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.

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.

Gisi Fleischmann was a steadfast and brave fighter in the underground resistance to Nazism during World War II. Many times, she refused to escape Slovakia to safety and instead chose to stay and fight for her people to the bitter end.

After Paulette Fink’s husband, serving in the French Army, escaped capture, Fink and her family fled to the unoccupied zone of France and joined the Resistance, hiding Jewish children and helping them escape. Despite her husband’s death, Fink continued working with the Resistance and the Jewish Brigade. When the war ended, she continued her work with refugees before settling in Minneapolis.

A Polish-born writer who survived the Holocaust, Ida Fink published several collections of short stories and a novel that explore the experiences and after-effect of the Holocaust. Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past.

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.

Minna Regina Falk was a historian, writer, and professor who is remembered for her work on German history. She became the first female full professor in New York University’s history department in 1963.

Born in 1939, Rachel Ertel is a translator and an essayist. She remains one of the most prolific translators from Yiddish to French and dedicated her life to the survival of Yiddish culture in France and America.

Gusta Dawidson Draenger was active in resistance movements during World War II, enduring imprisonment and torture. Her famous work, Justina’s Diary, recalls her experiences within the resistance and while incarcerated.

Ruth Dreifuss was the first Jewish member of the Federal Government of Switzerland and the first female President of the country. When she became President of the Confederation in 1999, she was the first Jew and the first woman to hold the office.

Friedl Dicker was an artist and educator who studied at the Bauhaus school then led art classes at Terezin.  In the ghetto, Dicker taught drawing to hundreds of children, designed sets and costumes for children’s performances, and made an exhibition of children’s drawings in a basement. She also created her own sketches, many of which were discovered in the 1980s.

Living a privileged existence in the wealthiest circles of German cultural society, Ida Dehmel became involved in circles of patronage of modern art that raised awareness for feminist issues, including women’s suffrage and equality for women’s artists’ associations. In 1916 she co-founded the Women’s Society for the Advancement of German Art.

Opera in Israel owes its creation primarily to singer, director, producer, and impresario Edis De Philippe. De Philippe made her New York opera debut in 1935 before performing with the Paris Opera and touring Europe and South America. She then founded the Israel National Opera Company in 1947 and ran it until her death in 1979.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz was an American-Jewish historian whose influential and controversial works reflect her deep personal and academic commitment to the Jewish people. She spent time in Poland immediately before the Holocaust and time in Germany immediately after it. Dawidowicz’s works, which received numerous awards, concern American and Eastern European Jewry, and the Holocaust.

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.

Liza Czapnik was a Polish freedom fighter during World War II who started working against the Nazi occupation after witnessing a mass murder of Jewish people near her hometown. After being interned in the Grodno ghetto, she escaped and began working as a courier for the anti-fascist underground in Bialystok. After the war, she earned a PhD and taught English until 1991, when she made Aliyah and settled in Beersheva.

Children’s literature in the United States would not be the same without Jewish women. From Sydney Taylor to Judy Blume to Lesléa Newman, Jewish women have written books read by millions of children and teenagers in the U.S. for more than a century.