Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Adele Gutman Nathan

Adele Gutman Nathan was a prolific writer, theater director, and creator of historical pageants and commemorative events. She wrote fourteen children’s books, in addition to newspaper and magazines articles. Nathan directed theater in Baltimore and New York and staged events from the 1933 and 1939 World’s Fairs to the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Joan Nathan

Award-winning journalist and cookbook author Joan Nathan is a transformative figure in documenting and exploring the evolving Jewish experience both in America and around the globe through the powerful lens of food. A long-standing contributing writer to The New York Times and Tablet Magazine, Nathan is the author of eleven books, as well as hundreds of articles, podcasts, interviews, and public presentations about Jewish, global, and American foodways.

Maud Nathan

After her daughter’s death, Maud Nathan battled grief by throwing herself into social justice work, transforming herself from a society wife into an influential social reformer. She devoted her life to leading organizations that worked to expose poor working conditions for women and children and was a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage.

Irene Nemirovsky

Irène Némirovsky was a French novelist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin who wrote fourteen novels in thirteen years before her death in Auschwitz in 1942. Némirovsky’s sentiment towards Jews and conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1939 has drawn criticism in recent years.

Sheryl Baron Nestel

Sheryl Baron Nestel’s activism in the childbirth reform movement led to her investigation of how race and racism affect healthcare.

Cover of "Stunden der Andacht" ("Hours of Devotion")

Fanny Neuda

Fanny Neuda was born into a Moravian family of rabbis and acted in line with her family tradition when she published a book of prayers. The book, which was specifically aimed at women, was hugely popular. Neuda continued to write until the end of her life, emphasizing the importance of a moral upbringing for Jewish girls.

Bernice L. Neugarten

Beginning the 1950s, Bernice Neugarten began groundbreaking research on aging that exploded many myths about the elderly and emphasized the importance of tailoring services to the needs of individual elderly people. She became the University of Chicago’s first tenured professor of human development in 1960 and wrote eight books and more than 150 articles on her research.

Jewish Women in New Zealand

Although New Zealand’s Jewish community is small, “Kiwi” Jewish women have punched well above their weight and account for a significant number of the country’s “historic firsts” and remarkable achievements.

Isadora Newman

Isadora Newman was a celebrated writer, storyteller, poet, and artist. Born in New Orleans, her stories often focused on Creole and Black life and legend and folktales from foreign countries. Her books were translated into many languages and she later became an accomplished painter and sculptor.

Lesléa Newman

Lesbian feminist writer Lesléa Newman made history in 1989 with her controversial children’s book, Heather Has Two Mommies. Inspired by Newman’s friend, a lesbian mother who complained that there were no children’s books with families that looked like hers, the book sparked national controversy. Newman has written countless books for children, adolescents, and adults on homosexuality, Jewish identity, eating disorders, and AIDS.

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit risked her own safety to become one of the first female refuseniks to protest for the right to leave Soviet Russia.

Diane Noomin

Diane Noomin was an acclaimed cartoonist and editor and the creator of her alter ego, DiDi Glitz. Noomin was a central figure in women’s comics beginning with the early feminist publications of the 1970s. In 2011 she published an anthology of her work, Glitz-2-Go: Diane Noomin Collected Comics.

Idra Novey

Through her poetry, translation, and fiction, Idra Novey relishes playing in the space between languages.

Achy Obejas

Writer, translator, and activist Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956 and moved to the United States with her parents six years later. She is known for stories with characters and themes related to gender, queer sexuality, Cuban-ness, and Jewishness, as well as migration, displacement, and diaspora.

Jessica Posner Odede

Jessica Posner Odede first came to Nairobi with dreams of volunteering with a theater program, but her experiences in the slums of Kiberia drew her to co-found Shining Hope for Communities, creating a girls’ school as a hub for social services ranging from medical aid to clean power and water initiatives.

Dalia Ofer

Dalia Ofer is an Israeli historian whose work mainly focuses on women’s experiences in the Holocaust and collective memory of the Holocaust in Israeli society. Ofer has published a multitude of books and articles on these topics during her career, and she has held positions at many prestigious universities around the world including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Old Yiddish Language and Literature

Women played a central role in the development and evolution of Old Yiddish literature. Old Yiddish literature was published with women’s literacy in mind, most nominally for women’s religious practice and learning.

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen was an American-Jewish author, professor, feminist, and social activist whose powerful fiction about the lives of the working poor, women, and minorities have shaped the development of the American literary cannon. Tillie Olsen’s own struggles to combine writing with working and raising a family spurred her to recover the writing of other silenced women writers, revolutionizing the study of women’s literature.

Suze Orman

Susan Lynn “Suze” Orman has made a career of advising people to take more direct control of their finances.

Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Alicia Ostriker is a feminist revolutionary, a poet, critic, and creator of contemporary midrash. She is one of an increasing number of women writers who have the courage to approach bibliocal history and legend from an unorthodox, feminist point of view.

Fayga Ostrower

Fayga Ostrower, born in Poland, began her artistic career after her family immigrated to Brazil, where she quickly developed a love and a talent for engraving. Her award-winning works have been displayed across the world, and she wrote many books reflecting on the power of art as a universal human language.

Cynthia Ozick

Cynthia Ozick is a Jewish-American writer, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her creative, authentic, and intelligent stories, including “The Shawl” (1989) and “The Puttermesser Papers” (1997), have made her one of the greatest fiction writers and literary critics alive.

Rosa Palatnik

Rosa Palatnik, born in a shtetl near Lublin, was a prolific Yiddish author. She told stories of Jewish immigrants struggling to integrate into new lives in Poland, France, and Brazil, the three countries in which she lived. Her stories were witty and rich, with a complex relationship to the Jewish past and tradition, especially after the Holocaust.

Grace Paley

Grace Paley wrote highly acclaimed short stories, poetry, and reflections on contemporary politics and culture. A rare example of a writer deeply engaged with the world, Grace Paley made an impact as much through her activism as her writing.

Lilli Palmer

After fleeing Nazi Germany, Lilli Palmer pursued her acting career in Paris, London, Hollywood, and New York. In the 1950s, she returned to Germany, becoming celebrated once again in her home country. Palmer was not only a prominent actor in numerous successful plays, films and television programs, but also a painter and an author of both fiction and non-fiction.

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Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Writing