Esther Frances Masserman Broner (1927-2011)

E.M. Broner, a respected feminist writer and former professor at Wayne State University, Sarah Lawrence College, Oberlin College, UCLA, and other educational institutions around the world, has died in New York City. She was 83 years old.

Dr. Broner was know for both her fiction and nonfiction works. One of her most influential books was The Women’s Haggadah, which she coauthored with Naomi Nimrod. Originally published in Ms. magazine, the book examined the Passover seder from the standpoint of women. In her 1993 work, The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality Through Community and Ceremony, Broder related stories from her women-only seders held each year in New York. Her best known novel was A Weave of Women. The book, which was published in 1978, told the stories of 15 women from around the world who lived in a Jerusalem commune in the early 1970s. She also published plays and short stories.

Esther F. Masserman was a native of Detroit. She earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s degree in creative writing at Wayne State University. Later, she earned a Ph.D. in religion from the Union Institute in Cincinnati. At age 20 she married Robert Broner, who died in 2010. The couple had four children. Her collection of papers is housed at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.