Whether in her family, the kibbutz training program or the movement, what set Plotniczki apart was her ability to combine penetrating, uncompromising analysis with a loving heart and maternal compassion.

Hantze Plotniczki was an active leader of and participant in resistance movements during World War II. She had a gift for connecting with people and inspiring love and action from other members of the movement.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin--a writer, activist, editor, organizer, and advocate--gained national recognition first in the national women’s movement and later as a spokesperson for Jewish feminism and issues related to Israel-Palestine. In her work, Pogrebin writes intimately about her own life’s complexities, while echoing the experiences of millions of women.

Women’s political parties have played an important, though to date poorly acknowledged, role in the social and political history of Israel. They had a significant impact on women’s participation in power center, political and other; they placed a major part in the struggle for women’s right to vote and to be elected; they raised the issue of violence against women, and much more.

Josephine Wertheim Pomerance spearheaded efforts for nuclear arms control as founder and head of the Committee for World Development and World Disarmament (CWDWD). She co-founded the CWDWD in 1950, helped to finance the organization, and led its efforts to convince Americans to support global development and oppose nuclear weapons.

Judith Graham Pool was a physiologist whose scientific discoveries revolutionized the treatment of hemophilia. Pool isolated factor VIII and created a concentrate made from blood plasma that could be frozen, stored, and used by hemophiliacs in their own homes.

Orna Porat was a leading actor at the Cameri Theater who also performed at the Habimah, the Beer-Sheva Municipal Theater, Beit Lessin, and the Yiddish Theater. After immigrating to Israel from Germany, Porat struggled to learn Hebrew and break into the theater world, but ultimately she was successful. She is known for serving on the Cameri’s administrative board and founding the Cameri Children’s Theater.

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.

A left-wing political activist and Soviet intelligence recruit, Zosha Posnanska was a fearless fighter against the Nazis and for a peaceful world.

Crowned “the Poetess of Jerusalem” by Sholem Asch, Rikudah Potash wrote in Yiddish about the landscape of her beloved city and its diverse ethnic communities. She brought to Yiddish readers the rarely seen Middle Eastern Jewish woman. Potash’s Jerusalem, both the heavenly and the earthly, was a capacious universe that she inhabited, body and soul, for thirty years.

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.

A Communist activist before and during World War II, Olga Benário Prestes’ political activities led her to the highest ranks of the Communist Youth International. Her relationship with Brazilian Communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes, who was part of a failed coup, led to her deportation to Germany, where she was gassed at Bernburg in 1942. Although her name is not well known in the United States, Olga is famous in Brazil and was considered a great heroine in the German Democratic Republic.