Sarah Blau

Sarah Blau was born in 1973 in Bnei Brak

Sarah Blau was born in Bnei Brak in 1973, the eldest daughter of a religious Zionist family. Her grandmother came from the Herzl family. Bnei Brak appears often in her writing.

During her national service she volunteered at a Holocaust studies institute in Haifa, where she guided visitors and documented survivors. She later studied history and psychology at Bar-Ilan University.

She presented religious programs on Israeli television, including a show where she talked with children about biblical figures. She wrote columns on religion and state for Maariv, Haaretz and Ha'ir, and calls herself religious lite. In 1999 she started alternative Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies in Tel Aviv, which drew debate at first and later spread across the country.

Her first novel, The Book of Creation, appeared in 2007 and tells of a lonely woman who makes a golem shaped like a man. Those Well-Raised Girls followed in 2012, set among religious schoolgirls staging a play about a Holocaust story now seen as a myth. In 2014 she performed a one-woman show and published the novel Stake alongside it, and in 2018 she published the thriller The Others, sold in 8 languages.

In 2015 she was among the winners of the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew literary works. In 2017 she received an alumni achievement award from Bar-Ilan University. She is a fellow at the Gesher Institute for Leadership.