Media
Gisela Peiper Konopka
Berlin-born Gisela Konopka built an international reputation as a group social worker and expert on youth issues. Lauded for her involvement in the rebuilding of social services and education in post-war Germany and beloved by her students at the University of Minnesota, Konopka received more than 42 awards in her lifetime.
Annie Londonderry
Beryl Korot
Joyce Kozloff
Joyce Kozloff is an internationally recognized painter, public muralist, and feminist whose long-term passions have been history, culture, and the decorative and popular arts. One of the founders of the pattern and decoration movement, Kozloff is dedicated to creating her own work and giving the folk art of women of color a voice. Kozloff is known as one of America’s more original and engaging artists.
Hanna Krall
Hanna Krall is one of the most important Polish-Jewish writers and reporters. A Holocaust survivor, she portrays in her own extremely concise manner the vicissitudes of other survivors, rescuers, and perpetrators. Krall has been internationally recognized and her works have been translated into fourteen languages.
Judith Krantz
Novelist Judith Krantz began her career as a fashion publicist, writer, and editor for numerous magazines, which would shape the themes of her popular and best-selling novels. Beginning with Scruples in 1978, Krantz’s books are about fashion, beauty, fame, money, and sex, and always feature working women.
Miriam Kressyn
Miriam Kressyn was that rare talent known for both her performances and her work as a historian of the Yiddish theater. Kressyn performed with Julius Nathanson’s, Maurice Schwartz’s, and Aaron Lebedeff’s Yiddish theater troupes and toured Argentina and Europe. For over forty years, she and her husband hosted the radio program Memories of the Yiddish Theater.
Golda Ginsburg Krolik
Mariana Kroutoiarskaia
Mariana Kroutoiarskaia was a talented Russian composer and music producer who dedicated her entire life to music, film, and television. Kroutoiarskaia worked as a music editor for Russian television, a lecturer, and a composer for many films. She also supervised the arrangement and publication of music for children by various composers.
Anna Kuliscioff
Born in Russia but educated in Switzerland, Anna Kuliscioff became one of the key figures in Italy’s early socialist movement and was a feminist advocate who concentrated on poor women’s issues. In her later life, she helped publish a socialist periodical and hosted a prominent salon, often with her partner Filippo Turati.
Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin is most widely known as a nature poet for her well-crafted descriptions of life on her New Hampshire farm. Yet increasingly her social conscience prompted her also to write “poetry of witness,” protesting torture and other injustices. Her strong Jewish consciousness showed itself in poems about her Jewish ancestors and historic injustices to Jews and in use of sacred Jewish texts to form an environmental message.
Madeleine May Kunin
Ellen Kushner
Rose Kushner
With a self-described “streak of stubbornness, and a loud voice as well,” Rose Kushner—journalist, activist, and patient advocate—raised American national consciousness on breast cancer and helped create a national movement around the issue.
Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States
The Ladino press of the United States, still largely unexplored, is the most vital source for the multifaceted history of Sephardic women in early twentieth-century America. Though the editors, along with much of the readership, were male, these numerous publications are an important source of information about the social status and activities of Sephardic women, and even more so, illuminate male perception of them.
Ann Landers
For over forty years, the Ann Landers advice column—written by Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer—helped lovelorn teens, confused parents, couples on the brink of divorce, grieving widows, and a myriad of others who were in need of counsel. Translated into over twenty languages, Ann Landers reached millions of readers with her clear, witty and sometimes sarcastic column.
Linda Lavin
A prolific performer on stage and small screen, actor-singer Linda Lavin has been a role model for many of America’s working women. While her Jewish heritage has not always been the focus of her career, she has powerfully portrayed Jewish women whenever the roles have come her way—which they increasingly do.
Nigella Lawson
Fran Lebowitz
Annie Leibovitz
For decades, Annie Leibovitz and her camera have exposed to the public eye subtleties of character that lay beneath the celebrity personae of rock stars, politicians, actors, and literary figures. As chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, she fueled the American fascination with rock ’n’ roll dissidents in the 1970s; in the 1980s and 1990s, she captured the essence of the day’s great cultural icons with her work for Vanity Fair.
Ada Leverson
Although essentially a product of the revolt against High Victorianism, as well as of Edwardian and pre-War social mores, Ada Leverson remained attuned to the latest cultural trends, and was quite a prominent figure in the literary and artistic circles of the twenties. Her stylish and pleasurable novels afford invaluable insights into the human comedy and the English society of her day.
Lia Levi
Marj Jackson Levin
Flora Lewis
Flora Lewis was an American journalist whose insightful reports and commentaries helped explain some of the most significant international events of the second half of the twentieth century to millions of readers. At a time when women’s voices were rarely heard in journalism, Lewis was a trailblazer and a role model for an entire generation.
