JWA needs donors like you to continue sharing stories and inspiring change. $18 helps keep JWA online for one day. Support JWA by making your end of year gift today!
Sharon Salzberg helped bring Theravedic Buddhism, one of the most conservative Buddhist dsiciplines, to America as one of the three co-founders of the Insight Meditation Society in 1974.
When the Nazi regime dissolved the feminist organization to which Hannah Karminski had devoted her life, she found new ways to serve the German Jewish community by saving children and providing aid for families.
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.
As one of the leaders of the Liberal Jewish Movement in France, Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur is working to bring a progressive mindset to the more traditional French Jewish community.
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.
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.
Jenny Hirsch devoted years to a society for women’s employment, but when the organization ironically refused to pay her, she reinvented herself as a mystery writer.
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.
One of the few women journalists to work in Israel before the founding of the state, Bracha Habas became beloved for her work as a writer and editor of children’s literature.
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.
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.
Margo Glantz fused the Yiddish literature of her parents, the Mexican culture of her homeland, and the French traditions of her academic training to create experimental new works of literature.
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.
Ellen Kushner’s revolutionary fantasy novel Swordspoint offered an important early example of a strong, successful gay hero in a committed relationship.
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.
