Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Norma Baumel Joseph

Orthodox feminist Norma Baumel Joseph has published widely on Jewish women and on feminism. Her activism in Canada is largely focused on Orthodox Judaism, and she is highly regarded as an expert on Jewish women and on feminism.

Esther Jungreis

Esther Jungreis, a leading Jewish public orator from the 1970s to the 1990s, was a pioneer in the Orthodox Jewish outreach movement. Her lectures and educational programs encouraged many previously unaffiliated young Jews to explore their heritage.

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.

Florence Prag Kahn

Florence Prag Kahn was not only the first Jewish woman to serve in Congress, but also one of only a handful of women serving during the 1920s and 1930s. A Republican party loyalist, Kahn was an effective maneuverer who introduced legislation that shaped the economy and geography of the Bay Area of San Francisco.

Madeline Kahn

Madeline Kahn acted in dramas and musicals on stage, film, and television, but she was best known for her comedic roles as Mel Brooks’s favorite female lead.

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.

Bertha Kalich

Known for her majestic bearing, great beauty, and fine diction, Bertha Kalich was the first female actor to make the transition from the Yiddish to the English stage. Kalich performed 125 roles in seven languages and was a star of Yiddish theater in Europe before immigrating to the United States and rising to fame in American Yiddish theater and mainstream films, plays, and radio shows.

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.

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.

Regina Kaplan

Regina “Kappy” Kaplan was nurse, teacher, hospital administrator, and health care innovator. Most notably, Kaplan helped break down gender barriers in medicine by creating the first nursing school in the South that admitted male students.

Kashariyot (Couriers) in the Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

Kashariyot were young women who traveled on illegal missions for the Jewish resistance in German-occupied Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. They smuggled goods, news, and other Jews in and out of the ghettos of Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Russia. While those who fought the Germans within the ghettos are often most celebrated for their heroism, kashariyot were essential in the survival of Jews within ghettos.

Shulamith Katznelson

Shulamith Katznelson helped make Israel a home for a wider range of people as both a pioneer of Hebrew-immersion programs and an advocate for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

Joyce Jacobson Kaufman

A pioneer in the field of physical chemistry, Joyce Jacobson Kaufman did groundbreaking work in the fields of jet propulsion fuels used in the space program, psychotropic pharmacology, and drug design. Kaufman also discovered a novel strategy for using computers to predict drug reactions and the trajectory of a significant number of carcinogens.

Judith Kaye, Presidential Libraries Conference, Hyde Park, New York

Judith S. Kaye

Judith S. Kaye was the first woman to serve as chief judge of the state of New York and chief judge of the Court of Appeals of the state of New York.

Helene Khatskels

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.

Loolwa Khazzoom

A pioneer of the Jewish multicultural movement, Loolwa Khazoom helped promote Sephardic and Mizrahi culture and priorities within the larger Jewish community.

Clare Kinberg

Clare Kinberg’s editing of the Jewish feminist journal Bridges put authors from across the spectrum of the Jewish, feminist, and activist communities in conversation with each other.

Francine Klagsbrun

Author of more than a dozen books and countless articles in national publications and a regular columnist in two Jewish publications, Francine Klagsbrun is a writer of protean interests who has made an impact on both American and American Jewish culture.

Gerda Weissmann Klein

Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein has used her experiences to educate countless people through her books, television appearances, and motivational speaking. Among numerous other awards for her work, Klein was appointed to the United States Holocaust Commission by President Clinton in 1997, and in 2011 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein was a pioneer in the psychoanalysis of children and inventor of the “play technique.” She contributed important insights regarding the treatment of individuals suffering from psychosis and personality disorders. Born to a Jewish family in Vienna at the turn of the century, she later lived and practiced in Budapest, Berlin, and London.

Blanche Wolf Knopf

Blanche W. Knopf made the publishing firm she shared with her husband one of the most respected in the world, bringing some of the greatest American and European thinkers of the twentieth century to an American audience.

Sarah Koenig

Journalist Sarah Koenig rocketed to fame as executive producer of Serial, an ongoing podcast that uncovered new details in the “cold case” of a murdered girl.

Sarah Kofman

Sarah Kofman was a French Jewish philosopher and professor who published many books on Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and more.

Hedwig Kohn

Born in Breslau, Hedwig Kohn was one of the early woman pioneers in physics. After a narrow escape from Nazi Germany, she went on to teach at Wellesley College and pursue independent research at Duke University in the field of flame spectroscopy, measuring absorption features of atomic species in flames.

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut made her mark on the American Jewish community in the areas of education, social welfare, and the organization of Jewish women. Grounded in her Jewish identity as the daughter and wife of rabbis, Kohut had a public career that paralleled the beginnings of Jewish women’s activism in the United States.

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

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