father, a socialist, had been a member of the Bund).

Today, Klepfisz teaches women's studies at Barnard College, specializes in the history and literature of Jewish women, and translates the works of Yiddish women writers.

But she also is actively opposing the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And she is outspoken about the indifference or racism many American Jews show toward the Palestinians.

"The American Jewish community has insulated itself from the real meaning of what is going on and what Israel is doing," she says. "Israel is not David in this case. It is Goliath."

I've wanted to interview Klepfisz for many years, ever since I got hold of a copy of A Few Words in the Mother Tongue, which sits on a shelf in my office.

It is impossible for me, as a Jew, not to be moved by the Holocaust poems.

In "Searching for My Father's Body," she writes:

The search leaves me weak. I am still not hardened. Often caught by a particular sight I begin to read, despite myself, and learn a new name, another event, still another atrocity. I smell again the burning bodies, see the flames, wade through sewers in a last desperate effort, till some present distraction, like hunger or cold, draws me back and I begin closing windows and preparing dinner. When she discovers, finally, how her father died, she is not relieved: "I am dissatisfied. I am angry.... I do not want...