Yiddish-language writers

Benjamin David "Jamie" Elman (born July 5, 1976) is a Canadian American actor, best known for his leading roles of Cody Miller on YTV's Student Bodies, Luke Foley in NBC's American Dreams, and himself in Yidlife Crisis.

Bella Rosenfeld Chagall (Russian: Бэлла Розенфельд-Шагал, 15 November 1895, Vitebsk - 2 September 1944, New York State) was a Jewish Belarusian writer and the first wife of painter Marc Chagall. She was the subject of many of Chagall's paintings including Bella au col blanc (Bella with White Collar) in 1917, and appears posthumously in Bouquet près de la fenêtre, painted in 1959-1960.

Elie Wiesel (, born Eliezer Wiesel Hebrew: אֱלִיעֶזֶר וִיזֶל‎ ʾÉlīʿezer Vīzel; September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish: יצחק באַשעװיס זינגער‎; November 21, 1902 – July 24, 1991) was a Polish-American writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He used his mother's first name in an initial literary pseudonym, Izaak Baszewis, which he later expanded. He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish. He was also awarded two U.S. National Book Awards, one in Children's Literature for his memoir A Day Of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw (1970) and one in Fiction for his collection A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories (1974).

Solomon Simon (1895—November 8, 1970) was a Jewish author and educator. He published over thirty books, in Yiddish and English, notably his children's books The Wandering Beggar, The Wise Men of Helm, and More Wise Men of Helm. He was also a leading figure of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, a Jewish cultural organization that operated Yiddish secular schools for children.

Isaac Nachman Steinberg (Russian: Исаак Нахман Штейнберг; 13 July 1888 – 2 January 1957) was a lawyer, Socialist Revolutionary, politician, a leader of the Jewish Territorialist movement and writer in Soviet Russia and in exile.

David Edelstadt (May 9, 1866, Kaluga, Russia – 17 October 1892, Denver, Colorado) was a Russian-American anarchist poet in the Yiddish language. Edelstadt immigrated to Cincinnati and worked as a buttonhole maker, while publishing Yiddish labor poems in Varhayt and Der Morgenshtern. He was editor of the Yiddish anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime in 1891 but left the post after contracting tuberculosis, moving west to seek a cure. He continued to send the newspaper his poems until his death a year later.

Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863 – November 8, 1920), known by his pseudonym S. Ansky (or An-sky), was a Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, polemicist, and cultural and political activist. He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914.

Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known under his pen name Sholem Aleichem (Yiddish and Hebrew: שלום עליכם‎, also spelled שאָלעמ־אלייכעמ‎ in Soviet Yiddish, Russian and Ukrainian: Шо́лом-Але́йхем) (March 2 [O.S. February 18] 1859 – May 13, 1916), was a leading Yiddish author and playwright. The 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof, based on his stories about Tevye the Dairyman, was the first commercially successful English-language stage production about Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The Hebrew phrase שלום עליכם (shalom aleichem) literally means "[May] peace [be] upon you!", and is a greeting in traditional Hebrew and Yiddish.

Sholem Asch (Yiddish: שלום אַש‎, Polish: Szalom Asz; 1 November 1880 – 10 July 1957), also written Shalom Ash, was a Polish-Jewish novelist, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States.