A novelist, playwright, and ritualist, Esther M. Broner emerged on the literary scene in the early 1970s as a leading feminist writer. Her novels feature bitter, fearless, and funny characters. In other works, Broner has combined autobiography with feminist critique of Jewish tradition and created new rituals, such as her 1976 “Women’s Haggadah.”

Anita Brookner was a British Jewish novelist and accomplished art historian known for her elegaic, gloomy novels depicting the bleak and disappointed lives of women. Receiving the Booker Prize in 1984 for Hotel du Lac, Brookner achieved international fame and recognition as one of the most accomplished writers of English fiction in the later twentieth century.

Born in San Francisco in 1897, Madeline Brandeis was a noted children’s book author and pioneer filmmaker, who produced films outside the mainstream Hollywood studios. Until her untimely death in 1937, Brandeis traveled the world in search of stories to tell, while aiming the lens of her camera at the lives of her characters.

Brazil is home to the second largest Jewish community in South America. Jewish women played important roles in the absorption of Jewish immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and also made important contributions to Brazilian intellectual and artistic life.

Admired for her darkly comic wit by writers like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and John Ashbery, writer Jane Bowles became the center of an avant-garde circle in Morocco with her husband, writer Paul Bowles. Her works have garnered critical acclaim long after her death.

Blanche Bloch helped open new opportunities for women in music as both a founding member and conductor of the New York Women’s Orchestra. Bloch collaborated with her husband, Alexander Bloch, performing, writing operettas, and delivering joint concerts and music lectures. Bloch also authored two mystery novels.

During her brief life, Yiddish writer Chaske Blacker worked in radio, tobacco and dress factories, and reared two children while supporting her poet-husband. It is no surprise that her stories mainly focused on the working class. She produced two novellas and a dozen short stories while still acting as the main breadwinner for her family.

Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was an influential actor, director, poet, and translator in Europe and Israel.  She was a versatile actor, appearing successfully both in comedies and in serious plays with the Ohel, Matateh, and Haifa Municipal Theater companies. In addition to her theater work, she wrote books and essays on theater and literature throughout her life.

Sabina Berman is a Mexican-Jewish playwright, screenwriter, film director, author, poet, and journalist. Considered Mexico’s most successful and critically acclaimed playwright alive, her plays have been staged internationally and her novels have been translated into eleven languages and published in over 33 countries.

Anne Fleischman Bernays is an American editor, novelist, and nonfiction writer. Her literary work is notable for its exploration of Jewish experiences of America, the pressure of assimilation, and the then-taboo subject of sexual harassment.

A prolific literary critic and essayist who wrote fiction, short stories, and novels, Lili Berger worked to educate, instruct, expose, and memorialize. Her works captured the Polish-Jewish experience in the twentieth century, particularly those of other writers and artists.

Writer, playwright, and screenwriter Vicki Baum is best known for her book, adapted into both the Broadway play and Oscar winning film, Grand Hotel. She wrote over 30 books and became one of the world’s best-selling authors of her time. Her works frequently depict powerful, self-reliant women.

Psychologist Dorothy Walter Baruch championed the health development of children as an educator, author, psychologist, and as a community leader. Her psychodynamic approach to child development focused on the relationship between physical, emotional, and intellectual development and on rechanneling children’s feelings through play and art therapy.

Devorah Baron is one of the few Hebrew women prose writers in the first half of the twentieth century to gain critical acclaim in her lifetime. She wrote primarily about Jewish women’s lives, focusing on the challenges women faced in a society that did not value them equally. Her work was in dialogue with European writers, including Chekhov and Flaubert, and with Hebrew modernist writer S. Y. Agnon.

A religious German-Jewish writer, intellectual, and ardent Zionist, Bertha Badt-Strauss was one of the first women to earn a doctoral degree in Prussia. She was a prolific writer, publishing hundreds of articles over the course of her lifetime, and was very involved in the “Jewish Renaissance” cultural movement. She was dedicated in particular to illuminating the diverse experiences of Jewish women past and present.

The minor character Asenath, mentioned in the Bible as Joseph’s wife and mother of Manasseh and Ephraim, became the heroine of an ancient Jewish novel written between 100 BCE to 200 CE, likely in Egypt. In the text, the daughter of an Egyptian priest falls in love with Joseph, turns to the God of Israel, marries Joseph, and is saved by God and some of Joseph’s brothers from attack by Pharaoh’s son.

Anglo-Jewish women writers have been active creators within the British literary arena since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a number of Jewish female voices, although it was not until the 1990s that the works of Jewish women writers began to be recognized as part of the British literary canon. Anglo-Jewish women writers’ multifaceted perspectives are reflected in a literary production characterized by experimentation and fragmentation.