Female Yishuv writers have often been ignored in discussions of Jewish literature from the period. As the sometimes-melancholy tone and escapist themes of their writing show, these women struggled to escape the margins in pre-state Palestine. Nonetheless, the works of these female writers offer important insights into the lives of Yishuv women and paved the way for contemporary women writers.

Italian Hebrew poet Rachel Morpurgo was part of the renaissance of Hebrew poetry and literature that began at the end of the eighteenth century. While earlier Italian Jewish women poets had written almost entirely in Italian, Morpurgo wrote all her poems in Hebrew and can be considered the first Hebrew woman poet.

Despite social barriers, Jewish women have played an essential role in the creation and propagation of news and journalism in Israel. With the advent of women’s magazines and the popularization of television, women became particularly involved in the news industry. However, while the numbers of female Israeli journalists have increased, women journalists still face gender-based discrimination. In recent years, many have become vocal members of women’s rights movements such as #MeToo and advocates for a more equitable future.

A study of the role of Jewish women in household formation, the household, and household dissolution, as well as their engagement in Jewish culture in early modern Italy, raises the question of how much of Jewish practice reflected the context of the surrounding society and how much engaged options in traditional Jewish practices, which were selected to meet their own needs. Despite the wealth of information about some well- known women and reports of the activities of many unnamed women, Jewish women, like Christian women, still functioned in the context of women and the period does not represent a Renaissance for women.