Mirra Burovsky was the first Jewish actress to star in the mainstream Russian theater. Her stormy life and career brought her to center stage of Jewish cultural, intellectual, and social ferment in Tsarist and revolutionary Russia, Weimar Germany, and mandatory Palestine. Her third marriage, to psychoanalytist Max Eitingon, and the career of her son Yuli Khariton, “the father of the Soviet atomic bomb,” created the background for a continuing espionage controversy.

This article gives an overview of the participation of Jewish women in Austrian sport from the Habsburg monarchy to the present day. Drawing on selected biographies of sportswomen and functionaries, and with a regional focus on the capital city of Vienna, it explores the double relationship between female emancipation and Jewish self-assertion in an environment that had long been male-dominated and anti-Semitic.

Ginevra Blanis was a late sixteenth-century silk manufacturer of the Florentine ghetto and Siena. She left her mark as a founder of the young community with her philanthropy and in the public communication of what she considered Jewish values in the provisions of her will.

Ladino or Judeo-Spanish Sephardic songs are primarily a women’s repertoire. The two main traditions are that of northern Morocco and the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily today’s Turkey, Greece, the Balkans.

The arrival in pre- and post-state Israel of Jewish immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa resulted in a culturally diverse proliferation of music, much of which involved performance and composition by Jewish women. Jewish women have also contributed significantly to the development of music education and music scholarship, being involved in music studies publications and projects as well as the development of music education institutions.

Vienna-born, Budapest-trained painter Judy Cassab, a survivor of the Holocaust, arrived in Australia in 1951. She became one of the country’s best-known and best-loved artists, primarily for her portraits but also for her depictions of Australia’s bright interior.

Frances Elaine Rosenthal Kallison was a horsewoman and historian, a cofounder of the Texas Jewish Historical Society, and the only Jewish woman in the National Museum and Cowgirl Hall of Fame.  A regional leader of the National Council of Jewish Women, she lobbied to end the poll tax and open pre-natal clinics for the poor. The exhibit she curated on Texas Jewry for the 1968 World’s Fair in San Antonio has been continually updated.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is an American folklorist who is a scholar of Jewish cultures of Eastern Europe, North America, and Israel, museums, heritage, and tourism, as well as a curator of exhibits and documentarian. She is Chief Curator of the core exhibit of the POLIN Museum of Jewish history in Warsaw.

Bessie Margolin was raised in New Orleans’s Jewish orphanage, where she learned powerful lessons in social justice that propelled her trailblazing legal career through the New Deal and Nazi War Crimes Trials to the United State Supreme Court, where she championed the rights of millions of American workers. A reluctant feminist who became the nation’s top fighter for equal pay for women and a co-founder of NOW, Margolin used intellect and charm to open courtroom doors for countless women who have followed.

Sally Gottesman, born 1962 in New Jersey and residing in New York, is a non-profit entrepreneur whose leadership and philanthropy have had a major impact on the Jewish feminist and justice landscape.

Multi-disciplinary artist, curator, and art consultant Vered Nissim was born in Israel to Iraqi immigrant parents. She identifies as a Mizrahi feminist; her art revolves around her gender, ethnic, and class identities, and she aims to give voice to marginalized women in Israeli society.

Shula Keshet is an Israeli Mizrahi feminist activist, an artist, and a curator. Her activism strives for justice for underprivileged women and men in Israel; as a Mizrahi feminist artist and curator, she has created several exhibitions.

 For many years, women played a secondary role in Israeli cinema, with little voice of their own and limited largely to objects of the male gaze. More recently, women filmmakers, often emphasizing autobiographical narratives, have begun to critique the patriarchal family and present new perceptions of female sexuality and female social roles.

The only female member of the founding group of photorealists, New York-born painter and sculptor Audrey Flack is especially recognized for the feminine content in her art. Her feminist sensibilities manifest in both her pioneering paintings, which often consider stereotypes of womanhood, and her sculptures, frequently depicting goddesses and other strong female figures. Flack’s work appears in prominent collections around the world.

Flory Jagoda is a singer, musician, and composer who has promulgated and enriched the Sephardic and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) musical and folkloric tradition in the United States. Born in 1923, in Sarajevo, Bosnia (formerly Yugoslavia), she managed to leave Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia and avoid the sad fate of the extended family that nurtured her musical talent and Sephardic heritage. The popular Hanukah song, Ocho Kandelikas, is one of her many original compositions in Judeo-Spanish.

In the first century BCE, King Herod the Great built a fortified palace atop the mountain of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. Seventy years after Herod’s death, during the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, Masada was occupied by bands of Jewish rebels, including families. This entry surveys the literary and archaeological evidence of women among the rebels at Masada.

Women who ministered at the entrance of the Tabernacle gathered around to donate their copper mirrors (Exodus 38:8), which were then smelted down to make the basin where the priests would wash before entering the sanctuary. The women may have served as guards, warding off evil with their mirrors. Midrash, however, conjectures that the women used these mirrors to seduce their husbands in Egypt, raising up the hosts of Israelites.

Miriam “Miri” Regev is a former Brigadier-General in the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit and a current member of the Knesset in the Likud party. As a member of the Knesset, Regev has held government postings as Minister of Culture and Sport and Minister of Transportation and Road Safety.