Susan Stamberg, the first full-time woman anchor of a national nightly news broadcast, played an important role in making National Public Radio (NPR) a news organization that offered pioneering opportunities to women journalists. Her half-century career at NPR opened the way for other women by demonstrating competence, originality, and compassion in reporting and interviewing. 

Elaine Lobl Konigsburg is best remembered from her many beloved children’s novels, including The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley and Me, Elizbeth, and The View from Saturday. Her novels and her characters reflect the angst of growing up in a middle-class world and finding your way, no matter where you come from.

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.

Starting in the 1970s, Nan Goldin used her camera to document her own life and that of her friends, her alternative family. Her pictures revealed intimacy and violence, love and abuse, sexuality and addiction, in the downtown punk scene of New York in the 1980s, a world subsequently devastated by AIDS. She adopted a slide show format to be a mirror to her friends, and ended up mirroring their lives to the outside world.

Wendy Perron is a dance writer, educator, teacher, performer, and choreographer. Across her thirteen-year tenure at Dance Magazine, Perron contributed nearly 1,000 individual pieces of dance journalism.

Dorit Rabinyan was born in Israel in 1972 to a family that emigrated from Iran. She is an acclaimed and popular author whose writings highlight her Jewish/Persian heritage and provide a critique of the position of women and the effects of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict on individuals.

“Daughter Zion” or “Fair Zion” (in Hebrew bat tzion) is the personification of Jerusalem in poetic and prophetic literature. Initially, the city is positively likened to a daughter, protected under God’s special regard, but later, under the Babylonian siege, she is devastated, even ravaged. However, when Jerusalem is rebuilt, the daughter is forsaken no longer, returning to God’s grace in the prophecies of consolation.

Pulcellina was a prominent and powerful Jewish moneylender in twelfth-century Blois. In 1171, she was burned at the stake with mother than 30 other Jews on the false accusation of murdering a Christian boy.

Elizabeth (Liz) Swados was an American composer, writer, and theatrical director. Best known for her 1978 Broadway musical, Runaways, Swados created a diverse body of work that included novels, poetry, plays, music, and musicals.

Twenty-first-century Jewish women’s writing in the United States is wide-ranging in genre and topic. In this body of literature, we can find insightful and nuanced stories of contemporary American life as well as fiction that delves into lost or forgotten Jewish histories. From a female Spinoza to a female golem, a strong feminist ethic is pervasive in these writings.

Born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, Jamaica Kincaid is a Jewish Afro-Caribbean author. She was sent to the United States from her birthplace in Antigua at the age of sixteen and became a writer while living in the United States.

Yehudit Katzir (b. 1963) is an Israeli author who emerged as a leading female voice in what had been a male-dominated literary field until the 1980s. Her novels and short stories are noted for their idiosyncratic and lyrical language, as well as their focus on female identity and treatment of taboo themes.

The author of nineteen books of poetry as well as several books of essays and translations, Denise Levertov was a world-renowned poet. She was also a prominent political activist, particularly in the anti-war and environmental movements.

The history of Jewish women’s comics and graphic novels can be traced back to early and mid-20th-century progenitors. With the underground comics scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s, several Jewish women laid the groundwork for the themes, styles, and communal ties that would be taken up by the post-underground. In the 21^st century, the works of Jewish women in comics and graphic novels is booming.

Author of five novels and numerous short stories, Emma Wolf was a pioneering Jewish American writer whose works were widely read and discussed within and outside the American Jewish community.

Louise Glück, American poet, essayist, and educator, was the recipient of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as numerous other awards for her writing; she also served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. One finds the personal, the mythological, and the Biblical woven intricately throughout Glück’s oeuvre.