Born on November 18, 1905, Mischket Liebermann was the fifth of eight children in a poor family that lived in the Galician [jwa_encyclopedia_glossary:404]shtetl[/jwa_encyclopedia_glossary] of Tytschin (Tyczyn), which had two synagogues. The one that had a golden dome was where the rich prayed, while the old ramshackle one served the poor. This was where her father, Pinchus Elieeser Liebermann, served as rabbi. Fearing pogroms, the family fled to Berlin in 1914. Here, living in the slum Scheunenviertel, her father soon gathered an orthodox congregation around him and established a synagogue in the Grenadierstrasse. As his daughter lovingly describes him, he was in constant movement, a one-man service combination, who cared for his flock from the cradle to the grave, as mohel (circumciser) and [jwa_encyclopedia_glossary:299]Bar Mitzvah[/jwa_encyclopedia_glossary] teacher, as celebrant at weddings, as a dayan granting divorce, as leader of prayers and as a judge in the ghetto.

Carol Weiss King was one of the outstanding practitioners of immigration law during the period bounded by the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy era. In her thirty-year career, she represented hundreds of foreign-born radicals threatened with deportation in administrative proceedings in the lower courts and in the Supreme Court.

Arguably the most important woman writer of post-World War II Italy, Natalia Ginzburg was born on July 14, 1916 in Palermo (Sicily), where her Jewish Trieste-born father, Giuseppe Levi, who later achieved fame as a biologist and histologist, was at the time a lecturer in comparative anatomy. Modest and intensely reserved, Ginzburg never shied away from the traumas of history, whether writing about the Turin of her childhood, the Abruzzi countryside or contemporary Rome—all the while approaching those traumas only indirectly, through the mundane details and catastrophes of personal life.