Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is a highly regarded Torah scholar and author. Her complex interpretive lens is both contemporary, in drawing from literary sources, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, and very traditional, in reading the Bible through the lens of classic commentaries and rabbinic midrash.

Jewish Women Watching was a Jewish feminist activist group in the 2000s. It fought against sexism, racism, and economic inequality in the Jewish community and was known for its members’ anonymity, costumes, shocking forms of protest, and witty press releases.

In the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature, most warriors are men. However, a few women go to war or kill: Deborah, Jael, the unnamed woman of Thebez, and Judith.

Second Temple discourse on women and gender is grounded in biblical interpretation and everyday life and, as such, has the potential to shed light on tumultuous debates about what different communities deemed problematic, acceptable, ideal, and anomalous with respect to a woman’s role in society. A selection of Second Temple texts envisioning Dinah, Miriam, and Sarah indicates these varied perspectives, as well as how these figures were used to promote the ideologies of the particular communities the texts represented.

Martha Ackelsberg is a Jewish feminist lesbian anarchist activist, community leader, and academic. She is a leading scholar of anarchism and of anarchist women’s organizations of the Spanish Civil War. A founder and/or early leading visionary in pivotal United States Jewish developments, Ackelsberg has been a key voice shaping feminist, lesbian, and havurah contributions to twentieth- and twenty-first century Jewish life.

Rabbi Naamah Kelman was the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in Israel and the first woman to serve as Dean of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She has had a distinguished career of more than four decades as an activist in feminist and social justice causes in the State of Israel.

Lauren Tuchman, the first blind woman ordained as a rabbi, is best known for her championing inclusive Torah and disability justice. Though she is ordained in the Conservative movement, most of her work has been in community organizing and other non-congregational settings.

Flory Jagoda is a singer, musician, and composer who has promulgated and enriched the Sephardic and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) musical and folkloric tradition in the United States. Born in 1923, in Sarajevo, Bosnia (formerly Yugoslavia), she managed to leave Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and avoid the sad fate of the extended family that nurtured her musical talent and Sephardic heritage. The popular Hanukah song, Ocho Kandelikas, is one of her many original compositions in Judeo-Spanish.

Karen Gerson Sarhon, founder and vocalist of the Sephardic music group Los Pasharos Sefaradis, is coordinator of the Sephardic Culture Research Center in Istanbul, Turkey, and chief editor of El Amaneser, the world's only newspaper wholly in Judeo-Spanish/Ladino. She continues to produce innovative projects for the preservation and promotion of Sephardic culture and language.

Mina Fink was one of Australia’s most influential twentieth-century community leaders. With her husband she spearheaded the postwar immigration and resettlement of Holocaust survivors in Melbourne. As President of the National Council of Jewish Women she brought a new feminist and humanitarian agenda. She helped establish the Holocaust Museum and Research Centre in Melbourne and imparted it with a strong educational focus.

London-born Marti Friedlander migrated to New Zealand in 1958. She became one of the country’s most outstanding and influential photographers in portraiture, photo-journalism, photo-books, and “street” photography. Her photographs still live vigorous public lives in exhibitions, books, and periodicals published after her death.

Sarah Rodrigues Brandon (1798-1828) was born poor, enslaved, and Christian on the island of Barbados. By the time of her death thirty years later she was one of the wealthiest Jews in New York and her family were leaders in Congregation Shearith Israel. This entry explains Sarah’s life journey and highlights how her story relates to that of other women of mixed African and Jewish ancestry in early America.

Mónica Unikel-Fasja is a chronicler of Jewish immigrant stories. She created a dozen guided walking tours in Mexico City and revitalized the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue as a bastion of Jewish culture, designating it a treasure trove of history fully accessible to the general public.

Mirta Kupferminc (b.1955) is an internationally recognized contemporary Argentine Jewish artist. For the past four decades, she has explored memory, culture, history, and language, in a variety of art media.

The history of Jewish women’s comics and graphic novels can be traced back to early and mid-20th-century progenitors. With the underground comics scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s, several Jewish women laid the groundwork for the themes, styles, and communal ties that would be taken up by the post-underground. In the 21^st century, the works of Jewish women in comics and graphic novels is booming.

Born in Odessa, Juliette Pary moved to Paris in 1925 and became a respected translator, journalist, and author. She also played important roles in summer camps, youth hostels, and the development of modern educational practices. During World War II she worked closely with child refugees.

The author of nineteen books of poetry as well as several books of essays and translations, Denise Levertov was a world-renowned poet. She was also a prominent political activist, particularly in the anti-war and environmental movements.

Yehudit Katzir (b. 1963) is an Israeli author who emerged as a leading female voice in what had been a male-dominated literary field until the 1980s. Her novels and short stories are noted for their idiosyncratic and lyrical language, as well as their focus on female identity and treatment of taboo themes.

Born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, Jamaica Kincaid is a Jewish Afro-Caribbean author. She was sent to the United States from her birthplace in Antigua at the age of sixteen and became a writer while living in the United States.

Leslie Feinberg was a self-described “anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist.” She worked at the nexus of trans, feminist, lesbian, critical race, Jewish, and class politics. A speaker and author, Feinberg was a gifted activist and political organizer.

An intense and vibrant literary engagement exists in Canada particularly in Toronto and Montréal but also in many centres across the country. The diversity in authors, subjects, and styles echo and illuminate a plurality of identities within Judaism and within Canada.

Twenty-first-century Jewish women’s writing in the United States is wide-ranging in genre and topic. In this body of literature, we can find insightful and nuanced stories of contemporary American life as well as fiction that delves into lost or forgotten Jewish histories. From a female Spinoza to a female golem, a strong feminist ethic is pervasive in these writings.