Naomi Ragen
Naomi Ragen (; born July 10, 1949) is an American-Israeli modern-Orthodox Jewish author and playwright. Ragen lives in Jerusalem, and writes in English. A recurring theme in her fictional works is injustice against women in the Haredi Jewish community. Ragen has been the subject of various lawsuits over claims of plagiarism. Biography Naomi Ragen (née Terlinsky) was born in New York City. She received an Orthodox Jewish education before completing a bachelor's degree in literature at Brooklyn College. In 1971, she moved to Israel with her husband. In 1978, she received a master's degree in literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has four children and lives in Jerusalem. Literary career Ragen's first three novels describe the lives of Haredi Jewish women in Israel and the United States, dealing with themes that had not previously been addressed in that society's literature: wife-abuse (Jephte's Daughter: 1989), adultery (Sotah: 1992), and rape (The Sacrifice of Tamar: 1995). Her next novel (The Ghost of Hannah Mendes: 1998) is the story of a Sephardic family brought back from assimilation by the spirit of their ancestor Gracia Mendes, a 16th-century Portuguese crypto-Jew. Chains Around the Grass (2002) is a semi-autobiographical novel dealing with the failure of the American dream. In The Covenant (2004), Ragen deals with an ordinary family confronted with Islamic terrorism. The Saturday Wife (2007), the story of a rabbi's wayward wife, is loosely based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and is a satire of modern Jewish Orthodoxy. The Tenth Song (2010) is the story of a family whose life is shattered when a false accusation of terrorism is made against the father. The Sisters Weiss (2013) is a novel about two sisters born into an ultra-Orthodox family in 1950s Brooklyn who choose very different paths in life. The Devil in Jerusalem (2015) is a mystery featuring Detective Bina Tzedek investigating a corrupt haredi cult rabbi. An Unorthodox Match (2019) a novel set in the ultraorthodox community of Boro Park, Brooklyn, in which a secular Jewish woman adopts a haredi lifestyle and marries a haredi widower. An Observant Wife (2021) is a sequel to An Unorthdox Match. Theater Women's Minyan (2001) is a play about a Haredi woman fleeing from her adulterous and abusive husband. She finds that he has manipulated the rabbinical courts to deprive her of the right to see or speak to her twelve children. The story is based on a true incident. Women’s Minyan ran for six years in Habima (Israel's National Theatre) and has been staged in the United States, Canada and Argentina. Columnist Ragen was also a columnist for The Jerusalem Post. Plagiarism lawsuits Michal Tal In 2007, Michal Tal, an American-Israeli writer, claimed that lines and sentences contained in Tal's novel The Lion and the Cross were plagiarized in Naomi Ragen's novel The Ghost of Hannah Mendes. Ragen vigorously denied the accusation and charged that Tal's "Table of Similarities" was riddled with fabricated quotes from both of the books. Tal died mid-trial, before a verdict was