The first woman to earn a PhD in urban planning from Harvard University, Marcia Marker Feld dedicated her career to teaching the next generation of urban planners to base their work on the needs and desires of a community instead of imposing their own visions on neighborhoods.
In 1994 Judith Seitz Rodin became the first permanent woman president of an Ivy League school when she took the helm of the University of Pennsylvania.
As a Talmud scholar and a member of the progressive Israeli political party Yesh Atid, Ruth Calderon has sought to break down the traditional divide in Israeli society between right-wing Orthodoxy and secular liberalism.
Veronika Wolf Cohen has shaped Israeli minds in two very different ways, by developing national music curricula and by leading innovative Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups.
Rachel Kadish’s fiction focuses on the ways Jewish women struggle to fulfill their longings and dreams despite the limitations of the times and places in which they live.
Rabbi Mychal Springer’s lifelong work to make hospital chaplaincy more inclusive and supportive across denominations culminated in her creation of the Center for Pastoral Education, which offers chaplaincy training for rabbis across the Jewish spectrum as well as clergy of other faiths.
As both one of the first women and one of the first openly gay rabbis to be ordained in Britain, Elli Tikvah Sarah has profoundly reshaped the liberal Jewish community of Britain.
In teaching liturgy to rabbinical students from around the world, Rabbi Dalia Marx is shaping how the next generation of rabbis interprets the tradition.
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.
Reb Mimi Feigelson, the first Orthodox woman ordained as a rabbi, has followed in the footsteps of her mentor, Shlomo Carlebach, by welcoming students from across the spectrum of religious practice.
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.
Rebecca Bayla Taichman’s success as the Tony award-winning director of Indecent is a reflection of her lifelong celebration of plays by and about women.
Although she made her Broadway debut with Indecent in 2016, playwright Paula Vogel has long been hailed for her unflinching exploration of taboo topics, from the AIDS crisis to child abuse.
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.
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.
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.
Fantasy author Esther Friesner uses humor and imagination in her writing to question the tropes and clichés about women in general and feminists in particular.
Over the course of her career, Prudence Steiner has devoted her literary, educational, and philanthropic talents to Harvard University, as well as to a range of cultural and Jewish organizations.