Jessica Strauss was born in Chicago in 1945. She moved to Berkeley, California, in 1966. She got her first degree at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana, and her further education studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She then taught in San Francisco in their public school system. In 1968 she got married and came to live in Israel in 1969. For 35 years, Jessica worked as a high school English teacher in Ramat Hasharon and retired in 2006. She has three children, two of whom are in Israel, one in NY, and eight grandchildren, seven of whom live in Israel.