Sarah Blau

Sarah Blau was born in 1973 and raised in the ultra-Orthodox town of Bnei Brak, near Tel-Aviv. She holds a BA in history and psychology from Bar-Ilan University. Blau has edited and presented several TV programs dealing with contemporary views on religion and feminism in the Orthodox community, and writes reviews for the Hebrew press. She is also a playwright and an actress .Blau has taught at the Holocaust Studies Institute in Haifa, and In 1999, she began holding an alternative Holocaust memorial service which ignited great interest and controversy in Israel and abroad.

Blau’s writing can be described as modern-Jewish-gothic, based on ancient Jewish myths, which she sets up for an ironical reexamination. In her debut novel, The Book of Creation, a lonely young woman creates her own man-shaped ‘Golem’ – a reincarnation of the one the Jews created in the Warsaw Ghetto; and in her one-woman show, Thy Shall Write, a heartbroken novelist is working on her great novel, a modern version of the biblical story of Yael and Sisera.

Blau, one of the most prominent new voices in young Orthodox literature in Israel, was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize (2015).

Photo by: Iris Nesher