Jane Yolen is a Jewish-American children’s author, poet, and young adult novelist. Yolen has written more than 400 books for children and adults, including the children’s book series How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and the young adult Holocaust novella The Devil’s Arithmetic.

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.

Miriam Yalan-Stekelis revolutionized Israeli children’s literature with her classic poems and stories. She challenged the convention of the “happy ending” in children’s stories, portraying children playing yet also struggling and suffering from the judgment of adults. Yalan-Stekelis’s play-songs and poems have become an integral part of the cultural repertoire of kindergartens and schools in Israel.

Leni Yahil was a German-born Israeli scholar and pioneer of Holocaust research in the decades following the Second World War. Working closely with Yad Vashem, she was among the first to emphasize Jewish primary sources, explore the importance of Jewish resistance, and document the Jewish experience in Northern Europe during the Holocaust.

Spurred to publish initially as a response to the concerted campaigning of Christian conversionists, women writers were the first Anglo-Jews to produce literature on Jewish themes in England. By the end of the nineteenth century, literature by Jewish women had expanded to encompass not only works defensive of the dignity and rights of Anglo-Jewry, but also satirical novels critical of the community’s materialism and marriage practices.

Helen Rosen Woodward is best known for her contribution to the world of advertising and is generally believed to be the first female account executive in the United States. She was also prolific author who was committed to social justice.

Nelly Wolffheim spent her career developing and teaching a kindergarten curriculum based around Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework. She taught this curriculum, which encouraged children to express their sexual desires, to Jewish women teachers in Berlin. After escaping Germany for England in 1939, Wolffheim struggled to continue her research but began publishing her work again after the war.

Theresa Wolfson, economist and educator, taught at Brooklyn College from 1929 until her retirement in 1967. A prolific writer, she published in the fields of labor economics and industrial relations. As early as 1916, Wolfson studied barriers to the advancement of women in the workplace and the unequal treatment of women within trade unions.

Martha Wolfenstein is a forgotten figure in American Jewish literature today, but near the end of her life, she was hailed by Israel Zangwill and other critics as “the best Jewish sketch writer in America.” Before her death at age thirty-six, she wrote with charm, learning and a distinctive woman's perspective.

Adele Wiseman was one of Canada’s most highly regarded writers of the second half of the twentieth century. She is best known for The Sacrifice (1956) and Crackpot (1974), her two groundbreaking novels that explore Jewish life in Canada. Both are set in Winnipeg’s insular North End, reveal her interest in characters who challenge normative behavior, and affirm Wiseman’s belief in community.

Rachel Wischnitzer was a pioneer in the fields of Jewish art history and synagogue architecture. Her wide-ranging scholarship included books, articles, book reviews, and exhibition catalogs on ancient, medieval, and modern Jewish art. The breadth of her contributions to the history of Jewish art and architecture is exemplified in her lifelong dedication to her work.

Short story writer, novelist, and screenwriter Thyra Samter Winslow was well known for her stories and articles published in The Smart Set, American Mercury, and The New Yorker. Her writing frequently dealt with themes of small-town life, assimilation, and complicated images of women in unhappy marriages.

Annette Wieviorka (b. 1948) is a major French historian of the Holocaust. Her work highlights the specificity of the Shoah in the context of Nazi and Vichy crime generally.

Barbara Mayer Wertheimer gave a voice to the voiceless, empowering thousands of women union workers through her initiatives in the late 20th century. Wertheimer established the trade union women’s studies program in 1972 and developed several other academic programs, giving working women access to education and the ability to interact and organize with other union workers.

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.

Pauline Wengeroff was the author of an extraordinary two-volume work in German, Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century. First published in 1910, the memoir richly depicts traditional Jewish society in Russia, its unraveling during the nineteenth century, and the devastating impact this dissolution had on families and especially on women.