Jonathan Sarna

Cora Wilburn was one of the most prolific American Jewish women writers of her time. After the death of her father, an unscrupulous merchant and con man and abusive husband and father who dragged his family around the world to escape creditors and victims, she immigrated to the United States. After several difficult years of mind-numbing toil, Wilburn became a professional writer and aligned herself with the fast-growing but controversial Spiritualist movement. She published regularly in Spiritualist magazines, producing serialized novels (including Cosella Wayne, the first coming-of-age novel to depict Jews in the United States), lengthy translations from German and French, colorful short stories, pointed non-fiction essays, and hundreds of poems. Her writings show her to have been a staunch advocate of social justice. In middle age, she began to affiliate with Reform Judaism and began writing mostly poetry, including a poem written for the Jewish Women’s Congress in Chicago.

"This book is an authoritative reference work for a twenty-first century audience. Its entries, written by eminent scholars, define the spiritual and intellectual concepts and movements that distinguish Judaism and the Jewish experience. The book discusses central figures and literary works, formative historical events, Jewish rituals and practices, and it illuminates the lives of ordinary Jewish men and women. But what makes this dictionary different is its broad exploration of the Jewish experience beyond Judaism, including literature, art, music, theater, dance, film, broadcasting, sports, and ecology, among many other topics from the Bible to the internet"--