Malka Fisz Kolodny served as one of the first teachers in pre-State Palestine, at a time when teaching often involved counseling traumatized war orphans.
A prolific poet in her own right, Feiga Izrailevna Kogan used her deft translations of Hebrew literature to bring Jewish and Israeli culture to a Russian audience.
Rashel Mironovna Khin hosted salons that made her the toast of Imperial Russia and, with the help of the novelist Ivan Turgenev, became a successful writer in her own right.
One of the great poets of modern Israeli literature, Lea Goldberg used the forms of Eastern European folk songs to capture the world lost in the Holocaust.
Shaped by Yiddish culture from an early age, Rachel Ertel sparked a love of Jewish studies in others through her work as the most respected scholar of Yiddish in France.
Ruby Daniel’s memoir of her life in India revealed not only the rich culture of her childhood but also her experiences as a Jewish woman in the Indian Navy, serving alongside Muslim and Hindu men.
Lili Berger’s experiences in the Holocaust heavily influenced her choices as a Yiddish writer and translator, focusing on the tensions outsiders face in different societies.
Part of the first generation of postwar writers in Germany, Katja Behrens grapples with the often difficult relationship between German Jews and the majority.
After co-founding America’s first birth control clinic with Margaret Sanger in 1916, Fania Mindell was arrested and convicted of breaking the Comstock Act for her efforts to make birth control available to women.
Shulamith Nardi helped shape relations between Jews and gentiles in the fledgling State of Israel through her analysis of Jewish literature and her work as advisor on Diaspora affairs to four Israeli presidents.
Bertha Szold Levin, the youngest sister of Henrietta Szold, served for sixteen years as the first woman member of the Baltimore City School Board and pushed for the inclusion of working women in Hadassah.
Shirley Kaufman used her Jewish heritage to create evocative poetry, exploring biblical matriarchs, her own mother’s immigrant past, and the tensions of daily life in modern Israel.
The daughter of the acclaimed writer Sholom Aleichem and the mother of celebrated novelist Bel Kaufman, Lyalya Kaufman was revered in her own right for her thousands of vignettes and short stories in Yiddish.
