[3] Jaffe was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, into a Jewish family,[4] her parents were Benjamin and Anna (née Levine) Sternstein.

Her mother moved the family to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and Jaffe attended Abraham Lincoln High School.

[1] After her marriage, she lived in Washington, D.C., for a period of time, attending the Phillips Art School there, then moved to Paris when her husband was transferred there in 1949.

[2] This study break took her away from the circle of artist friends she had developed in Paris and exposed her to new influences such as the music of contemporary composers Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

[6] It may also have reunited her thinking with the European abstraction of Jean Arp, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Wassily Kandinsky and Auguste Herbin.

"[7] It was no coincidence that Jaffe was awarded the Ford Foundation grant in 1963 due to the political climate that was engulfing the world, not to mention especially in Berlin.

Jaffe's new style featured flat, uninflected surfaces, single-colour shapes and predominantly straight, rather than curved, lines.

[6] Later analyses of her work note that Jaffe's style moved in a "different direction" from other painters of her time, and was characterised by "an incredible vitality of form and complexity".

[1][8] The evolution of her style, which happened gradually over a period of decades, was described by critics as an "internal development" apparently unrelated to contemporary trends, and therefore she could not be seen as a part of any particular art movement.