Freema Gottlieb

Freema Gottlieb was born in London, England, and raised in Glasgow, Scotland. She was awarded a scholarship to Girton College at Cambridge University, where she studied English literature, and received a BA and M.Phil. She received a PhD from University College, London, for her research on Leonard and Virginia Woolf. She was an editor for the Soncino Press, reported for the Jewish Chronicle, and worked for BBC World News. She subsequently eft the UK for New York City, to teach literature and do public relations work and speech-writing for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. In addition to contributing literary reviews to periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times Book Review, Gottlieb was the ghost writer of Jewish Folk Art for Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, former curator of the Jewish Museum in New York. Through the Joint Distribution Committee, Gottlieb volunteered for two years to teach Midrash in the Near East Department of Charles University and at the Jan Hus Theological Seminary in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where she collaborated with photographer Alois Haljan on Mystical Stonescapes of Prague Jewish Town and Village Graveyards. She is also the author of The Lamp of God: A Jewish Book of Light. She has been researching the role of her father Rabbi Dr. Wolf Gottlieb in saving the lives of many hundreds of Jewish youth through founding the Vienna Youth Aliyah School in the early days of the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria in 1938, before he himself became a refugee.