Novelist and poet Marge Piercy's life and life’s work reflect her deep engagement with political activism, feminism, and Judaism. In genres including fiction, poetry, liturgy, memoir, and essays, Piercy’s work brings together spirituality, creativity, memory, sensuality, and political engagement.

Cynthia Ozick is a Jewish-American writer, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her creative, authentic, and intelligent stories, including “The Shawl” (1989) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997), have made her one of the greatest fiction writers and literary critics alive.

Grace Paley wrote highly acclaimed short stories, poetry, and reflections on contemporary politics and culture. A rare example of a writer deeply engaged with the world, Grace Paley made an impact as much through her activism as her writing.

Kadya Molodowsky was a major figure in the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw (from the 1920s through 1935) and in New York (from 1935 until her death in 1975). She published extensively in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, and founded and edited two journals. Recurrent themes in her work include the lives of Jewish women and girls Jewish tradition in the face of modernity, Israel, and the Holocaust.

Annie Nathan Meyer promoted women’s higher education and founded Barnard College, New York’s first liberal arts college for women. She also chronicled women’s work, dramatized women’s status in plays, novels, and short stories, and raised funds for Jewish and black students to attend Barnard.

Jane Yolen is a Jewish-American children’s author, poet, and young adult novelist. Yolen has written more than 400 books for children and adults, including the children’s book series How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and the young adult Holocaust novella The Devil’s Arithmetic.

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.

Spurred to publish initially as a response to the concerted campaigning of Christian conversionists, women writers were the first Anglo-Jews to produce literature on Jewish themes in England. By the end of the nineteenth century, literature by Jewish women had expanded to encompass not only works defensive of the dignity and rights of Anglo-Jewry, but also satirical novels critical of the community’s materialism and marriage practices.

Martha Wolfenstein is a forgotten figure in American Jewish literature today, but near the end of her life, she was hailed by Israel Zangwill and other critics as “the best Jewish sketch writer in America.” Before her death at age thirty-six, she wrote with charm, learning and a distinctive woman's perspective.

Adele Wiseman was one of Canada’s most highly regarded writers of the second half of the twentieth century. She is best known for The Sacrifice (1956) and Crackpot (1974), her two groundbreaking novels that explore Jewish life in Canada. Both are set in Winnipeg’s insular North End, reveal her interest in characters who challenge normative behavior, and affirm Wiseman’s belief in community.

Short story writer, novelist, and screenwriter Thyra Samter Winslow was well known for her stories and articles published in The Smart Set, American Mercury, and The New Yorker. Her writing frequently dealt with themes of small-town life, assimilation, and complicated images of women in unhappy marriages.

An award-winning children’s author and the creator of the beloved Jewish story-book hero K’tonton, Sadie Rose Weilerstein’s stories for Jewish children in English heralded the beginning of a new genre. Weilerstein published the first version of The Adventures of K’tonton in 1935, and by 1964 she had published eleven books.

Anna Strunsky Walling was a Russian-born author, journalist, lecturer, and social activist. She produced several novels and memoirs and was involved in a number of political organizations, including the Socialist Labor Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she and her husband helped found.

Malka Heifetz Tussman introduced into Yiddish poetry one of the most rigid verse forms, the triolet, and mastered another, the sonnet corona. A teacher of Yiddish language and literature in the Midwest and the West, Tussman was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish poetry in Tel Aviv in 1981.

Mina Tomkiewicz was a Polish author who wrote two books based on her personal experience growing up in Warsaw, Poland, and her deportation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Born in Budapest, Eva Szekely was forced to stop swimming during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. However, she returned to the sport after the war and went on to win thirty-two national individual swimming titles and eleven national team titles. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, she set a new Olympic record in the 200-meter breaststroke.

Rahel Goitein Straus, a pioneering woman medical doctor trained in Germany, was a model “New Jewish Woman” of the early-20th century. Successfully combining a career as a physician with marriage and motherhood, she committed herself to Jewish and feminist causes and organizations throughout her life, while also embracing Zionist ideals.