23 Jewish Romanian writers

Camil Baciu was a Romanian journalist and science fiction writer. He was a friend of, among others, Iordan Chimet and Gheorghe Ursu. In 1969 he left Romania, settling in Paris.

Aurel Baranga was a Romanian playwright and poet.

Aristide or Aristid Blank, also spelled Blanc or Blanck, was a Romanian financier, economist, arts patron and playwright. His father, Mauriciu Blank, an assimilated and naturalized Romanian Jew, was manager of the Marmorosch Blank Bank (BMB), a major financial enterprise. Aristide took up jobs within the same company, and, after seeing action in the Second Balkan War and World War I, began expanding its investments, branching out into maritime transport and founding CIDNA/CFRNA airlines. This period witnessed his attempt at setting up a press empire around the twin dailies Adevărul and Dimineața, and his brief engagement with Epoca.

Nina Cassian was a Romanian poet, children's book writer, translator, journalist, accomplished pianist and composer, and film critic. She spent the first sixty years of her life in Romania until she moved to the USA in 1985 for a teaching job. A few years later Cassian was granted permanent asylum and New York City became her home for the rest of her life. Much of her work was published both in Romanian and in English.

Paul Celan was a Romanian-born German-language poet and translator. He was born as Paul Antschel to a Jewish family in Cernăuți, in the then Kingdom of Romania, and adopted the pseudonym "Paul Celan". He became one of the major German-language poets of the post–World War II era.

Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the winner of the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar and the Ovid Prize for poetry. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.

Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu was a Romanian literary critic and science fiction writer.

Sami Damian (sometimes referred to as S. Damian or Samy Damian was a Romanian-born Jewish literary critic and essayist.

Doru Davidovici, was an aviator and writer. Born in Romania in a Jewish family, Doru Davidovici became one of the most loved Romanian fiction writers in the 1980s. During the communist years, his books gave an unusual sense of liberty and new horizons by describing the experience of flying, and the closeness it forged - both between pilots, and between pilots and their machines. The plane is seen by Davidovici not simply as a machine that enables one to fly but as an actual character, with its own personality and almost with its own soul.

Leon Feraru was a Romanian and American poet, literary historian and translator. Cultivating proletarian literature while frequenting the Symbolist movement, he displayed both his origins in the Romanian Jewish underclass and his appreciation for the wider Romanian culture. He popularized the latter with his work in America, having left in 1913 to escape antisemitic pressures. A translator, publicist, and public lecturer, he was involved with the Romanian press of New York City, and eventually as a Romance studies academic at Columbia and Long Island. Feraru's poetry, collected in two volumes, mixes Romanian patriotism, traditionalist references, and modern industrial aesthetics.

Benjamin Fondane or Benjamin Fundoianu was a Romanian and French poet, critic and existentialist philosopher, also noted for his work in film and theater. Known from his Romanian youth as a Symbolist poet and columnist, he alternated Neoromantic and Expressionist themes with echoes from Tudor Arghezi, and dedicated several poetic cycles to the rural life of his native Moldavia. Fondane, who was of Jewish Romanian extraction and a nephew of Jewish intellectuals Elias and Moses Schwartzfeld, participated in both minority secular Jewish culture and mainstream Romanian culture. During and after World War I, he was active as a cultural critic, avant-garde promoter and, with his brother-in-law Armand Pascal, manager of the theatrical troupe Insula.

Isidore Isou, born Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, dramaturge, novelist, film director, economist, and visual artist who lived in the 20th century. He was the founder of Lettrism, an art and literary movement which owed inspiration to Dada and Surrealism.

Norman Manea, is a Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist state, and exile. He lives in the United States, where he is a Professor and writer in residence at Bard College.

Cilibi Moise or Cilibi Moisi was a Moldavian-born Wallachian and Romanian peddler, humorist, aphorist, and raconteur. He is best known for the aphorisms and anecdotes attributed to him, which, although recorded in Romanian, represent an important segment of the local secular Jewish culture and Jewish humor in the 19th century. Moise relied on others to record his own creations, and these often refer to him using the third person, which made him a stock character.

Andrei Oișteanu is a Romanian historian of religions and mentalities, ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, literary critic and novelist. Specialized in the history of religions and mentalities, he is also noted for his investigation of rituals and magic and his work in Jewish studies and the history of antisemitism. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he also became noted for his articles and essays on the Holocaust in Romania.

Alexandru Robot was a Romanian, Moldovan and Soviet poet, also known as a novelist and journalist. First noted as a member of Romanian literary clubs, and committed to modernism and the avant-garde, he developed a poetic style based on borrowings from Symbolist and Expressionist literature. Also deemed a "Hermeticist" for the lexical obscurity in some of his poems, as well as for the similarity between his style and that of Ion Barbu, Robot was in particular noted for his pastorals, where he fused modernist elements into a traditionalist convention.

Lazăr Șăineanu was a Romanian-born philologist, linguist, folklorist and cultural historian. A specialist in Oriental and Romance studies, as well as a Germanist, he was primarily known for his contribution to Yiddish and Romanian philology, his work in evolutionary linguistics, and his activity as a literary and philological comparatist. Șăineanu also had innovative contributions to the investigation and anthologizing of Romanian folklore, placed in relation to Balkan and East Central European traditions, as well as to the historical evolution of Romanian in a larger Balkan context, and was a celebrated early contributor to Romanian lexicography. His main initiatives in these fields are a large corpus of collected fairy tales and the 1896 Dicționarul universal al limbii române, which have endured among the most popular Romanian scientific works.

Mihail Sebastian was a Romanian playwright, essayist, journalist and novelist.

George Silviu was a Romanian poet, playwright, translator and lawyer.

Ion Vianu is a Romanian writer and psychiatrist, who has lived in Switzerland since 1977. He is the son of literary critic Tudor Vianu and his wife, Elena.

Tudor Vianu was a Romanian literary critic, art critic, poet, philosopher, academic, and translator. Known for his left-wing and anti-fascist convictions, he had a major role on the reception and development of Modernism in Romanian literature and art. He was married to Elena Vianu, herself a literary critic, and was the father of Ion Vianu, a well-known psychiatrist, writer and essayist.

Ilarie Voronca was a Romanian avant-garde poet and essayist.

Abraham Leib Zissu was a Romanian writer, political essayist, industrialist, and spokesman of the Jewish Romanian community. Of lowly social origin and a recipient of Hasidic education, he became a noted cultural activist, polemicist, and newspaper founder, remembered primarily for his Mântuirea daily. By the end of World War I, he emerged as a theorist of Religious Zionism, preferring communitarianism and self-segregation to the assimilationist option, while also promoting literary modernism in his activity as novelist, dramatist, and cultural sponsor. He was the inspiration behind the Jewish Party, which competed with the mainstream Union of Romanian Jews for the Jewish vote. Zissu and Union leader Wilhelm Filderman had a lifelong disputation over religious and practical politics.