Media

Gladys Heldman

After originally planning to be a medieval historian, Gladys Heldman became a competitive tennis player and later an advocate for women’s tennis. The current generation of women tennis players owe their equal status to her important efforts.

Dame Myra Hess

One of Great Britain’s most famous classical pianists, Dame Myra Hess had the idea of setting up lunchtime concerts at London’s National Gallery during the Second World War. The success of those concerts made Hess an international star, and the honor of Dame of the British Empire was conferred upon her in 1941.

Goldie Hawn

After beginning her career as a dancer, Goldie Hawn won many awards for her critically acclaimed acting performances. She has been one of the most successful women in Hollywood and, since executive producing Private Benjamin in 1980, she has continued to produce films with her own production company.

Berta Zuckerkandl

Berta Zuckerkandl was a journalist and cultural critic. She was a hostess of a famous Viennese salon and between 1890 and 1940 and fought for the recognition of modern Austrian art, for a cultural and political dialogue between Austria and France, and for important humanist causes.

Miriam Shomer Zunser

Miriam Shomer Zunser, journalist, playwright, and artist, was an important promoter of Jewish culture in America during the period before World War II. Born in Odessa in 1882, Zunser left a strong legacy in the Yiddish literary world and in the world of Jewish activism and organization.

Hanna Zemer

In 1970 Hanna Zemer was chosen as the Israeli newspaper Davar’s editor-in-chief, the highest position held by a woman in Israeli media and politics at the time. Throughout her career she won prizes and praise for her journalism and leadership.

Yiddish: Women's Participation in Eastern European Yiddish Press (1862-1903)

The development of the Yiddish press allowed Jewish women to move from the domestic into the public sphere and to be part of public discussion about communities’ affairs, to acquire knowledge of other Jewish towns and world events, and to express themselves publicly in their own language understood by all. They wrote letters to the editor, stories and articles, and opinion pieces and practical instructions.

Helen Yglesias

At the age of 54, Helen Yglesias dedicated herself to becoming a writer. Her works focus on the lives and concerns of Jewish women in New York. Her most notable books include Sweetsir and The Girls.

Marjorie Wyler

Marjorie Wyler was a Jewish Theological Seminary professor for over half a century and was involved in numerous public service and Jewish organizations. Furthermore, her involvement in religious broadcasting, coupled with decades of public relations work, made her an advocate for the ethics of social justice inherent in Judaism.

Rosi Wolfstein-Fröhlich

Rosi Wolfstein’s life constituted a battle against war, racism, and social injustice. She worked with other socialist political figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, helped found the Independent Social Democratic Party, and was a representative for the German Communist Party. Despite having to flee to the United Stattes during World War II, Wolfstein returned to Germany and remained active in party and workplace politics until her death.

Sally Rivoli Wolf

Sally Rivoli Wolf joined the U.S. Navy during World War I as soon as women were admitted worked on newsp,apers when few women did, and spent many years as an active member and officer of three largely male veterans’ advocacy groups.

Belle Winestine

During a career that spanned over seventy years, Belle Winestine devoted her time, money, and energy to the development of women’s rights legislation. As a member of the women’s movement, Winestine believed that she contributed to the historical process that encouraged women to seek public employment and to pursue professional lives.

Ruth Westheimer

Ruth Westheimer, who lost her entire family in the Holocaust, served in the Haganah, and received her Ed.D. from Columbia University, was an unlikely candidate for the role of host of a cheerful talk show about sex. However, her celebration of human sexuality, derived from Orthodox Judaism, made her an influential and highly successful proponent of joyful, responsible sex from the 1980s into the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Mildred Wertheimer

Mildred Wertheimer was a scholar of international relations and political science in the early twentieth century. In the 1920s, few women worked in the field of foreign policy, and even fewer achieved her level of scholarship and renown.

Trude Weiss-Rosmarin

Trude Weiss-Rosmarin made great advances for women’s involvement in Jewish life through the schools she created and her editorship of the Jewish Spectator. A dynamic speaker backed by broad-ranging Jewish scholarship and a prodigious memory, she was a popular lecturer at synagogues and Jewish centers across the United States and a foremost critic of American Jewish life and institutions.

Louise Weiss

Considered an architect of European unity, Louise Weiss is best known for her campaigns on behalf of the peaceful resolution of international conflicts during the interwar years and the Cold War. She also worked on behalf of Jewish refugee rights in the late 1930s and was a leading feminist activist who focused on obtaining the right for French women to vote.

Edith Weiss-Mann

Edith Weiss-Mann’s distinguished career as a concert artist, music journalist, and teacher led to universal acknowledgment of her tremendous influence on new music in Germany during the interwar period. Along with other musicians, Weiss-Mann pioneered the revival of the harpsichord and baroque music in particular.

Wendy Wasserstein

In 1989, Wendy Wasserstein won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles and was the first woman playwright to win a Tony Award. After graduating from the MFA program at the Yale School of Drama, in which she was the only woman, Wasserstein wrote countless dramas, three musicals, various comedy skits for television, and a series of essays published in the New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar.

Zoe Wanamaker

Zoë Wanamaker is one of Britain’s most enduringly popular and talented actors. The recipient of numerous awards for both her stage and television work, she is known to millions of cinemagoers worldwide for her role as Madam Hooch in the film Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001).

Anna Strunsky Walling

Anna Strunsky Walling was a Russian-born author, journalist, lecturer, and social activist. She produced several novels and memoirs and was involved in a number of political organizations, including the Socialist Labor Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she and her husband helped found.

Barbara Jill Walters

Barbara Walters has probably interviewed more statesmen and stars than any other journalist in history. A list of her numerous and timely TV interviews, both on the weekly newsmagazine 20/20 and on The Barbara Walters Specials, reads like a "Who's Who" of newsmakers.

Rokhl Korn, Kadya Molodowsky, and Ida Maze

Malka Heifetz Tussman

Malka Heifetz Tussman introduced into Yiddish poetry one of the most rigid verse forms, the triolet, and mastered another, the sonnet corona. A teacher of Yiddish language and literature in the Midwest and the West, Tussman was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish poetry in Tel Aviv in 1981.

Mina Tomkiewicz

Mina Tomkiewicz was a Polish author who wrote two books based on her personal experience growing up in Warsaw, Poland, and her deportation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Diana Trilling

Although Diana Trilling did not begin her career as a writer and critic until her mid-thirties, she quickly became a formidable literary critic. Her prominence amongst other critics and opinionated reviews pushed against the narrative that intellectualism could only be cultivated in universities.

Marie Trommer

Marie Trommer was an early twentieth-century writer, poet, artist, art critic, and contributor to American Jewish newspapers. After attending the Cooper Union Art School, Trommer became known for her contributions to Jewish newspapers, her poetry, and her oil and watercolor paintings. She was a member of the Creative Writers Group, Society of Independent Artists, and Art Alliance of America.

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