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.

Marga Minco (b. 1920) is a Dutch writer famous for her literary work relating to the Holocaust and for her economical use of words. Both topic and writing style have made her work unique.

A Jewish-American poet, nurse, journalist, and educator, Penina Moïse was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1797. Penina Moïse, a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, shaped American-Jewish culture through her poetry as the first woman poet included in an American prayer book.

Kadya Molodowsky was a major figure in the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw (from the 1920s through 1935) and in New York (from 1935 until her death in 1975). She published extensively in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, and founded and edited two journals. Recurrent themes in her work include the lives of Jewish women and girls Jewish tradition in the face of modernity, Israel, and the Holocaust.

Deborah Dash Moore is a leading scholar of American Jewish history. Her influential work has focused on both urban and visual Jewish history in locales from New York to Miami to Los Angeles. A prolific interpreter of Jewish and American culture, Moore has played a key role in making American Jewish history a recognized subfield in the academy.

Elsa Morante (1912-1985) was an Italian author whose writing often addressed persecution and injustice. After fleeing Fascist authorities during World War II, Morante traveled extensively while continuing to write prolifically; she later won the Viareggio literary prize, Strega Prize, and Prix Medicis.

Italian Hebrew poet Rachel Morpurgo was part of the renaissance of Hebrew poetry and literature that began at the end of the eighteenth century. While earlier Italian Jewish women poets had written almost entirely in Italian, Morpurgo wrote all her poems in Hebrew and can be considered the first Hebrew woman poet.

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.

An award-winning anthropologist and feminist scholar, Barbara Myerhoff emphasized the importance of storytelling and studying one’s own community. Myerhoff’s work pioneered the study of elderly Jews and highlighted the role of women in religion, which had been previously neglected by the scholarly world.

Doña Gracia Nasi was the embodiment of passionate solidarity among exiles. As a young woman she inherited her husband’s fortune, and fled from Lisbon to Venice to Ferrara, where her family lived openly as Jews for the first time. In Constantinople, she assumed a role of leadership in the Sephardi world of the Ottoman Empire.