Writing
Marie Grunfeld Jastrow
Author of two critically acclaimed books on immigrant life, Marie Grunfeld Jastrow was educated in a German school, and lived in Serbia before moving to New York with her family at age ten. Her two memoirs, A Time to Remember: Growing Up in New York Before the Great War and Looking Back: The American Dream through Immigrant Eyes, touched audiences deeply.
Jazz Jennings
Jewish Feminism in the United States
Challenging all varieties of American Judaism, feminism has been a powerful force for popular Jewish religious revival. The accomplishments of Jewish feminists have transformed American Jewish life, even as the ultimate goal of gender equity and shared power has yet to be fully realized.
The Jewish Woman
Women, Music, and Judaism in America
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was a novelist, short story writer, and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Known for her nuanced depiction of exile and identity, she is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.
Joan Nestle
Joan Nestle is an activist, writer, and educator known for her work on lesbian identity, sexuality, culture, and history, among other topics. Nestle also co-founded the New York-based Lesbian Herstory Archives, the largest lesbian-focused archive in the world, in 1975. Her essays and stories, which she began writing in the late 1970s, have been published in three anthologies.
Lydia Joel
Anna Maria Jokl
Author, psychoanalyst, and scriptwriter Anna Maria Jokl was greatly influenced by the many places she lived: Vienna, Berlin, Prague, London, Zurich, and Jerusalem. Forced to flee countries twice because of Nazism, Jokl is best known for her German children’s books. Her prolific career includes accomplishments in radio broadcasting, psychoanalytic writing, and autobiographical prose.
Erica Jong
Erica Jong is an American writer most famous for her bestselling novel Fear of Flying (1973). Sometimes controversial in her role as a media celebrity, Jong has published novels, poetry collections, memoirs, works of literary criticism, and literary anthologies, most often focusing on the explicit expression of women’s sexuality and neglected or untold stories of contemporary and historical women.
Helen Joseph
An internationally renowned puppeteer and author on marionettes, Helen Haiman Joseph made a career entertaining and educating audiences of all ages with the performance of puppetry. She created the Pinocchio Players in 1924, writing and producing plays for clubs, schools, and hospitals. Joseph also wrote several children’s books.
Judaic Studies in the United States
When the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) was established in 1969 as the professional organization of scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Judaic studies, there were no women among its founders. Within the past few generations, however, a field that was traditionally dominated by men has gradually witnessed the emergence of many women scholars.
Juedischer Frauenbund (The League of Jewish Women)
Founded in 1904, The League of Jewish Women pursued secular German feminist goals while maintaining a strong sense of Jewish identity. The League supported vulnerable women through practical social reforms while fighting for political power within the German Jewish community. It saw employment opportunities as essential to women’s economic, psychological, and emotional independence.
JWRC: Eleanor Leff Jewish Women's Resource Center
Rachel Kadish
Helena Kagan
Helena Kagan, a pioneer of pediatric medicine in pre-State Palestine, is known to this day as the children’s doctor of Jerusalem, the city where she settled following her aliyah in 1914. Kagan tended to generations of children—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—saving many of them from sickness and death.
Amalia Kahana-Carmon
Amalia Kahana-Carmon was an Israeli author, activist, literary critic, and feminist. She was the recipient of many prestigious literary prizes, the “darling” of Israeli academe, and the subject of several scholarly Hebrew monograph. Her Woolfian Modernist literary works have contributed to the development of Israeli postmodernist, multicultural feminism.
Jenette Kahn
Joan Kahn
Miriam Kainy
Miriam Kainy, Israel’s first established woman playwright, won the Israel Prime Minister’s Literary Prize in 1997. All sixteen of her plays were written in Hebrew and produced by Israel’s established theater companies. Kainy has also written manuscripts for radio and television and adapted dramas from English and Yiddish into Hebrew.
Mascha Kaléko
Mascha Kaléko was a German-Jewish poet whose literary works have made her a mainstay of the German poetic cannon. She is best known for content, diction, rhythm, and Kalékoesque rhyme.
Ita Kalish
Ita Kalish was a Zionist activist, Jewish Agency employee, Israeli civil servant, journalist, and memoir writer. Born into the Warka Hasidic dynasty, Kalish rejected her upbringing and went on to write nuanced portrayals and female-centered literature about the Hasidic community. Kalish’s memoirs are a rich source on the inner life of the Hasidic courts of Poland at the turn of the twentieth century and center around her own and her friends’ journey to leave what they considered the stifling atmosphere of the Hasidic world.
Tamara Kamenszain
Tamara Kamenszain, born in 1947, was a highly regarded Argentine poet. She was also a literary critic especially interested in avant-garde poetry and in questions of gender in literary expression. Women’s experience and Jewish identity are among the themes of her poetry.
Ida Kaminska
Fay Kanin
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.
