E. M. Broner, Jewish Feminist, Dies at 83

E. M. Broner, a writer who explored the double marginalization of being Jewish and female, producing a body of fiction and nonfiction that placed her in the vanguard of Jewish feminist letters, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 83.

The cause was multiple organ failure as a result of an infection, her daughter Nahama said.

Ms. Broner (her surname rhymes with “owner”) was among the first writers to consider feminism and Judaism as parts of a seamless if difficult-to-integrate whole. While her work was often likened to that of postwar feminist novelists like Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy and Marilyn French, it was distinguished by its specifically Jewish focus.

In that respect, Ms. Broner was sometimes compared to Grace Paley, whose fiction also centered on modern Jewish women. But where Ms. Paley’s work was steeped in secular progressivism, Ms. Broner’s was intensely concerned with Jewish spirituality, and with carving out a place for women in a faith tradition that had long seemed not to want them.

One of Ms. Broner’s most influential books was “The Women’s Haggadah,” written with Naomi Nimrod. Originally published in Ms. magazine in 1977 — at the time no book publisher would touch it, Ms. Broner explained in interviews — it was one of the first Haggadot to recast the Passover seder from a feminist vantage point. It was issued in book form by HarperSanFrancisco in 1994.

“The Women’s Haggadah” has inspired feminist seders throughout the world. Ms. Broner’s own women’s seder, held in New York since 1976 (often in her Manhattan apartment), was regularly attended by luminaries including Ms. Paley, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Letty Cottin Pogrebin.

As a novelist, Ms. Broner was best known for “A Weave of Women,” published in 1978. It centers on 15 women from around the world who are living communally in Jerusalem in the early 1970s. Many have suffered at the hands of men, or will by novel’s end. Because received tradition has failed them, the women create new spiritual rituals — for birth, death, healing and exorcising demons, among other things.

The book typifies Ms. Broner’s novelistic style: experimental, nonlinear and magic realist, suffused with myth, mysticism and sensory experience. Its prose can be sober, even urgent, but is also peppered with abundant sly humor.

Though some critics found the book polemical, others praised its dreamlike milieu, musical language and ambitious scope.

Reviewing “A Weave of Women” in The New York Times, John Leonard called it “an astonishment,” adding: “E. M. Broner seeks nothing less than to achieve, in a kind of epic poem, a recapitulation of the rhythms of female consciousness.”

Esther Frances Masserman was born in Detroit on July 8, 1927. (The year of her birth is often erroneously reported as 1930.) Her father, Paul, was a newspaperman; her mother, Beatrice, had acted in the Yiddish theater in Poland.

Ms. Broner earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a master’s in creative writing from Wayne State University in Detroit; she later received a Ph.D., with a specialization in religion, from what is now the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati.

She joined the Wayne State faculty in 1964 and taught in the English department there for many years; she also taught at Sarah Lawrence College and elsewhere.

Ms. Broner’s husband, Robert Broner, a printmaker whom she married in 1948, died last year. Besides her daughter Nahama, she is survived by another daughter, Sari Broner; two sons, Adam and Jeremy; a brother, Jay Masserman; and two grandchildren.

Her other work includes stage plays; the novels “Her Mothers” (1975) and “The Red Squad” (2009); a volume of short fiction, “Ghost Stories” (1995); and the memoir “Mornings and Mourning: A Kaddish Journal” (1994), in which she recounts her long, painful but ultimately strangely successful effort to say Kaddish for her father in a small Orthodox synagogue in New York.

In another work of nonfiction, “The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality Through Community and Ceremony” (1993), Ms. Broner documented the annual seder and other alternative celebrations held by her circle.

In chronicling the story of the Exodus, for instance, their seder included opening the door to allow the prophetess Miriam, rather than the prophet Elijah, to enter. It also included a reworking of the Four Questions, which traditionally begin, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

In the revised version, the question — and answer — became: “Why is this Haggadah different from traditional Haggadot? Because this Haggadah deals with the Exodus of women.”