Peninnah Schram

Peninnah Schram was born and raised in New London, Connecticut. As she was growing up, her father, Cantor Samuel E. Manchester, a chazan, mohel, shochet, and composer of cantorial music, spent much time recounting tales of the works and wonders of Elijah the Prophet, as well as other familiar and beloved tales from the Bible. Her mother, an entrepreneur and enthusiast of the Yiddish language, taught her daughter how to be a mensch through the telling and re-telling of stories and proverbs. Hearing her father’s heart-felt voice and beautifully articulated words when he prayed, in addition to hearing wise stories from both her parents, enabled Peninnah Schram to comprehend deeply the power and fascination of the oral tradition.

After graduating from the University of Connecticut and Columbia University, Peninnah Schram and a friend created Theatre à la Carte, a theatre company which produced and toured adult and children’s plays in the New York area. In 1966 they were invited to develop musical plays for children through the Jewish Heritage Theatre at the 92nd Street Y in New York. In 1967 she began her teaching career at Iona College. Two years after that she joined the faculty of Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. Peninnah taught at Stern College for 45 years. She retired as Professor Emerita in 2015.

In 1970 Peninnah Schram started recording books for the blind at the Jewish Braille Institute. That experience inspired her to begin to teach Jewish storytelling as a separate subject, and in 1974 she taught her first course on Jewish storytelling. The year 1974 heralded several other groundbreaking projects: She became “storyteller-in-residence” at The Jewish Museum, and she recorded three record albums and broadcast two storytelling series on radio. Some of this recorded material is now in the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting. Ms. Schram is the Founding Director of the Jewish Storytelling Center. She has told stories in America, Canada, England, and Israel, at synagogues, festivals, conferences, colleges, organizations, camps, and schools. She is also a catalyst, sparking ideas, inspiring others to tell stories, and creating places for other storytellers to gather and share stories. Several of her collections of folktales have been published by Jason Aronson Inc.: Jewish Stories One Generation Tells Another; Eight Tales for Eight Nights: Stories for Chanukah; and Tales of Elijah the Prophet. She is the editor of Chosen Tales: Stories Told by Jewish Storytellers, a collection of the works of 68 storytellers.

2018 Update:

Peninnah Schram became Professor Emerita at Yeshiva University in the Winter 2015, when she officially retired from YU.

Peninnah continues to write and publish as well as to present storytelling concerts and workshops in the US and Israel. She also coaches rabbis in the art of storytelling so they become inspired to integrate more stories into their divrei Torah and life cycle events.