Writing

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Collection

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.

Adele Bildersee

A feminist before her time, Adele Bildersee was an advocate for women in education. She graduated with the first class of the then all-women’s Hunter College in 1903 and went on to help found Brooklyn College, serving as both its dean of students and its director of admissions.

Chaske Blacker (Blacher)

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.

Biblical Women in World and Hebrew Literature

The fate of biblical women in post-biblical times has been a reoccurring source of inspiration in world and Hebrew literature. With the rise of feminist criticism, there has been renewed vigor and excitement surrounding interpretation and retelling of biblical women’s stories.

Miriam Bernstein-Cohen

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.

Deborah Bertonoff

From her debut at age nine through her performances in her late seventies and teaching into her late eighties, Deborah Bertonoff made dance her life’s work. Bertonoff began studying at the Bolshoi School before moving to Israel and joining the Habimah Theater. After studying dance in Europe she began choreographing, and in 1944 she founded a dance studio. She was honored with the 1991 Israel Prize.

Anne Fleischman Bernays

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.

Sabina Berman

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.

Sarah Bernhardt

Named by her fans “the Divine Sarah,” the French actress Sarah Bernhardt is recognized as the first international stage star. She played some 70 roles in 125 productions in Europe and around the world and reinvented herself as a public icon, allowing the romances and tragedies of her stage heroines to reflect her own life.

Jessie Bernard

Sociologist Jessie Bernard’s feminist epiphany came at age 67 in 1969, but her earlier work anticipated feminist theory by discussing the differences between men’s and women’s experiences and arguing that quantitative studies did not accurately represent women’s stories.

Beatrice Berler

Beatrice Berler was an award-winning translator of Spanish-language novels and history and a renowned community activist. She worked in women’s fashion for over twenty years before returning to school at the age of forty-five, eventually becoming nationally recognized as a literacy activist.

Hinde Bergner

Hinde Bergner holds a special place in Yiddish literature by virtue of the fact that her memoir of family life in a late nineteenth-century Galician shtetl is one of few extant Yiddish memoirs to describe the traditional Jewish family on the edge of modernity from the perspective of a woman. Her intimate portrayal of her life results in a valuable source for Jewish social, family, and women’s history.

Lili Berger

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.

Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi

Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi was the second First Lady of Israel, wife to President Yizhak Ben-Zvi. Before and after Ben-Zvi’s tenure, she was active in the labor movement in Palestine and Israel and in the independence movement, as well as a prolific writer and recorder of her experiences in Erez Israel.

Berthe Bénichou-Aboulker

Writer and artist Berthe Bénichou-Aboulker was born in Oran, French Algeria, in 1886. She published a number of collections of poems and plays. After publishing her first play in 1933, she became the first woman writer to be published in Algeria.

Bene Israel

The Bene Israel is one of three Jewish communities in India. Bene Israel women were the producers and preservers of Bene Israel culture in India, and many were very influential leaders in their communities, academia, and religious life.

Hadassa Ben-Itto

Hadassa Ben-Itto was a jurist and best-selling author. In addition to serving in multiple prestigious positions, she is best known for her book The Lie that Will Not Die: One Hundred Years of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Hebrew, 1998).

Miriam Ben-Porat

Although Miriam Ben-Porat is perhaps best known as the first woman to be appointed an Israeli Supreme Court Justice, she also held many positions throughout her life, from state comptroller to professor and author. She was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1976, where she made rulings characterized by both legal and non-legal elements and grounded in the principles of equality and good faith.

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda collaborated with her husband to revive ancient Hebrew and make it a truly functional living language. She helped coin new Hebrew words, created salons for Jewish thinkers, and wrote articles for the newspaper she and her husband ran. Beyond her own writings, she helped edit and compile the seventeen-volume Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.

Netiva Ben Yehuda

Netiva Ben Yehuda was a Jewish-Israeli writer, poet, broadcaster, and Palmah officer. Ben Yehuda’s works surround her experiences before, during, and after her service in the Jewish underground Palmah and her dedication to enriching the lexicon of spoken Hebrew.

Ruth Ben Israel

Ruth Ben Israel was an Israeli legal scholar who specialized in labor law, social equality, and women’s legal rights. While a member of Tel Aviv University’s law faculty from 1986 until her retirement in 2005, Ben Israel wrote more than fifteen influential books on labor law and served as a legal advisor to multiple Knesset Committees related to labor and women’s rights.

Vicki Baum

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.

Sarah Bavly

Dutch-born Sarah Bavly was a pioneer nutritionist in the Yishuv who laid the groundwork for Israel's nutritional infrastructure and educational programming, directing Hadassah's hospital nutrition departments and school lunch programs and establishing the State's first College of Nutrition.

Evelyn Torton Beck

Evelyn (Evi) Torton Beck is a multi-faceted scholar, analyst, activist, feminist, dancer, Jew, and lesbian who has enriched each discipline she engaged. She wrote the iconic Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, as well as articles on Franz Kafka, Frieda Kahlo, and the transformative power of the sacred circle dance. Under Beck’s leadership, the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, became world-renowned.

Katja Behrens

Katja Behrens was a Jewish-German writer, translator, director, and activist whose writings often grappled with the myth of German-Jewish symbiosis in post-war Germany. Her stories delineated the tensions in Germany’s post-Holocaust social situation.

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