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Communism

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Ethel Rosenberg

Ethel Rosenberg, convicted in 1953 alongside her husband for conspiracy to divulge atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, became the second woman in the United States to be executed by the federal government. The verdict and the Rosenbergs’ execution became one of the most-questioned cases in United States history, as well as one piece of a much larger Cold War picture of anti-Communist hysteria and antisemitism.

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen was an American-Jewish author, professor, feminist, and social activist whose powerful fiction about the lives of the working poor, women, and minorities have shaped the development of the American literary cannon. Tillie Olsen’s own struggles to combine writing with working and raising a family spurred her to recover the writing of other silenced women writers, revolutionizing the study of women’s literature.

Lillian Hellman

Controversial both during and after her life, Lillian Hellman was one of the leading women of letters of mid-century America and a pioneer woman playwright. Hellman displayed courage not only in writing powerful plays like The Children’s Hour but also in her public refusal to name colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Yudica

Yudica, the pseudonym of Yehudit Zik, was a Canadian-Jewish poet and activist whose reputation in Yiddish literature was largely developed during her three decades in North America. Yudica contributed greatly to the “proletarian” literature genre of Canadian Yiddish writing.

Helen Yglesias

At the age of 54, Helen Yglesias dedicated herself to becoming a writer. Her works focus on the lives and concerns of Jewish women in New York. Her most notable books include Sweetsir and The Girls.

Rose Wortis

Rose Wortis was an active union organizer and member of the Communist Party in the first half of the 20th century. She was an elected official of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the Trade Union Unity League, and the New York District Communist Party.

Rosi Wolfstein-Fröhlich

Rosi Wolfstein’s life constituted a battle against war, racism, and social injustice. She worked with other socialist political figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, helped found the Independent Social Democratic Party, and was a representative for the German Communist Party. Despite having to flee to the United Stattes during World War II, Wolfstein returned to Germany and remained active in party and workplace politics until her death.

Ursula Kuczynski (Ruth Werner)

Operating under at least five different names in the course of her career, Ruth Werner (a pen name) was a singularly accomplished spy, whose espionage activities spanned some fifteen years, from 1931 to 1946. Twice awarded the order of the Red Banner, the highest Soviet military decoration, Werner also held the rank of colonel in the Red Army.

Helene Weigel

Helene Weigel was an actress and director known for her maternal roles in Bertolt Brecht’s plays and her incredible kindness and generosity. Weigel married Brecht in 1922 and they fled Germany during the war, returning to East Germany after the war. Weigel was known for her strength, energy, diplomacy, and good humor as she managed an acting career and dealt with many challenges in her lifetime. 

Manya Gordon Strunsky

Manya Gordon Strunsky was a socialist activist and a respected writer on political and social issues. Strunsky was also instrumental in bringing Jewish immigrants from czarist Russia to America and helping them to become settled.

Virginia Snitow

Virginia Levitt Snitow was a multifaceted woman who was a teacher, political activist, pre-Second Wave feminist, poet, writer and founder of US/Israel Women to Women. Ahead of her time in the fight for both civil and women’s rights, Snitow was unafraid to take unpopular stances when fighting for others.

Chava Slucka-Kesten

Chava Slucka-Kesten started teaching in Warsaw before World War II and continued her career through the war in Moscow. After the war she became an author and sustained her political involvement. Writing from the perspective of a politically engaged woman, Slucka-Kesten offers a unique glimpse into pre- and post-war Jewish life in Poland’s cities and villages, as well as into the early years of the State of Israel.

Tess Slesinger

Novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Tess Slesinger was born in New York on July 16, 1905. She published several works, including: The Unpossessedand Time: The Present. Slesinger died of cancer at age thirty-nine before the premiere of one of her final works, the acclaimed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Dora Shulner

Dora Shulner was a Yiddish writer who vividly evoked for her readers life in the Pale of Settlement before, during, and after the Russian Revolution and Civil War. She candidly portrayed women in their most intimate relationships with men, revealing the complexity of their disappointments and aspirations.

Esfir Il’inishna Shub

Esfir Shub was active as an editor, director, and writer of nonfiction films for twenty years, from 1927 to 1947—one of the few women in the Soviet Union at that time to achieve some standing in the film industry. Shub found success as a woman in the film industry by pioneering the form of compilation documentary and by producing technically competent work that satisfied the political needs of the communist moment.

Clara Sereni

Clara Sereni was an Italian writer of Jewish descent. The rich legacy of her Jewish roots as well as her inherited passionate political commitment permeate all her narrative works. The act of writing offered Sereni an opportunity to articulate female subjectivity and language experimentation, providing a setting for exposing issues related to identity, politics of gender, disability, and ethnic diversity while building a new utopia.

Anna Seghers

Anna Seghers is considered one of the most important German women writers of the twentieth century. Her many novels and stories written during her multiple exiles, including Das siebte Kreuz (1942) adapted into the Hollywood film “The Seventh Cross,” reflect her strong socialist and anti-fascist beliefs, and she remains controversially linked to her later involvement with the East German government.

Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle

Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle, a Sephardi woman, risked her life over and over again to aid to her community during World War II. At a later stage in her life, Bouena’s historical-literary acumen enabled her to record Jewish life in Salonika during the twentieth century, including the devastation to her community at the hands of the Nazis.

Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman

Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman was a Soviet-Yiddish educator, journalist, writer, and memoirist. Her books concentrate on personalities and events in the Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Birobidzhan, providing insightful portrayals of Soviet Yiddish cultural history, its Soviet state-sponsored development, and its total liquidation.

Zosha Posnanska

A left-wing political activist and Soviet intelligence recruit, Zosha Posnanska was a fearless fighter against the Nazis and for a peaceful world.

Olga Benário Prestes

A Communist activist before and during World War II, Olga Benário Prestes’ political activities led her to the highest ranks of the Communist Youth International. Her relationship with Brazilian Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes, who was part of a failed coup, led to her deportation to Germany, where she was gassed at Bernburg in 1942. Although her name is not well known in the United States, Olga is famous in Brazil and was considered a great heroine in the German Democratic Republic.

Ana Pauker

Born to an impoverished Orthodox family in Bucharest, Ana Pauker joined the Romanian communist movement in 1915. She rose through the ranks, becoming one of the most powerful Communist leaders in Romania after World War II and, according to Time magazine, “the most powerful woman alive.”

Gill Marcus

After the African National Congress was unbanned in South Africa in 1990, Gill Marcus quickly became a central figure in the party, helping to build a communications infrastructure in preparation for the transition to democracy. She was later elected to Parliament, where she served as the Deputy Finance Minister in 1996 and then Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank in 1999.

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was a socialist revolutionary known for her critical perspective. Born in Poland, Luxemburg had become an important figure in the world socialist movement by 1913. She argued against Lenin’s hierarchal conception of party organization, and against revisionism. Luxemburg was internationalist in orientation and unflinchingly dedicated to a radical democratic vision.

Hildegard Löwy

Born in 1922, Hildegard Löwy was the youngest member of the Baum Gruppe, a mainly Jewish resistance group against the Nazis. She had firm Zionist and pacifist principles and believed communism was the best way for Jews to obtain equal rights. Arrested in April 1942, Löwy tried to escape from prison but was ultimately convicted of Communist treason and executed in a Berlin prison.

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