Language is Mother1

Cultural and oral historian of Jewish women exploring the intersections of gender, sexuality, Jewish studies, psychoanalysis, migration, memory, and postmemory. She is the Founding Director of the International Association for Spielrein Studies, and recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Harvard Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library Research Support Grant. Her most recent book is an edited anthology, Early Women Psychoanalysts: History, Biography, and Contemporary Relevance (Routledge, 2024). In her current research project, she uses archival materials and interviews to reconstruct biographies of Polish Jewish women psychoanalysts who fled the Nazis to the United States. She focuses on their accounts of the past, and the retellings of their stories of loss and survival by their children and grandchildren. Klara is now completing a narrative nonfiction book, Clara Happel, Judaism, and Psychoanalysis in America: Memory, History and Interpretation (Routledge, 2025). She is an Adjunct Professor at Montclair State University in NJ.