Fiction

Content type
Collection

Anne Fleischman Bernays

Anne Fleischman Bernays is an American editor, novelist, and nonfiction writer. Her literary work is notable for its exploration of Jewish experiences of America, the pressure of assimilation, and the then-taboo subject of sexual harassment.

Sarah Bernhardt

Named by her fans “the Divine Sarah,” the French actress Sarah Bernhardt is recognized as the first international stage star. She played some 70 roles in 125 productions in Europe and around the world and reinvented herself as a public icon, allowing the romances and tragedies of her stage heroines to reflect her own life.

Lili Berger

A prolific literary critic and essayist who wrote fiction, short stories, and novels, Lili Berger worked to educate, instruct, expose, and memorialize. Her works captured the Polish-Jewish experience in the twentieth century, particularly those of other writers and artists.

Bene Israel

The Bene Israel is one of three Jewish communities in India. Bene Israel women were the producers and preservers of Bene Israel culture in India, and many were very influential leaders in their communities, academia, and religious life.

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda collaborated with her husband to revive ancient Hebrew and make it a truly functional living language. She helped coin new Hebrew words, created salons for Jewish thinkers, and wrote articles for the newspaper she and her husband ran. Beyond her own writings, she helped edit and compile the seventeen-volume Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.

Vicki Baum

Writer, playwright, and screenwriter Vicki Baum is best known for her book, adapted into both the Broadway play and Oscar winning film, Grand Hotel. She wrote over 30 books and became one of the world’s best-selling authors of her time. Her works frequently depict powerful, self-reliant women.

Dorothy Walter Baruch

Psychologist Dorothy Walter Baruch championed the health development of children as an educator, author, psychologist, and as a community leader. Her psychodynamic approach to child development focused on the relationship between physical, emotional, and intellectual development and on rechanneling children’s feelings through play and art therapy.

Hannah Barnett-Trager

Hannah Barnett-Trager’s involvement in the literary world began when she helped found and then worked as a librarian at the Jewish Free Reading Room in London. She published her first article in 1919 and went on to write books for both children and adults. Trager’s writing discussed Jewish culture and politics, often drawing from her own experiences.

Devorah Baron

Devorah Baron is one of the few Hebrew women prose writers in the first half of the twentieth century to gain critical acclaim in her lifetime. She wrote primarily about Jewish women’s lives, focusing on the challenges women faced in a society that did not value them equally. Her work was in dialogue with European writers, including Chekhov and Flaubert, and with Hebrew modernist writer S. Y. Agnon.

Bertha Badt-Strauss

A religious German-Jewish writer, intellectual, and ardent Zionist, Bertha Badt-Strauss was one of the first women to earn a doctoral degree in Prussia. She was a prolific writer, publishing hundreds of articles over the course of her lifetime, and was very involved in the “Jewish Renaissance” cultural movement. She was dedicated in particular to illuminating the diverse experiences of Jewish women past and present.

Asenath: Bible

The minor character Asenath, mentioned in the Bible as Joseph’s wife and mother of Manasseh and Ephraim, became the heroine of an ancient Jewish novel written between 100 BCE to 200 CE, likely in Egypt. In the text, the daughter of an Egyptian priest falls in love with Joseph, turns to the God of Israel, marries Joseph, and is saved by God and some of Joseph’s brothers from attack by Pharaoh’s son.

Anglo-Jewish Writers in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Anglo-Jewish women writers have been active creators within the British literary arena since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a number of Jewish female voices, although it was not until the 1990s that the works of Jewish women writers began to be recognized as part of the British literary canon. Anglo-Jewish women writers’ multifaceted perspectives are reflected in a literary production characterized by experimentation and fragmentation.

Myriam Anissimov

Born to parents who were members of the French resistance, Myriam Anissimov worked as an actress and singer before turning to writing. One of the many strengths of her works lies in their outspoken presentation of the sexual and emotional relationship between the sexes from the point of view of the woman. In this respect, Anissimov’s works are intriguing complements to the American Jewish novel of the 1960s and 1970s. 

