Rabbi Susan Grossman has helped shape the Conservative Movement’s policies on women’s rights and roles in Jewish life through her work as a member of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS).
One of the first women ordained by Yeshivat Maharat, a seminary for Orthodox Jewish women, Maharat Rachel Kohl Finegold is the first woman in Canada to serve as clergy for an Orthodox synagogue.
Although she was the second woman ordained by the Conservative Movement, Rabbi Nina Bieber Feinstein helped lay the groundwork for women’s ordination through her own years of study and struggle.
As editor of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, scholar and rabbi Tamara Cohn Eskenazi recovered the stories of women mentioned throughout the Bible and treated them with the academic rigor usually reserved for the patriarchs and other biblical men.
As a lesbian rabbi serving an LGBT congregation during a period that has spanned the AIDS crisis and the legalization of gay marriage, Rabbi Lisa Edwards has spent decades working to make the Jewish community a more welcoming place for gays, lesbians, and transgender Jews.
One of the first graduates of Yeshivat Maharat, the first Orthodox seminary to ordain women, Maharat Ruth Balinsky Friedman is crafting a new model of religious leadership for Orthodox women and girls.
Under the pen name Hannah Green, Joanna Greenberg turned her struggle with mental illness into the bestselling novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
Resisting taboos around discussing death, Rochel Udovich Berman has worked to educate people on Jewish funerary practices and encourage them to participate in the mitzvah of caring for the dead.
Mary Loeb Gendler has helped shape social justice movements in indirect but effective ways, from crafting new rituals for Jewish feminists to helping Tibetan exiles leverage the tools of nonviolent protest.
Combatting centuries of sexism that had erased women’s contributions, Bonnie Anderson published one of the first major surveys of women’s history, A History of Their Own.
In her bestselling 2012 book Good Girls Revolt, Lynn Povich described the 1970 lawsuit against Newsweek that enabled her to become the journal’s first female senior editor.
Discouraged from a promising career in science, Eileen Pollack published her 2015 memoir The Only Woman in the Room to unravel the many instances of sexism, large and small, which push women like her out of STEM fields.
In her novel The Beautiful Possible, Amy Gottlieb melds the everyday and the mystic by showing the secret lives and troubled pasts of rabbis, scholars, and their loved ones.
Fiction writer Jennifer Weiner made headlines when she challenged book critics for dismissing books by women as “chick lit” but reviewing and honoring books by men on the same topics.
Years of covering Putin’s regime in Russia made journalist Maria Alexandrovna “Masha” Gessen uniquely qualified to point out uncomfortable parallels between Putin’s leadership style and that of President Trump.
After the 2016 election, journalist Laura Moser created Daily Action to mobilize and coordinate people who wanted to become active in resisting problematic policies of the Trump administration.
Hari Nef, the first trans woman model to be signed to the prestigious IMG modeling agency, has used her public platform to speak out on issues that affect other transgender people.
Marjorie Ingall’s 2016 parenting guide Mamaleh Knows Best offers a blend of empathy, ethics, and practical advice that readers have come to expect from her “East Village Mamaleh” column in the Forward.
In her book All the Single Ladies, Rebecca Traister investigates why so many women are choosing to remain single, and the impact single women can have on society.
