E. M. Broner
E. M. Broner, born Esther Masserman in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan, is a notable American author and academic known for her contributions to feminist literature and Jewish cultural discourse. Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Broner moved to New York City at the age of seventeen and later settled in Detroit with her husband and four children. She gained her B.A. and M.A. from Wayne State University, where she began her academic career in creative writing. Her debut work, *Summer Is a Foreign Land*, was published in 1966, exploring themes of alienation and identity.
Broner's most renowned novel, *A Weave of Women* (1978), delves into women's experiences and their spiritual connections to Jewish tradition, influenced by her participation in the feminist movement of the 1970s. Throughout her career, she received numerous awards and fellowships, highlighting her impact on feminist writing and Jewish heritage. Noteworthy works include *The Telling* (1993), which recounts the first women's Passover Seder, and *Mornings and Mourning* (1994), reflecting on her personal experiences with Jewish mourning practices. Broner’s writing consistently seeks to redefine women's roles within Judaism and to challenge traditional narratives.
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Subject Terms
E. M. Broner
Writer
- Born: July 8, 1930
- Birthplace: Detroit, Michigan
Biography
E. M. Broner was born Esther Masserman in 1930 to Paul Masserman and Beatrice Weckstein Masserman of Detroit, Michigan. Her father was a journalist and well-known Jewish historian, and her mother had been an actress in the Yiddish theater in Poland. Broner was raised as part of a large family that espoused a Conservative Jewish tradition. She moved to New York City when she was seventeen. Several years later she married Robert Broner, an artist, and the couple moved around the United States, eventually settling in Detroit with their four children, Sari, Adam, Jeremy, and Nahama. Broner earned her B.A. in 1950 and her M.A. twelve years later from Wayne State University. In 1962, she began her academic career as an instructor of creative writing at her alma mater, eventually becoming an associate professor and writer-in-residence.
In 1966, Broner published her first creative work, Summer Is a Foreign Land, a verse play about the death of a Russian Jewish woman said to have mystical powers. The play, produced at the Wayne State Studio Theater four years earlier, prefigures what would become a dominant theme of her writing: the feeling that one can be a stranger in one’s own home. In 1968, she won second prize in the O. Henry Awards for “The New Nobility,” part of her collection Journal-Nocturnal, and Seven Stories. Several plays followed, including Body Parts of Margaret Fuller, which won the 1976 bicentennial playwriting contest. Her Mothers, Broner’s first novel, appeared in 1975.The work is made up of short stories and sketches about the semi-autobiographical Beatrix Palmer, a Jewish writer and feminist who examines her life through a study of her foremothers, such as the biblical Sara and Rachel as well as Margaret Fuller and Louisa May Alcott.
Her next novel, A Weave of Women, published in 1978 (the same year that Broner earned her Ph.D. from Union Graduate School), is Broner’s most well-known work. The work draws on her visiting professorship at Haifa University in 1972 and 1975, and presents and resolves women’s political, cultural, and spiritual alienation from Israel and the Jewish tradition. Broner examines Judaism through the activism of the 1970’s feminist movement in the United States, which criticized the limitations society placed on women. In the novel, a disparate group of women— Israeli, American, German, and British—all of whom have been beaten down spiritually, emotionally, or physically in their pasts, come together in Jerusalem and form a communal life that transforms traditional Jewish rituals through feminism into a nurturing lifestyle.
In the 1980’s, Broner was awarded many writing fellowships from sources ranging from Esquire magazine to the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Wonder Woman Award (1983). In 2000, Broner was cited by the City of New York for “A Celebration of Jewish Heritage.” Her work continued to focus on establishing a new place in Judaism for women. The Telling (1993) is a work of nonfiction describing the first women’s Passover Seder conducted by a group of Jewish feminists in New York City in 1976. In Mornings and Mourning (1994), she recounts how she tried to say Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, at her father’s funeral in 1987, although women were forbidden to do so.