As executive director of Hadassah, Aline Kaplan credited the organization’s success to the commitment of its volunteers, whose numbers grew to a staggering 370,000 during her tenure. In addition to her impact at Hadassah, she was also a board member in several Zionist organizations and a delegate to the World Zionist Congress.

Ilona Karmel transformed details of her experiences as a Polish-Jewish prisoner in Nazi work camps and as a patient undergoing a prolonged convalescence into two compelling and memorable novels. Karmel was a distinguished writer, winning a fiction contest from Mademoiselle and teaching awards from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Miriam Karpilove was a pioneer among women writers of Yiddish fiction. She produced scores of works of short fiction and many novels about the roles of women in immigrant Jewish culture, most of which were serialized in the American Yiddish press during the first half of the twentieth century.

Regarded as one of the wittiest women in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, Beatrice Kaufman edited important works of modernist poetry and fiction, published short stories of her own in the New Yorker, and saw several of her plays produced on Broadway. Her life demonstrated that a perceptive, ironic, and acculturated Jewish woman could become a valuable contributor to New York’s literary subculture.

Bel Kaufman was the author of Up the Down Staircase, a novel that gently parodied the public school system in New York City. Published in 1964, the book went on to sell six million copies, spent 64 weeks on the best-seller list, and inspired a film adaptation in 1967 and a popular school play. She was also the granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, whose stories formed the musical Fiddler on the Roof.

Shirley Kaufman’s poetry deals with family relationships, personal identity, aging and death, violence, and the meaning of Jewish fate. Moving to Israel later in life, she worked on many translations of Hebrew poetry and was noted for her series of poems about the suffering of women in the Bible, set in modern Israel.

Writer Sue Kaufman is best-known for her novel, Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), which was made into a movie in 1970 with Carrie Snodgress in the title role. Her numerous books focus on observations of the upwardly mobile urban middle class in which she lived.

Lena Nemerovsky Kenin made major contributions to both gynecology and psychology with her successful medical practice and her groundbreaking work on postpartum depression.

As a member of the General Jewish Workers’ Bund, Helene Khatskels fought to realize socialist ideals about autonomy and liberation. As a Yiddish teacher and writer in Tsarist Russia and later the Soviet Union, she demonstrated a commitment to spreading and inspiring pride in Yiddish culture.

Rashel Mironovna Khin hosted salons that made her the toast of Imperial Russia, and, with the help of the novelist Ivan Turgenev, became the first Jewish woman to publish major literary works in the Russian language. As an affluent member of the Jewish merchant class, she received a first-class European education and portrayed the anxieties of the Russian-Jewish elite in her fiction.