This is an alphabetical, referenced list of notable Jewish American authors. For other Jewish Americans, see Lists of American Jews.
Stanley Lawrence Elkin was an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.
Daniel Fuchs was an American screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist.
Moyshe-Leyb Halpern was a Yiddish-language modernist poet. He was born and raised in a traditional Jewish household in Zlotshev, Galicia and brought to Vienna at the age of 12 in 1898 to study commercial art. He then began writing modernist poetry in German. Upon returning to his hometown in 1907, he switched to writing in Yiddish. One of his best-known poems is a satire about his hometown.
Edward Lewis Wallant was an American novelist who wrote The Pawnbroker (1961). It was adapted into an award-winning film of the same name, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger. He also worked in the 1950s an art director at advertising firm McCann-Erickson.
Celia Dropkin was a Russian-born American Yiddish poet, writer, and artist.
Ruth Feldman was an American poet and translator.
Sanford Friedman was an American novelist. He was gay and his books often featured LGBT themes.
Levi Yehoshua Shapiro, better known as "Lamed Shapiro",, was an American Yiddish author. His stories are best known for such themes as murder, rape, and cannibalism.
Jules Chametzky was an American literary critic, writer, editor, and unionist. His essays in the 1960s and 1970s on the importance of race, ethnicity, class, and gender to American literary culture anticipated the later schools of New Historicism and Cultural Studies in American letters.
John Felstiner, Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, was an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests included poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic poems, literary translation, Vietnam era poetry and Holocaust studies. John Felstiner died in February 2017 at the age of 80. He had been suffering from the effects of progressive aphasia at his time of death, at a hospice near Stanford.
Yente Serdatzky was a Russian-born American Yiddish-language writer of short fiction and plays, active in New York City.
Jay Neugeboren is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer.
Fradl Shtok was a Jewish-American Yiddish-language poet and writer, who immigrated to the United States from Galicia, Austria-Hungary, at the age of 18 or 19. She is known as one of the first Yiddish poets to use the sonnet form; and her stories, which were less well received than her poems in her lifetime, have since been recognized as innovative for their exploration of subjectivity, and, in particular, for their depiction of Jewish female characters at odds with traditional roles and expectations.
Joel Shatzky was an American writer and literary professor at the State University of New York.
Judd L Teller (Yehuda-Leib) was an American author, social historian, lecturer, poet, and held many professional posts in Jewish community life.
The Congress Weekly magazine was a periodical, published in New York, by the American Jewish Congress.
Kathryn Ann Hellerstein is an American academic and scholar of Yiddish-language poetry, translation, and Jewish American literature. Specializing in Yiddish, she is currently a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her research focus on Yiddish women writers, notably Kadya Molodowsky, Malka Heifetz Tussman, and Celia Dropkin.
Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto is Abraham Cahan's first book, published in 1896. It depicts the life of Jewish immigrants living in a New York City ghetto. The plot follows Yekl, Russian-Jewish immigrant sweatshop worker, as he attempts to assimilate into American culture. His attempts are complicated by the arrival of his wife and son, which force him to decide between his Jewish identity and a new American one.
Although earlier she had found that her Jewish heritage paled before the American past that now belonged to her, she never repudiated her Jewish identity.
Dorothy Baruch was a member of B'nai B'rith and, in 1928, organized and directed a parent education department for the National Council Of Jewish Women.
Abraham Cahan (1860–1951), was a Lithuanian-born Jewish American author, socialist leader and editor of the Yiddish newspaper the Jewish Daily Forward.
In time Ferber even developed a sense of collective Jewish identity that highlighted the positive compensatory effects of oppression. She believed that the Jew, left in peace, would have lost his 'aggressiveness, his tenacity and neurotic ambition.' More important, oppression had yielded to Jews the priceless gift of 'creative self-expression.'
I finished the book in 1941 and sent it off to Barthold Fles, a New York literary agent who had been recommended to me. Mr. Fles was a Jew and in March, 1941, Jews were pretty sensitive about heroic German naval officers. To say that Mr. Fles was insulted was the understatement of the year.
A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael came to a positive Jewish identity late in life and his gay identity even later.
As a Jewish daughter, wife, and mother, she has both yeshiva and secular backgrounds and writes from vast personal experience that includes constant joyous rounds of bar and bat mitzvahs, engagement parties, bridal showers, and weddings.
