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Rashel Mironovna Khin hosted salons that made her the toast of Imperial Russia and, with the help of the novelist Ivan Turgenev, became a successful writer in her own right.
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.
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.
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.
One of the great poets of modern Israeli literature, Lea Goldberg used the forms of Eastern European folk songs to capture the world lost in the Holocaust.
Ellen Kushner’s revolutionary fantasy novel Swordspoint offered an important early example of a strong, successful gay hero in a committed relationship.
Fashion writer Tavy Stone reached the pinnacle of her career when she was chosen as one of only seven American reporters allowed to cover the wedding of Lady Diana and Prince Charles.
After the narrowly averted disaster of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lillian Mellen Genser decided to train people to think differently about conflict from early childhood onward.
One of the youngest playwrights ever to have a play produced on Broadway, Liz Swados was unafraid of tackling heavy subjects like politics, racism, and mental illness.
Through performance art pieces like Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger and The Opposite Sex is Neither, Kate Bornstein questions society’s understanding of gender as a binary.
Television writer Sarah Treem’s work with Hagai Levi, adapting In Treatment for an American audience, led to their collaboration on the Golden Globe-winning The Affair.
Jill Soloway’s mixture of curiosity and empathy for unusual characters, from funeral directors to people suffering from multiple personality disorder, earned her multiple Emmy awards for her creation of Transparent.
In her rich and prolific writing, feminist thinker Hélène Cixous elided the term “juifemme” (Jewoman) to articulate her complex experiences as “other” in society.
An actress with a long history of activism, House star Lisa Edelstein organized her first protest at age sixteen as a cheerleader for Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals, outraged that the cheerleaders were forced to flirt in bars.
A Jewish writer exploring her outsider identity in largely Catholic Mexico, Sabina Berman was the first writer to win the Mexican Theater Prize four times.
Shulamit Bat-Dori defied widely held notions about the inappropriateness of theater in the kibbutz, creating popular and acclaimed plays for the masses.
Yavilah McCoy is the founder of Ayecha, a nonprofit Jewish organization that provided Jewish diversity education and advocacy for Jews of color in the United States.
Cecilia Razovsky found countless ways to help Jewish refugees, from writing plays and pamphlets that changed public opinion to running numerous committees and organizations for immigrant aid.
Isadora Newman’s creativity defied categorization, spilling across the boundaries of poetry, fiction, painting, and playwriting, but always returned to the African American and Creole influences of her New Orleans heritage.
