Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Miriam Waddington was educated in an intellectually and culturally progressive Yiddish environment, an upbringing which may have inspired her to write poetry whose powerful voice challenged the patriarchal assumptions still endemic among her fellow modernist poets.

Guided by her vision of a unified humanity, Lillian D. Wald passionately dedicated herself to bettering the lives and working conditions of immigrants, women, and children. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and initiated America’s first public-school nursing program. A talented activist and administrator, Wald’s pathbreaking work continues to be memorialized.

Barbara Walters has probably interviewed more statesmen and stars than any other journalist in history. A list of her numerous and timely TV interviews, both on the weekly newsmagazine 20/20 and on The Barbara Walters Specials, reads like a "Who's Who" of newsmakers.

Zoe Wanamaker, the recipient of numerous awards for both her stage and television work, is known to millions of cinemagoers worldwide for her role as Madam Hooch in the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001).

Warburg began her philanthropic work after her marriage as a director of the Brightside Day Nursery. In 1911, she became a director of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA) and later its president (1929–1942).

Dora Wasserman’s love of Yiddish theater accompanied her from the Soviet Union where she was born in 1919, to Montreal, Canada where she lived from 1950 until her death on December 15, 2003.

Chemist Elga Wasserman – a recipient of a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard in 1949 and a J.D. from Yale in 1976 – is best known for overseeing the entrance of the first coeducational class at Yale College in 1969.

In 1989, with her play The Heidi Chronicles, she won a Pulitzer Prize and became the first woman to receive the Tony Award for Best Play.

Helene Weigel was an actress and director known for her maternal roles in Bertolt Brecht’s plays and her incredible kindness and generosity. Weigel married Brecht in 1922 and they fled Germany during the war, returning to East Germany after the war. Weigel was known for her strength, energy, diplomacy, and good humor as she managed an acting career and dealt with many challenges in her lifetime. 

Gertrude Weil’s life is a rare example of southern Jewish social activism during the first half of the twentieth century. She was the first Jewish woman to lead a statewide secular women's movement in North Carolina, beginning her activist career in 1915 fighting for woman suffrage and continuing through to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Helen Weil was a devoted gerontologist in and around Cleveland, Ohio. A German-Jewish refugee herself, in addition to teaching at Western Reserve University, Weil developed thorough social services and programs for elderly Jewish residents at Montefiore Home before going on to found and direct the Schnurmann House.

An award-winning children’s author and the creator of the beloved Jewish story-book hero K’tonton, Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s stories for Jewish children in English heralded the beginning of a new genre. Weilerstein published the first version of The Adventures of K’tonton in 1935, and by 1964 she had published eleven books.

Gladys Davidson Weinberg’s pioneering archaeological work on ancient and medieval glass and its manufacture in the Mediterranean world sheds light on the trade and technology of preindustrial societies.

A professor at the University of Toronto, Weinrib is one of Canada’s foremost authorities on constitutional law.

A brilliant French journalist and a lifelong champion of European union and women’s rights, Louise Weiss was an influential voice in French and international affairs from the 1920s until her death in 1983.