Judy Klass

Senior Lecturer of Jewish Studies

Prof. Judy Klass from Vanderbilt Jewish Studies on Vimeo.

Judy Klass is a Truman Scholar. Eight of her full-length plays and 42 of her one-act plays have been produced onstage; her short plays have had multiple productions all over the US. A few have been produced in the UK, Ireland and Canada. One was translated into Ukrainian and had a staged reading in Kharkiv in the summer of 2024. Her full-length play Cell was nominated for an Edgar and is published by Samuel French/Concord Theatricals. Her full-length play Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One won the Dorothy Silver Award for Best New Jewish Play in 2006 had five staged readings, and was produced at Chaffin’s Barn Theatre in Nashville, after coming in Second in their Clash of the Playwrights competition. Her full-length science fiction play in verse After Tartuffe was in the Fresh Fruit Festival in NYC and is published by Next Stage Press. Her play Country Fried Murder won the S.O.P.S. competition in the Full-Length category and was produced at the Shawnee Playhouse in Pennsylvania in 2019. During the pandemic, it was produced as a Zoom recording/podcast by Quarantine Players. It is published by Lazy Bee Scripts in the UK. A number of her plays, short and long, have been produced as podcasts. Three of Judy’s short plays are published, each as a stand-alone script, by Brooklyn Publishers. Her short plays have appeared in anthologies like The Art of the One-Act and The Best New Ten-Minute Plays 2021. Long ago, Judy wrote an original-series Star Trek novel published by Pocket Books. She co-wrote the Showtime cable film adaptation of Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies. Her original screenplay Au Pair Girl has been optioned many times; she turned it into a YA book published by a small press. Three books of her poems have been published by small presses. Her poems have appeared in magazines like the Brooklyn Review, Piedmont Literary Review, Shenandoah, Slant, Pivot, Faultline, Möbius, Ship of Fools, iota, and the Long Island Quarterly. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Magazine, Wind Magazine, Muse & Stone, Phoebe, Bryant Literary Review, Satire, Space & Time, The Courtship of Winds, Synkroniciti and Albedo One, among other places. Her essay “The Twilight Zone as Jewish Science Fiction” appeared in the book Jews in Popular Science Fiction: Marginalized in the Mainstream, and her essay “Teaching Jewish Science Fiction” appeared in the book Jewish Fantasy Worldwide: Trends in Speculative Stories from Australia to Chile, both published by Lexington Press. As a songwriter, she co-wrote Maine Mendoza’s hit song/video in the Philippines called “Lost With You,” and has cuts with Filipino artists such as Ariel Rivera, Eurika and Rachelle Ann Go. She co-wrote a Euro dance club hit called “Disappear,” sung by Adara, and has cuts in the US with artists and bands such as Coyote Crude, Hilda Lamas, Simon Kirke (the drummer in Bad Company), Brandon Maddox and Iron Cowboy. She co-wrote nine songs in the musical comedy film Cooking for Two, shot in Hong Kong and available on Tubi TV.