Naomi Ragen

Naomi Ragen was born in 1949 in New York City

Naomi Ragen, born Terlinsky, was born in New York City in 1949. Her father died in 1955, and the family then lived in poverty. She attended a private religious Jewish school on a scholarship.

She earned a bachelor's degree in English literature at Brooklyn College. She married Alex Ragen in 1969, and the couple moved to Israel in 1971 and settled in Jerusalem. In 1978 she received a master's degree in literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Ragen writes in English. Her first novels dealt with wife abuse, adultery and rape among Haredi women, and later books covered terrorism, family life and Orthodox society. Her play Women's Minyan ran at Habima for 6 years and was also staged in the United States, Canada and Argentina.

She wrote a column for The Jerusalem Post. In 2007 she joined a petition to the High Court of Justice against gender-segregated public bus lines. Two plagiarism suits were filed against her, one dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2012 and one upheld by the Jerusalem District Court in 2011 and later settled.

She has 4 children. In 2021 she and her husband moved from Jerusalem to Zichron Yaakov.