Turning dining hall dollars into food for the hungry, Rachel Sumekh has empowered college students to address food insecurity in their communities and has shined a light on hunger on university campuses.
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.
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.
A political operative who served as deputy director of issues and research for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Sara Teitelbaum Ehrman had an inadvertent brush with history when she drove Hillary Rodham to Arkansas while urging her not to marry Bill Clinton.
During her term as the first female Speaker of the Knesset, Dalia Itzik was called upon to take on another first when she became the first female Interim President of Israel in 2007.
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.
Through her genealogical program Routes to Roots, Miriam Weiner helped Jews access historical records that had survived the Soviet suppression of information throughout Eastern Europe.
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 the first full-time female rabbi in Poland, Tanya Segal has creatively transformed Jewish life in the historic city of Krakow through her blending of Jewish learning and performance art.
Rabbi Haviva Ner-David chronicled her struggles to become an Orthodox woman rabbi in her celebrated book Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Toward Traditional Rabbinic Ordination before finally achieving her dream in 2006.
Throughout her career, Rabbi Avis Miller has searched for new ways to educate, engage, and support unaffiliated Jews and those on the margins of the Jewish community.
After a car accident left Rabbi Lynne Landsberg struggling with a traumatic brain injury, she devoted her career to ensuring that Jews with disabilities have full access to the richness of Jewish life.
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.
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.
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.
One of the first graduates of Yeshivat Maharat, the first Orthodox seminary to ordain women, Maharat Ruth Balinsky Friedman is crafting a new model of religious leadership for Orthodox women and girls.
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.
Marjorie Switow Fisher found inventive ways to improve children’s lives, from funding mobile dental clinics to using summer jobs as an opportunity for career training. Fisher majored in art at Marjorie Webster Junior College and graduated at the top of her class.
By helping victims of “revenge porn” get justice in court, and working to prevent such cases from occurring in the first place, Carrie Goldberg is creating important safeguards for an era in which people live more and more of their personal and professional lives online.
As president of Guyana for two years, Janet Rosenberg Jagan was the first American-born woman to serve as president of any country. Jagan was a student at the Cook County Nursing School in Chicago when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student.
Ellen Odette Cuffe, Lady Desart, was celebrated as the most important Jewish woman in Irish history for her boundless philanthropy and political acumen.
Mary Loeb Gendler has helped shape social justice movements in indirect but effective ways, from crafting new rituals for Jewish feminists to helping Tibetan exiles leverage the tools of nonviolent protest.