Gail Twersky Reimer is a teacher, writer, editor, passionate advocate for the humanities, and visionary pioneer of Jewish feminism. Reimer founded the Jewish Women’s Archive in 1995 to ensure that Jewish women’s stories would become integral parts of the historical record. Under her leadership, JWA pioneered the use of virtual technology in collecting, chronicling, and transmitting knowledge of Jewish women’s lives.

Jewish women made overwhelming contributions to the creation of the field of Screendance.  Maya Deren, Amy Greenfield, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and others have created a legacy of socially conscious dance for the screen that collectively exhibits and performs principles of Jewish ritual and practice. Many of these artists share a focus on social justice and a collective approach to what might be called a feminist Jewish art form.

Rita Arditti was an Argentinian Sephardic scientist, feminist, educator, and activist who spent most of her adult life working for social justice and human rights while living in the United States. She co-founded Science for the People, New Words Bookstore, and the Women’s Community Cancer Project. She co-edited anthologies on science and politics and reproductive technologies and wrote a book about the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1945-2018) was a lesbian-feminist writer and editor. She made multiple theoretical contributions to understanding Judaism, lesbianism, and feminism as intersectional identities, extended an awareness of class and economic justice through a Jewish lens, and made visible racial differences within Jewish communities. She advocated Radical Diasporism as a progressive alternative to Zionism.

Dr. Judith Herman was a pioneer in identifying the frequency with which sexual abuse of female children occurs within the family, in the treatment of victims of abuse, and in psychotherapeutic confrontations of abusers.

Susan Brownmiller is a radical feminist writer and journalist. She was a leader in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s to 1980s (second-wave feminism). Brownmiller is bes-known for Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), the first comprehensive study of sexual violence.

Alix Kates Shulman is a radical feminist writer and activist and a leader in the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s through 1980s.  She is best known as the author of “The Marriage Agreement” (1970) and the best-selling Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), which was heralded as the “first important novel of the Women’s Liberation movement.” She was honored with a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism in 2018.

Rivka Carmi is a medical geneticist, neonatologist, pediatrician, the first woman to be appointed president of an Israeli university (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev), and a feminist trailblazer who broke the glass ceiling for women in academia.

Irena Klepfisz is a poet whose legacy is key to the history of Jewish, American and lesbian literature. Klepfisz is also a pioneer of the recovery of Jewish and Yiddish women’s writing, to which she has dedicated translations, research, teaching, and activism.

Pearl M. Hart was a pioneering attorney, activist, and educator. She devoted her life to defending the legal rights of the vulnerable and oppressed, especially women, children, immigrants, and gay men and lesbians. Her work in Chicago was instrumental in the development of the LGBTQ community there in the middle of the twentieth century.

Erica Jong is an American writer most famous for her bestselling novel Fear of Flying (1973). Sometimes controversial in her role as a media celebrity, Jong has published novels, poetry collections, memoirs, works of literary criticism, and literary anthologies, most often focusing on the explicit expression of women’s sexuality and neglected or untold stories of contemporary and historical women.

Diane Noomin was an acclaimed cartoonist and editor and the creator of her alter ego, DiDi Glitz. Noomin was a central figure in women’s comics beginning with the early feminist publications of the 1970s. In 2011 she published an anthology of her work, Glitz-2-Go: Diane Noomin Collected Comics.