As a female playwright, Martha Morton faced adversity within the male-dominated New York theater world. Despite repeated rejection, she achieved fame and prosperity. Resisting expectations of women writers, Morton took a firm hand in production, often casting and directing her own work.

Elinor Morgenthau’s accomplishments were largely invisible, as she helped her husband, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., rise to great heights in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Because of her sharp political and social skills, she often filled in for her husband, and eventually she became Eleanor Roosevelt’s assistant in the Office of Civilian Defense.

An innovator in mixed-media forms, Meredith Monk uses music, dance, drama, and film in her theater pieces. Acting as composer, choreographer, librettist, and performer, Monk creates diverse works that have been widely exhibited and have received many awards and honors.

Regarded as one of the foremost designers in twentieth-century theater, Tanya Moiseiwitsch was an innovative designer of costumes, sets, and stages, responsible for over two hundred productions in England, Canada, and the United States. She made an impact in the male-dominated world of stage design.

Bette Midler went from canning pineapples at a factory in Honolulu to starring in over 20 films, releasing two dozen records, and touring the world with record-breaking live concert performances. Midler got her start at a gay bathhouse in New York, where she developed the campy and confident persona “The Divine Miss M.” Her career in show business spans decades, old and new media, and musical genres.

Hanna Meron began her long acting career as a four-year-old child prodigy, appearing in children’s theater, radio plays, and films. In 1945 she joined the recently founded Cameri Theater. She helped shape the company by becoxming active in management and as a member of the repertory committee, while also rising to prominence as one of Israel’s greatest actors.

One of the finest actors of her day, as well as a producer and a philanthropist, Helen Menken devoted her entire life to the American theater. While she was known for playing a lesbian in The Captive, for which she was arrested during a performance, and her role as Elizabeth I in Mary of Scotland, her biggest contribution to theater was creating the 1942–1946 Stage Door Canteen through the American Theater Wing, in which Broadway stars performed for service people.

Fritzi Massary was a prominent singer in Berlin prior to the onset of World War II. She reigned over the Berlin stage, singing the title role in Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow and Adele in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. Among the works created especially for her was the operetta Die Kaiserin by Leo Fall.

Sara Levi-Tanai was the founder, choreographer, and artistic director of the Inbal Dance Theater. With an original style, she established a unique dance theater that combined the East and West and the early history of the Nation of Israel with the present, as well as creating a new language of movement in the world of dance that is called “the Inbal language.”

Lia Koenig is known as the First Lady of Israeli Yiddish Theater for her complex roles in world drama. After immigrating to Israel from Poland in 1961 with her husband Zevi Stolper, she began her legendary career at the Habimah theater. Koenig was awarded the Israel Prize, the Israel Theater Prize, and the EMET Prize. 

Over a sixty-year career as a writer, actor, co-producer, and activist, Fay Kanin was awarded several Emmys and Peabodys, the ACLU Bill of Rights Award, the Crystal Award from Women in Film, the Burning Bush Award from the University of Judaism, and nominations for Oscar and Tony awards. She was the second female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Known for her majestic bearing, great beauty, and fine diction, Bertha Kalich was the first female actor to make the transition from the Yiddish to the English stage. Kalich performed 125 roles in seven languages and was a star of Yiddish theater in Europe before immigrating to the United States and rising to fame in American Yiddish theater and mainstream films, plays, and radio shows.