Inez Bensusan, an Australian and English playwright, actress, and suffragist, was born on September 11, 1871. She wrote and acted in many feminist plays and was active in multiple activist groups, often combining theater and feminism for a political cause.

Elana Dykewomon was a poet, novelist, editor, theorist, lesbian, and cultural worker. Her lesbian and Jewish identities and commitments informed and shaped her award-winning novels and other writings, and she made significant theoretical contributions to lesbian separatism and fat liberation.

JWA chats with Sarah Groustra for our series of interviews with Rising Voices Fellowship alums to mark the 10th anniversary of the fellowship. 

JWA talks to playwright Anna Ziegler. 

Judith Rosenbaum interviewed Merle Feld on July 19, 2000, in Northampton, Massachusetts, as part of the Women Who Dared Oral History Project. Feld recounts her upbringing in Brooklyn, her involvement in the Jewish community, her work in facilitating Israeli-Palestinian dialogue, and the profound impact of her activism on her life and career as a writer and public figure.

On February 21, 2005, Jewish comedian, actress, singer, and writer Rain Pryor received an NAACP Theatre Award for her one-woman autobiographical play, “Fried Chicken and Latkes.” In the play, Pryor explores her experiences with racism growing up Black and Jewish in Beverly Hills, CA, as well as her complex relationship with her father, the late comedian Richard Pryor.

Aída Bortnik was an Argentine journalist, dramaturge, and screenwriter who wrote the first Argentine screenplay nominated for an Academy Award (“The Truce,” 1974), an award she later won for best foreign film in 1986 (“The Official Story”). Bortnik was also the first Argentine to pen a screenplay that addressed the military dictatorship (1976-1983) and the first Latin American admitted as a permanent member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Ana María Shua is an Argentine writer and screen writer who is internationally known as a specialist in short stories, in particular micro fiction tales, which are stories of just two or three lines of extension. She is well known in the Hispanic world as the Queen of the Microstory and employs her writing to narrate various aspects of the Jewish experience.

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.

Abstract notions of feminism never interested Joan; specific women and their stories did. Yet without setting out to do so, Joan Silver influenced generations of women to come. She was a trail-blazer, a risk-taker, a champion of other women directors. 

That Scottish Shakespearian tragedy, so shrouded in mystery that it is unlucky even to say its name, gave society new ideas about women that have stayed with us since 1606, when the play debuted in London.  

The people who make stories a central focus of their life come in all genders, colors, creeds, and professions. JWA was lucky enough to speak with Paula J. Caplan, who first championed women’s stories as a clinical and research psychologist,and has now turned her attention, as a playwright, to the struggles that returning veterans face. Her newest play,Shades, is at theCherry Lane Theatre in New York until December 17th.

Two driving forces in my life are creativity and passion. These qualities have always gone hand in hand. As I have grown through the years, my love for writing and my passion for activism have blended into one tremendous, creative, passionate, one-act play.

Over Boston’s long winter, I shared Shabbat dinner with a friend-of-a-friend who, unbeknownst to me, is a talented poet and playwright. In addition to winning a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship this spring, Cecelia Raker’s play dry bones rising made its first full-length, professional debut in May at the Venus Theatre in Laurel, MD.

A poem by WWII hero Hannah Szenes was discovered 68 years after her death.

Jacqueline Susann was the first writer to have three consecutive novels hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Esther Broner "made room for us at the table by creating a whole new one—a Seder table at which women’s voices were heard.”