Else Frenkel-Brunswik was a social psychologist who is best known as a coauthor of The Authoritarian Personality.

German-born Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in 1933, which assisted in sending Jewish European teenagers to Palestine prior to World War II to be trained as agricultural pioneers on kibbutzim. Although she was responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jewish youth, Freier’s efforts were not officially acknowledged until 1975, when she was eighty-three years old.

From the French Revolution to the twenty-first century, Jewish women in France have undergone radical legal, political, cultural, and religious transformations. Seizing upon the increasing number of opportunities available to them, both as Jews and as women, Jewish women have left their marks on all areas of French society.

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.

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.

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.

Tilly Edinger made her mark as one of the leading vertebrate paleontologists of the twentieth century. Her pioneering work in paleoneurology, the study of fossil brains, established her international reputation as the outstanding woman in her field. She performed research in Germany before World War II and continued researching and teaching in the United States until her untimely death in 1967.

Jewish immigrants to the New World brought with them their ritual and celebratory Jewish dances, but these traditional forms of Jewish dance waned in the United States. Working-class and poor Jewish immigrants parents sought out culture and education in the arts for their children, often as a vehicle for assimilation. Jewish women were particularly attracted to the field of modern dance.

After the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478, observance of crypto-Judaism became dangerous and more difficult. Women were at the center of Judaizing efforts, since the home was the only remaining institution in which one could observe Jewish law. Crypto-Jewish women most frequently observed the Sabbath and dietary laws.

Photographer and photojournalist Eva Besnyö was born in Budapest in 1910. In the 1930s Besnyö moved to Berlin, where she quickly became successful with numerous exhibitions and commissions and spent time with politically engaged intellectuals and artists. Following the war, Besnyö was active in the Dolle-Mina feminist movement and was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Award for her life’s work.

A lawyer by training, Vienna-born Clementine Bern-Zernik produced broadcasts for the US Office of War Information in London during the war, served as the director of a Displaced Persons Camp in post-war Germany, and spent the last 50 years of her life as a UN liaison to the New York Public Library. Throughout her life she maintained a strong Austrian identity and was a founding member of the Austrian-American Federation.

Barbara (Monique Andrée Serf) was a French singer and composer whose melancholy style rose to national significance. Born in Paris in 1930, after World War II Barbara studied music, rising to fame in the 1960s. Her Jewish identity and wartime experience as a child influenced her non-conformist persona as an artist, and through her song lyrics, she advocated for Franco-German reconciliation.