June 23, 2011
Feminist writer E.M. Broner dies at 83
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Jewish feminist writer E.M. Broner, perhaps best known as the co-author of “The Women’s Haggadah,” has died.
Broner, a longtime professor of English at Wayne State University, Sarah Lawrence College and other schools, died June 21 in New York at 83. The cause of death was multiple organ failure, her daughter Nahama told the Times.
“The Women’s Haggadah,” first published in Ms. magazine in 1977, was an early feminist interpretation of the Passover seder. It has been used by numerous women’s weders and inspired similar re-imaginings of other Jewish rituals.
Broner hosted women’s seders at her Manhattan home starting in 1976, The New York Times reported. Among the well-known Jewish feminists and writers who attended were Grace Paley, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Letty Cottin Pogrebin.
In 1994, Broner published “Mornings and Mournings: A Kaddish Journal,” a chronicle of the year she spent trying to say Kaddish for her father in an Orthodox synagogue in New York.
Broner also was a prolific writer of spiritually infused, Jewish-themed fiction. One of her most popular books was “A Weave of Women,” released in 1978, which told the tale of abused women living together in Jerusalem in the early 1970s and creating new feminist rituals.
