Colette Roberts devoted her life to increasing people’s understanding and appreciation of modern art. The success she earned as a gallery director, art critic, and educator influenced the art world of the mid-twentieth century in New York and Paris and throughout the world.

Elise Richter could not pursue a university degree until she was in her 30s, when she became part of the first group of women to study at the University of Vienna. She received doctoral and post-doctoral degrees and subsequently taught classes on various Romance languages while publishing extensively, making important contributions to the field of historical and comparative linguistics.

Sarah Reisen was both a gifted Yiddish writer in her own right and a respected translator of great literature into Yiddish for children and adults. Recognized by contemporaries for her humane literary sensibility, she brought to Yiddish literature not only her own creative works but also her translations, which introduced readers of all ages to world literature.

Painting and sculptor Antonietta Raphaël rose to fame in the 1950s. Her paintings were seen for the first time in Rome in 1929; during World War II, she took up sculpting, and in the 1950s, she rose to prominence and exhibited her works worldwide.

The "founding mother" of modern Hebrew poetry by women, Rahel Bluwstein achieved in death the status of a national cultural icon. Rahel’s affiliation with the avant-garde group of Second Aliyah pioneers to pre-state Palestine, her dedication to Zionist ideals, and her agonizing death made her a beloved pioneering figure in Israel.

Puah Rakovsky dedicated her life to working towards the empowerment of Jews, particularly of Jewish women. She was a revolutionary woman, taking on important roles as an educator, translator, organizer of women, and an early socialist Zionist.

Sophie Rabinoff used the skills she honed as a doctor in Palestine to improve health care in some of the worst slums in New York. Her innovative work helped to establish the fields of public health and preventive medicine in both the United States and Palestine.

Following decades of intensive work in management of Israeli music institutions, Daniella Rabinovich became a leading figure in the field in Tel Aviv in the 1980s and 1990s, serving as director of the Tel Aviv Conservatory.

An outstanding bacteriologist and a leading figure in the feminist movement of women scientists in Germany in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner was a pioneer among women scientists, an exception among the first generation of women scientists in her combination of career and family.

Linda Rabins’s education and career as a dancer, teacher, and choreographer was global and eclectic, making her a unique dance artist. She has studied dance, healing arts, and somatic education all over the world from Israel, Japan, to Canada. She is known for co-founding and co-directing the Linda Rabin Danse Moderne in Montréal, which evolved into Les Ateliers de Danse Moderne de Montréal (LADMMI).

Hortense Powdermaker explored the balance of involvement and detachment necessary for participant-observer fieldwork in cultural anthropology, stressing the ability to “step in and out of society.” Her secular Jewish identity was apparently a factor in learning this skill, exemplified in an academic career that included thirty years of college teaching and the writing of five major books based on widely diverse fieldwork studies.

One of California’s first Jewish educators, Mary Goldsmith Prag came to San Francisco as a young child during the Gold Rush. She became a religious and secular teacher, an administrator, a fighter for equal rights for women, and the mother of the first Jewish congresswoman, Florence Prag Kahn.

Lucie Porges brought a combination of elegance and a relaxed sensibility to her long and fruitful collaboration with top fashion designer Pauline Trigère. As she continued to design, Porges also imparted her immense knowledge in the Fashion Department of the New School for Social Research.

Deborah T. Poritz was New Jersey’s first female attorney general and in July 1996, she was sworn in as the first woman chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. She served in that position until she reached the compulsory retirement age of seventy in 2006.

Clara Asscher Pinkhof dedicated her life and work to helping and advocating for Jewish children, initially as a teacher and later as an author. She is most known for her accounts of the experiences of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation.

Ursula Philip was a German geneticist whose work was interrupted by the Nazis’ rise to power but achieved prominence after fleeing to Great Britain.

With almost seventy years as a social work practitioner, supervisor, teacher, consultant, and author to her credit, Helen Harris Perlman was a legend in her field. She pioneered the “Chicago School” of social work, arguing that many people in crisis needed short-term therapy and solutions rather than long-term Freudian analysis.

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.”