Writing

Content type
Collection

Carry Van Bruggen

Fighting the constraints of her Orthodox upbringing and expectations of her role as a wife and mother, novelist Carry van Bruggen wrote movingly of both the need for freedom and the isolation it could bring.

Ruth Mack Brunswick

Psychoanalyst Ruth Mack Brunswick served as a crucial sounding board for Sigmund Freud, helping him revise his theories on the importance of the mother in the early shaping of the psyche. A valuable contributor to the American psychoanalytic group, Brunswick’s tactful thinking won her ideas a rare acknowledgment.

Joyce Brothers

Joyce Brothers was the second person and only woman to win the top prize on the popular television show The $64,000 Question. She became a popular psychologist and talk show host. Brothers conformed to normative understandings of 1950s womanhood but, unlike others, she gave advice about taboo topics such as sexuality and menopause.

Ruth Hagy Brod

Ruth Hagy Brod was a versatile and peripatetic career woman who worked for nearly fifty years as a journalist, publicist, literary agent, television host, and government antipoverty official.

May Brodbeck

May Brodbeck, whose career in the sciences ran the gamut from teaching high school chemistry to exploring fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of human consciousness, was among the foremost American-born philosophers of science.

Claire Brook

Claire Brook was a writer, editor, and composer whose career was most distinguished by her work in publishing. After retiring from W.W. Norton, she founded Pendragon Press, a small press focused on musicological books, with her husband and brother.

Suzanne Brøgger

Suzanne Brøgger is a Danish journalist, cultural critic, author, and essayist. With more than twenty books to her name, Brøgger has received widespread acclaim for her novels, essays, anthologies, poems, and plays.

Britain: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Since being allowed to resettle in 1656, Jews in Great Britain have established deep community ties throughout their diverse community. Class differences between early Sephardic settlers and the later wave of Ashkenazi immigrants gave rise to numerous Jewish charitable organizations, in which women played a key role.

Esther M. Broner

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.”

Rokhel Brokhes

Rohkel Brokhes offered an intimate and poignant glimpse into Jewish family life in Russia in the early 20th century. Her short stories, novellas, and plays documented the often-harsh lives of Russian Jews, especially women. She was born and raised in Minsk, and she would also die there in the ghetto.

Anita Brookner

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.

Jeanette Goodman Brill

As the first woman magistrate in Brooklyn and the second in New York, Jeanette Goodman Brill believed women had an aptitude and responsibility to judge cases involving women and children.

Ruth F. Brin

Ruth F. Brin helped transform modern prayer with her evocative writing, translation, and poetry. She wrote liturgical poetry, using vivid imagery from her own experience and challenging or reworking imagery of God as father or king that she found problematic as a woman and a modern American Jew.

Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends

Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal emerged in the overlap of late twentieth-century feminism and the Jewish and connected Jewish feminist writers, activists, and artists with each other, and with various public forums, for more than two decades. As a project made by, for, and about Jewish feminists, it became a space of creative collaboration, and a place to showcase late twentieth-century Jewish feminist cultural projection.

Fanny Brice

One of America’s great clowns, Fanny Brice built her career on a Yiddish accent and a flair for zany parody. Brice earned a reputation as a vaudeville star before creating some of her best-loved comedic personae for radio.

 

Elsie Oschrin Bregman

Psychologist Elsie Oschrin Bregman’s pioneering research changed how psychologists measured intelligence. Her research ranged from measuring intelligence in saleswomen to army recruits.

Jane Bowles

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.

Madeline Brandeis

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, Contemporary

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.

Judy Blume

American writer Judy Blume is a perennially best-selling author of books for children and adults. Her books are popular with generations of young readers and have sold over 85 million copies worldwide.

Helen Abrahams Blum

Helen Abrahams Blum was an artist who developed a passion for theater. Blum exhibited her work in various galleries throughout the United States and designed scenery and costumes for the Little Theater Movement. She was an active member of the Rodeph Shalom Sisterhood and the international peace movement.

Ruth Bondy

Ruth Bondy was an author, a journalist, and a gifted translator. Born in Prague to a large Zionist family, the majority of whose members perished in the Holocaust, Bondy survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau and arrived in Israel in late 1948. She soon became a journalist, and eventually began to write biographies and translate from Czech to Hebrew.

Blanche Bloch

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.

Claire Bloom

From her first film role in Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 film Limelight to her performance in 2010’s The King’s Speech, Claire Bloom has been one of the most iconic and popular actresses of her generation. During her long career in theater and film, Bloom won multiple awards and was made a Commander of the British Empire.

Anita Block

As editor of the women’s page of the New York Call, one of America’s first socialist newspapers, Anita Block ensured the section covered subjects of real social and political interest to women. After the paper closed, Block continued to write about the intersections of radical thought, theater, and women’s interests.

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