Lillie Cowen

Lillie Cowen (or Lillie Goldsmith or Mrs. Philip Cowen) (1851, London, England - 1939, New Rochelle, New York) was the first woman to translate the Haggadah.

Cowen who descended from a family of Jewish-Irish scholars, emigrated to the United States when she was eleven months. In 1887, she married Philip Cowen who was the first publisher of the Jewish weekly newspaper The American Hebrew.

In 1904, she published the Cowen Haggadah, the first mass-produced adaptation of the haggadah in modern American vernacular. It was the most popular haggadah in the United States in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

References

• Goldman, Yosef. Hebrew Printing in America, 1735-1926, A History and Annotated Bibliography (YGBooks 2006). ISBN 1-59975-685-4.
• Guber, Rafael. "Did you know? Little-known facts about Passover and Judaism to share at the seder table"The Jewish Journal, 2007-03-30. Accessed 2007-07-20.