NORTH ADAMS, Mass. —  A longtime professor of French and Comparative Literature at North Adams State College, now the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Ellen (Frankfurt) Schiff died Friday evening in New York City. She was 94. A native of Beach Haven, NJ, she was born behind the prescription room of her father’s Long Beach Island pharmacy. As a teenager, she worked the soda fountain, seven days a week. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Syracuse University, spending her junior year in Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne. She arrived in France aboard the S.S. Ile de France but arrived in Syracuse in a boyfriend’s car, without her parents’ knowledge. She went on to earn a master’s degree from Syracuse and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

She published prolifically on Jewish theatre, writing and editing six volumes that included From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama (1982) to Plays of Jewish Interest (2006). She contributed as well to a great number of anthologies and scholarly journals.

After more than four decades in the Berkshires, she moved to New York City, where she immersed herself in the city’s cultural life, relishing especially her evenings at the ballet and opera. She was especially gifted at following a recipe with surgical precision; sculpting a perfect sentence; applauding elegance. She could locate humor at the unlikeliest address and was a master of verbal hijinks. She never saw a spade she failed to identify as a spade. She remained devoted to Long Beach Island, where she spent her summers.

She is survived by her children, Gary, and his wife Arlene; Stacy, and her husband, Marc de La Bruyere; five loving grandchildren, Sarah, Max, Hannah, Millie, and Josephine; and three great-grandchildren. She was predeceased by her husband, Morton Schiff, third-generation proprietor of Schiff Clothing in Adams, MA and by Daniel Berley, her second husband, whom she married in 1998.

FUNERAL NOTICE: The funeral will be held at 11:00 AM on Monday October 5, 2026 at Beth Israel Cemetery, 512 Walker Street, Clarksburg, MA. Donations in Ellen Schiff’s memory can be made to the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, or the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. To add to the book of memories, please visit www.flynndagnolifuneralhomes.com