SOURCE: Whitfield, Stephen J. “Wendy Wasserstein and the Crisis of (Jewish) Identity.” In Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers, edited by Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel, pp. 226-46. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Whitfield investigates the thematic significance of Jewish identity in Wasserstein's major plays, comparing the verisimilitude of their autobiographical dimension with the collective experience of Jewish-Americans.

Born in Brooklyn on 18 October 1950, Wendy Wasserstein has drawn on features of her family life to inspire all four of her major plays. She was the youngest of four children, including two other daughters—one of whom became a high executive at Citicorp, while another married a doctor and raised three children. “She did the best,” the “bachelor girl” playwright once sardonically announced,¹ in comparing the siblings whose lives would be transmuted into The Sisters Rosensweig (1992). The Wassersteins themselves were very solidly and...