Ranger Read Program
Biography of Moisés Kaufman
Moisés Kaufman
(born November 21, 1963) is a playwright and director. He wrote The Laramie
Project with other members of the Tectonic Theater Project. He was born
and raised in Caracas, Venezuela and moved to New York City in 1987. He
has also written Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde.
His Jewish father survived the Holocaust and fled from Romania to Venezuela
where he met Kaufman's Venezuelan-born mother. Kaufman's paternal grandparents
were European Jews who immigrated before the war. Kaufman's Orthodox Jewish
parents sent him to Yeshiva University, a school that provided both religious
and academic instruction. Although Kaufman would eventually cease to practice
Orthodox Judaism, he valued the lessons on a Talmudic scholarship, especially
taking a sentence from the Bible and analyzing it twenty different ways.
