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.

Founded in 1913 as the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods and officially renamed Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ) in 1993, the WRJ has for more than a century galvanized hundreds of thousands of Jewish women to support and advance Reform Judaism, the Jewish people, and Jewish values in their home communities, around the country, and around the world.

Like Jewish women everywhere, Dutch Jewish women struggled with issues of assimilation, emancipation, and equality as both Jews and women. This article summarizes the conditions and challenges facing Jewish women in the Netherlands and the paths to progress and change they sought—education, work, activism, and literature, among others—from the nineteenth century to the present, including after the particular decimation of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust.

Pauline Newman played an essential role in galvanizing the early twentieth-century tenant, labor, socialist, and working-class suffrage movements. The first woman ever appointed general organizer by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Newman continued to work for the ILGWU for more than seventy years—first as an organizer, then as a labor journalist, a health educator, and a liaison between the union and government officials.

Israela Oron is a retired Brigadier-General in the Israel Defense Forces who worked to reform the IDF’s Women’s Corps and redefine women’s role in the Israeli military. As OC (Officer Commander) of the IDF’s Women’s Corps, she balanced extending more opportunities for women in positions traditionally held by men with the need to retain an infrastructure that would care for the specific needs of women in the IDF.

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.

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.

Bertha Pappenheim was the founder of the Jewish feminist movement in Germany. In 1904, she founded the League of Jewish Women. Pappenheim believed that male-led Jewish social service societies underestimated the value of women’s work and insisted on a woman’s movement that was equal to and entirely independent of men’s organizations.

Writer, poet, critic, and screenwriter Dorothy Parker became known for her fierce wit as Vanity Fair’s drama critic in 1918 and as a founder of the “Algonquin Round Table.” She wrote multiple successful volumes of poetry and short stories and co-wrote the screenplay for the original A Star Is Born (1939). Parker was also committed to activism and numerous political causes.