Women’s poetry in Yiddish first made its presence felt within the wider context of modern Yiddish culture in the late 1910s. Exploring topics from gender in Judaism to queer sexuality and eroticism, women’s Yiddish poetry cemented itself as its own literary corpus with priceless value and contribution to Yiddish literary culture.

Born in Poland, Miriam Ulinover was one of the great Yiddish poets of the early twentieth century. Through her poems, she wove traditional Jewish life in the shtetl into a mythical vision of Jewish life, tradition, childhood, and identity.

Crowned “the Poetess of Jerusalem” by Sholem Asch, Rikudah Potash wrote in Yiddish about the landscape of her beloved city and its diverse ethnic communities. She brought to Yiddish readers the rarely seen Middle Eastern Jewish woman. Potash’s Jerusalem, both the heavenly and the earthly, was a capacious universe that she inhabited, body and soul, for thirty years.