Like Jewish women everywhere, Dutch Jewish women struggled with issues of assimilation, emancipation, and equality as both Jews and women. This article summarizes the conditions and challenges facing Jewish women in the Netherlands and the paths to progress and change they sought—education, work, activism, and literature, among others—from the nineteenth century to the present, including after the particular decimation of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust.

Fighting the constraints of her Orthodox upbringing and expectations of her role as a wife and mother, novelist Carry van Bruggen wrote movingly of both the need for freedom and the isolation it could bring.