Born into a wealthy Venetian Jewish family, Margherita Sarfatti joined the Socialist Party and became the art critic for the newspaper Avanti!, where she met Benito Mussolini. The two became lovers, and she followed Mussolini into the Fascist movement and helped plan the rise of the Fascists, only abandoning his cause when Mussolini embraced antisemitism in 1938.

Rachel Salamander is a writer, scholar, editor, and publisher. Born in 1949 in a DP camp in Germany, she has written and published multiple works about German Jewry and DP camps after World War II. In 1982, Salamander established the Literaturhandlung in Munich, a prominent bookshop and meeting place specializing in Jewish literature.

Helena Rubinstein built a global beauty empire by selling face cream to Depression–era housewives and teaching makeup tricks to film vamp Theda Bara.

Jean Rosenthal was a pioneer in theater lighting design, finding new aesthetics for dance performances and theater productions. Rosenthal did the stage lighting for a number of well-known Broadway plays and musicals, such as West Side Story (1957), Becket (1960), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Hamlet (1964), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), and Cabaret (1966). She is most famous for her unconventional lighting of dance and opera performances. 

Colette Roberts devoted her life to increasing people’s understanding and appreciation of modern art. The success she earned as a gallery director, art critic, and educator influenced the art world of the mid-twentieth century in New York and Paris and throughout the world.

Painting and sculptor Antonietta Raphaël rose to fame in the 1950s. Her paintings were seen for the first time in Rome in 1929; during World War II, she took up sculpting, and in the 1950s, she rose to prominence and exhibited her works worldwide.

Lucie Porges brought a combination of elegance and a relaxed sensibility to her long and fruitful collaboration with top fashion designer Pauline Trigère. As she continued to design, Porges also imparted her immense knowledge in the Fashion Department of the New School for Social Research.

Although women photographers long struggled for recognition and appreciation in Palestine and Israel, in recent years awareness of their roles and contributions to photograph has increased. The activity of women photographers who focus on gender issues has increased dramatically, while female curators and academics are gaining new perspectives on Jewish female photographers, re-evaluating their role in the development of photography in Israel.

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.

Sculptor Chana Orloff was a part of the avant-garde circle of Montparnasse, the international movement of artists in Paris. After immigrating to Paris from Palestine in 1910, Orloff became the unofficial portraitist of the Parisian elite, creating over three hundred portraits. Orloff’s sculpture figures are now in collections throughout Israel, Europe, and the United States.

Lea Nikel, one of the central pillars of Israeli painting, had more than fifty years of magnificent creativity to her credit. She belonged to no art group or movement and over the years did not change her distinctive style, even when new styles became fashionable. Her works were exhibited throughout Israel from the early 1950s into the 2000s.

Mela Muter was the first professional Jewish woman painter in Poland. She immigrated to Paris in 1901, and her portraits, landscapes, and still lifes reveal the influence of major artistic currents of the turn of the century: synthetism of École de Pont-Aven, van Gogh’s expressionism, French fauvism, and cubism. Her works have been shown in exhibits throughout France and New York.

Regina Mundlak was a skilled artist who exhibited her works in Warsaw at the Society for Promotion of Fine Arts and at the Aleksander Krywult Salon, and the Cassirer Salon in Berlin. She was interested in depicting Jewish life in the Diaspora, first through sketched portraits and later with oil paint. In 1942 she was probably deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp.

Regarded as one of the foremost designers in twentieth-century theater, Tanya Moiseiwitsch was an innovative designer of costumes, sets, and stages, responsible for over two hundred productions in England, Canada, and the United States. She made an impact in the male-dominated world of stage design.