Quick Facts
Biography
Lillie Goldsmith Cowen (often Mrs. Philip Cowen) (1851 in London, England – 1939 in New Rochelle, New York) was the first woman to translate the Haggadah.
Cowen, who descended from a family of Jewish-Irish scholars, emigrated to the United States when she was eleven months old. In 1887, she married Philip Cowen, who was the first publisher of the Jewish weekly newspaper The American Hebrew. She worked with him on publishing the paper until 1906, when he retired.
In 1904, she published the Cowen Haggadah, which was first American English adaptation of the haggadah to be published for a mass audience. It became the most popular haggadah in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century, with distribution of 295,000 copies by 1935.