Fiction

Michal Govrin

Michal Govrin, born in 1950 is an Israeli poet, writer, and stage director. She takes a highly individualized perspective on Israeli-Jewish post-Holocaust reality by combining artistic experimentation with Biblical and Rabbinic sources and philosophical discourse. In her poetry, prose and essays she examines places and spaces within a polyphonic context of architecture, art and theater, the sanctity of land, and the national narrative.

Nadine Gordimer

In 1991, writer, journalist, and activist Nadine Gordimer became the first South African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gordimer’s work presents a sweeping canvas of a South African society, where all have been affected by the institutionalized racial discrimination and oppression of apartheid.

Claire Goll

Claire Goll’s poetry and prose were fueled by the tragedies and scandals that shaped her life. She and her husband, writer Yvan Goll, were central cultural figures of the French avant-garde, and her prolific body of work includes journalism, multiple novels, short fiction, and numerous translations of other authors’ works.

Lea Goldberg

Lea Goldberg was a Russian-Israeli poet, author, playwright, literary translator, researcher, and professor. One of the great poets of modern Israeli literature, Goldberg used the forms of Eastern European folk songs to capture the world lost in the Holocaust.

Natalia Ginzburg

Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and political activist. Ginzburg is considered one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century, and her award-winning literary work is recognized for its exploration of family relationships and politics throughout fascism in modern Europe and during World War II.

Margo Glantz

Margo Glantz is a Mexican-Jewish writer, journalist, literary critic, and academic. Born in Mexico City in 1930, Glantz demonstrates tremendous versatility as a writer and thinker who strongly identifies with Mexican, Jewish, Catholic, and indigenous practices and beliefs.

Nora Glickman

Argentine-born Nora Glickman is a prolific dramatist and short story and non-fiction writer, translator, editor, and professor of Latin American literature.

Élisabeth Gille

Élisabeth Gille (1937-1996) was a French author known most of all for biography of her mother, best-selling novelist Irène Némirovsky, murdered at Auschwitz. It was written borrowing Némirovsky’s voice, narrated in the first person as “dreamt memoirs.”

Mirra Ginsburg

Although she moved to North America at a young age, Mirra Ginsburg’s passion for Russian folklore and literature endured throughout her life. Through her deft translations of Eastern European folk tales, and her creation of a few of her own, Ginsburg offered children a window into worlds many of them had never before experienced.

Luisa Futoransky

Poet, novelist, music scholar, and journalist, Luisa Futoransky has led a life characterized by travel and the arts: she has published over two dozen books (poetry and narrative fiction), many of which have been translated into English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Japanese, and German, and other languages. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991, the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1990, the Centre National des Lettres Fellowship in 1993 and 2010, and was the Regent’s Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997.

Carl Friedman

Carl Friedman was a Dutch writer who published several international bestsellers about the Holocaust and second generation trauma. Though writing from a Jewish perspective, in 2005 it was revealed that Friedman did not have a Jewish background. The controversy marred Friedman’s literary career.

Cynthia Freeman

Cynthia Freeman is remembered as a best-selling author of popular romances during the 1970s and 1980s. A central theme running through most of Freeman’s novels is the struggle of Jewish immigrants to assimilate to American life while at the same time maintaining Jewish traditions. Freeman’s work was influenced by her family’s closeness and by her concern for the continuation of Jewish life and culture.

Ellen Frankel

A pioneering feminist leader in business and the arts, Ellen Frankel served as the first woman CEO of the Jewish Publication Society. She is the author of several books including The Classic Tales: Four Thousand Years of Jewish Lore (1989) and The Five Books of Miriam (1996), a retelling and woman’s commentary on the Five Books of Moses, and has written several librettos,.

Rose Franken

Rose Franken was a celebrated Broadway playwright and director, a Hollywood screenwriter, and a popular novelist whose fiction touched a sympathetic chord in American women. After much success as both a playwright and a novelist, she ventured into more problematic subject matter, exploring antisemitism and homophobia in her works.

Eugénie Foa

Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) was, to our knowledge, the first Jewish woman to support herself professionally as a writer. Based in Paris, she wrote in French and was active in circles of French women writers who advocated for greater recognition. She wrote novels and newspaper articles on a variety of topics, including stories about Jews but also on fashion and the lives of saints. She is best remembered for her children’s books.

Rokhl Korn, Kadya Molodowsky, and Ida Maze

Dvoyre Fogel

Dvoyre Fogel was a Polish-Jewish philosopher, professor, translator, and Yiddish modernist writer of poetry, prose, and literary and art criticism. Fogel’s remarkable experimental poetry was radically avant-garde and attuned to all the modernist minimalisms.

Sarah Feiga Meinkin Foner

Born into a family that encouraged her love of Jewish learning, Sarah Foner asked to learn Hebrew when she was only five years old and published her first novel in her twenties. During her lengthy writing career, Foner’s publications often reflected her interest in Jewish and women’s issues and centered notably independent female characters.

Janette Fishenfeld

Janette Fishenfeld was a Brazilian author, columnist, and Zionist. In her works, she portrayed a nuanced, complex view of the Brazilian Jewish community and advocated for the Zionist cause.

Ida Fink

A Polish-born writer who survived the Holocaust, Ida Fink published several collections of short stories and a novel that explore the experiences and after-effect of the Holocaust. Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, 1923

Fiction in the United States

Literature by American Jewish women reflects historical trends in American Jewish life and indicates the changing issues facing writers who worked to position themselves as Americans, Jews, and women.

Fiction, Popular in the United States

The explosion of writing by American Jewish women in the twentieth century produced not only serious fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiography but also a range of popular literature geared towards pleasure and light entertainment. Popular fiction by American Jewish women in the twentieth century featured genres from regional novels, sagas, historical novels, romances, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and humor.

Edna Ferber

Prolific writer Edna Ferber celebrated America in her many works, even as she exposed its shortcomings. Her novel So Big won a Pulitzer Prize in 1925, and the film Giant and the musical Show Boat were both based on her novels. Ferber’s work was shaped by her childhood experiences of antisemitism and frequently featured strong and talented women.

Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein was the preeminent Jewish woman literary author in late 20th- and early 21st-century England and a leading European Jewish writer. An award-winning poet, novelist, and translator, her works explore Jewish women’s identities as writer, wife, friend, and mother; assimilation; antisemitism; the Holocaust and its transgenerational impact; Soviet Russian poets; European Jewish life in the 20th century; Israel and Zionism; and the meanings of a literary life.

Ruth Fainlight

Writer and poet Ruth Fainlight’s work interweaves feminism and elements of Judaism, often using biblical imagery and reflecting on her own Jewish identity and the Holocaust.

Sara Riwka B’raz Erlich

An exemplar of the amalgamation of cultures in the Diaspora, Sara Riwka Erlich was a Brazilian-Jewish woman author and scientist whose writings drew from her work in psychiatry, her Jewish heritage, and her experiences in Brazil and Israel. The daughter of Polish immigrants, Erlich was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1935 and published memoirs, stories, poems, and essays in Portuguese until the early twenty-first century.

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