Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Merle Feld

Both through her writing and in her work with Israeli-Palestinian dialogue groups, Merle Feld supported the difficult and delicate struggle to make peace in the Middle East.

Tovah Feldshuh

Tovah Feldshuh set a record for the longest running one-woman show with her starring role in Golda’s Balcony, a Broadway play about Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

Prolific writer Edna Ferber celebrated America in her many works, even as she exposed its shortcomings. Her novel So Big won a Pulitzer Prize in 1925, and the film Giant and the musical Show Boat were both based on her novels. Ferber’s work was shaped by her childhood experiences of antisemitism and frequently featured strong and talented women.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, 1923

Fiction in the United States

Literature by American Jewish women reflects historical trends in American Jewish life and indicates the changing issues facing writers who worked to position themselves as Americans, Jews, and women.

Fiction, Popular in the United States

The explosion of writing by American Jewish women in the twentieth century produced not only serious fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiography but also a range of popular literature geared towards pleasure and light entertainment. Popular fiction by American Jewish women in the twentieth century featured genres from regional novels, sagas, historical novels, romances, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and humor.

Liana Finck

Liana Finck finds new angles of approach into her life and Jewish history through her whimsical and expressive autobiographical cartoons.

Ida Fink

A Polish-born writer who survived the Holocaust, Ida Fink published several collections of short stories and a novel that explore the experiences and after-effect of the Holocaust. Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past.

Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone was one of the founders of radical feminism in the United States. At age 25, she published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which brought together the dialectical materialism of Marx and the psychoanalytic insights of Freud in an effort to develop an analysis of women’s oppression that was inclusive of the dimensions of class and race.

Ruth First

Ruth First was a prolific writer and her penetrating investigative journalism exposed many of the harsh conditions under which the majority of South Africans lived. As various restrictions prevented her from continuing her work as a journalist Ruth First became more and more involved with the underground movement that was changing its tactics from protest to sabotage.

Edith Fisch

With great courage and dogged determination, Edith Lond Fisch became a lawyer, legal writer, and law professor despite severe physical limitations, educational prejudices, and sexual discrimination. Edith Fisch wrote an important book on evidence which became regularly cited by judges and used in law schools throughout New York.

Janette Fishenfeld

Janette Fishenfeld was a Brazilian author, columnist, and Zionist. In her works, she portrayed a nuanced, complex view of the Brazilian Jewish community and advocated for the Zionist cause.

Carrie Fisher

While Carrie Fisher was best known for her early film roles, she spent most of her career as a script doctor, shaping characters for others to play.

Doris Fleischman

Doris Fleischman made history as the first American married woman issued a passport under her own name. Her prolific writing career and public feminism brought her national recognition.

Jennie Maas Flexner

Jennie Maas Flexner was the head of the circulation department at the Louisville Public Library and later the readers’ advisor at the New York Public Library. Her sympathy for self-taught and adult learners drove her to create innovative reading lists for adults embarking on a new life or second career.

Eugénie Foa

Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) was, to our knowledge, the first Jewish woman to support herself professionally as a writer. Based in Paris, she wrote in French and was active in circles of French women writers who advocated for greater recognition. She wrote novels and newspaper articles on a variety of topics, including stories about Jews but also on fashion and the lives of saints. She is best remembered for her children’s books.

Rokhl Korn, Kadya Molodowsky, and Ida Maze

Dvoyre Fogel

Dvoyre Fogel was a Polish-Jewish philosopher, professor, translator, and Yiddish modernist writer of poetry, prose, and literary and art criticism. Fogel’s remarkable experimental poetry was radically avant-garde and attuned to all the modernist minimalisms.

Sarah Feiga Meinkin Foner

Born into a family that encouraged her love of Jewish learning, Sarah Foner asked to learn Hebrew when she was only five years old and published her first novel in her twenties. During her lengthy writing career, Foner’s publications often reflected her interest in Jewish and women’s issues and centered notably independent female characters.

Selma Fraiberg

Selma Fraiberg was a psychoanalyst, author, and pioneer in the field of infant psychiatry. Her classic parenting book The Magic Years was the result of her years of research in the field of social work and her experiences as a stay-at-home mother.

Anne Frank

Anne Frank is famous for the diary she wrote during the Holocaust, in which she describes her life while hiding in an Amsterdam attic. She was caught and perished in Bergen-Belsen. Her diary, which is often part of school curricula, has become one of the central symbols of the Holocaust and human suffering.

Ellen Frankel

A pioneering feminist leader in business and the arts, Ellen Frankel served as the first woman CEO of the Jewish Publication Society. She is the author of several books including The Classic Tales: Four Thousand Years of Jewish Lore (1989) and The Five Books of Miriam (1996), a retelling and woman’s commentary on the Five Books of Moses, and has written several librettos,.

Rose Franken

Rose Franken was a celebrated Broadway playwright and director, a Hollywood screenwriter, and a popular novelist whose fiction touched a sympathetic chord in American women. After much success as both a playwright and a novelist, she ventured into more problematic subject matter, exploring antisemitism and homophobia in her works.

Käte Frankenthal

A stubborn nonconformist from an early age, Käte Frankenthal was a physician and politician active in Germany’s Social Democratic Party. While running her own successful private practice, she was active in sex reform legislation and played a prominent role in the Federation of Women Physicians.

Studio portrait of Lilian Freehof wearing a flower hat

Lillian Simon Freehof

Lillian Simon Freehof (1906-2004) was a leader in developing transcription services for people with visual impairments and blindness, working with Sisterhood volunteers at Rodef Shalom Congregation in Pittsburgh, PA, and, at the national level, with the Federation of Temple Sisterhoods (now WRJ). She also wrote books and plays for children and young adults and books on needlework and Jewish festivals for adults. She was the wife of Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof.

Cynthia Freeman

Cynthia Freeman is remembered as a best-selling author of popular romances during the 1970s and 1980s. A central theme running through most of Freeman’s novels is the struggle of Jewish immigrants to assimilate to American life while at the same time maintaining Jewish traditions. Freeman’s work was influenced by her family’s closeness and by her concern for the continuation of Jewish life and culture.

Bernice Sains Freid

Bernice Sains Freid called her time in WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) during WWII “the happiest days of my life.”

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Writing