Rachel Kadish

Rachel Kadish is an American writer of fiction and non-fiction and the author of several novels and a novella. Born in New York City on August 12, 1969, Kadish grew up in Westchester County, New York, where she attended middle school at Solomon Schechter School of Westchester in Hartsdale, and New Rochelle High School. Kadish received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1991 and an M.A. from New York University in 1994.

Her fiction work has won the National Jewish Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize, the John Gardner Fiction Prize, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and she teaches in Lesley University's MFA Program in Creative Writing.

She is currently involved in New Voices, a project using the arts to work for tolerance.

Writing career

Rachel Kadish's 2017 novel, The Weight of Ink, winner of National Jewish Book Award, is a work of historical fiction set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century. It tells the interwoven stories of two women: Ester Velasquez, an immigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history.

Her short stories and essays have been read on US National Public Radio and have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, Salon, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Kadish has also written in Quartz magazine about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who saved her family during World War II and in The Paris Review on the importance of historical fiction in illuminating forgotten history.

She is a graduate of Princeton University and New York University.