Caraid O'Brien (born December 20, 1974[1]) is an Irish-born, US-based writer, performer, translator and theater director.

Former Theater J Artistic Director Adam Immerwahr has praised "her superb theatrical ear and facility for transforming Yiddish work into relevant contemporary text.

[1] Her maternal grandfather was an Irish-speaker[1] from the Aran Islands[3] and, by O'Brien's account, her paternal grandmother was a great storyteller.

At the time, she already had a strong interest in Irish literature,[3] but teacher Catherine Doyle assigned their class stories by Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick (all of whom wrote in English but were either Yiddish-speakers or a generation removed), as well as Yiddish-language writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the latter in translation, of course.

[1][3] This led her to look at the Boston Public Library to seek further Yiddish literature in translation,[3] among which she discovered Chaim Grade.

"[3] A class on Yiddish theater taught by Ruth Wisse (then chair of the Yiddish department at Harvard) introduced O'Brien to Sholem Asch's play God of Vengeance, about a Jewish brothel-owner whose bid for respectability crumbles when his daughter, whom he has kept entirely away from men, becomes sexually involved with one of the prostitutes in the brothel.

[8] This resulted in a November 1999 production at Show World, historically a porn venue at Eighth Avenue at 43rd Street,[1] portions of which were still showing porn at the time; under zoning-based pressure from the administration of mayor Rudy Giuliani, they were required to devote some of their stages to "cultural" programming.

In an interview, she talked about how, in first translating God of Vengeance, "my model for how I wanted it to be was John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World" (written one year before God of Vengeance), where Synge immersed himself for several months in the Gaelic-speaking Aran Islands, then wrote his play in English with some Irish Gaelic words.

As O'Brien puts it, "[I]t was a translation," and its boisterous plot constituted "a 'shande far di goyim [embarrassment in front of the Gentiles],'... but in an Irish context.