Ruth Almog

Ruth Almog is an Israeli novelist and children’s author. Her work is known for its orientation surrounding themes of social justice and the condition of “non-belonging.”

Frida Alexandr

A Brazilian-born daughter of immigrants, Frida Alexandr was the only woman writer to describe Jewish cowboys in Brazil from the viewpoint of one who lived among them. Her only published book was the novel Filipson, which chronicled the lives and episodes of the farm where she was born in 1906 and spent two decades of her life.

Gila Almagor

Israeli writer, actress, and filmmaker Gila Almagor’s acclaimed 1988 autobiographical film Summer of Aviya and its sequel Under the Domin Tree bought attention to post-Holocaust trauma and depression, which were often scorned by Israeli society. Almagor is also a founder of the Israeli Union of Performing Artists, the Tel Aviv International Film Festival, and the Gila Almagor Wishes Foundation.

Grace Aguilar

Grace Aguilar was an Anglo-Jewish poet, historical romance writer, domestic novelist, Jewish emancipator, religious reformer, educator, social historian, theologian, and liturgist. In her short life, she wrote twice as many books as Jane Austen, from popular historical romances to an introduction to Judaism that was used by both churches and synagogues.

Since we’re talking about comic books…

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

Those of you whose lives don't involve a weekly update on what new comics have come out this Wednesday might not be familiar with Y The Last Man, a 60-issue comic book (10 volume graphic novel), whose much anticipated final issue just came out last month.  The premise of Y The Last Man is that a mystery plague instantaneously wipes out every man and male mammal on planet Earth except for Yorick Brown, a 22 year old magician/slacker, and his capuchin monkey, Ampersand.  

Topics: Art, Fiction

Book Review: Away by Amy Bloom

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

When I wrote the short blurb on Away for the Jewesses with Attitude Summer Reading List, I don't think I really knew what I was getting into.

Topics: Fiction

Book Review: The Book of Dahlia

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

A week into the Jewesses With Attitude Summer Reading List, and I’ve finished The Book of Dahlia and am about halfway through Away. So far, good picks, if I do say so myself.

Topics: Fiction

The Jewesses with Attitude Summer Reading List

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman
So, I’m not spending my summer in the Hamptons, on Cape Cod, the Jersey Shore, or any other iconic beach. But like my fellow Jewesses with Attitude bloggers, I am a self-proclaimed “word nerd” and so, in spite of sitting on public buses rather than public beaches, I will be using the long hours of summer to bulk up on my reading (which, not surprisingly, is heavy on the Jewish Women writers).
Topics: Fiction, Poetry

Grace Paley, z”l

Judith Rosenbaum

Grace Paley died on Wednesday. She was 84 and had been sick, so it should not have come as a surprise, but when I heard the news I felt a very sharp sense of loss. So I decided I would spend the night with her, reading through my well-worn copy of her Collected Stories, her poems in Begin Again: Collected Poems, and her essays in Just as I ThoughtAnd reading her words made it even harder to believe she’s gone – her stories just radiate life, in all its banality, warmth, irrationality, sadness, and love.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

Jordan Namerow

There is a new audio podcast on Nextbook of an interview with political activist and writer Alix Kates Shulman -- featured in JWA's online exhibit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution -- about her first novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Click here to download or listen to the Nextbook podcast.

Tillie Olsen: Voicing What Was Silenced

Jordan Namerow

Last week, after Jewish writer Tillie Olsen died at the age of 94, I picked up a copy of Tell Me A Riddle, her first collection of short stories published in 1961. Last night I re-read “I Stand Here Ironing,” a story that recounts a poor working woman’s ambivalence about her parenting skills and about her eldest daughter’s future during the Great Depression.

Topics: Feminism, Fiction

Sex Wars

Judith Rosenbaum

It’s the story of an immigrant struggling to survive economically in the big city, a woman running for president, a crusade against pornography and birth control, a decades-long debate on how to achieve political equality for women.

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