Elaine Showalter is a pioneer of feminist criticism. She is best known for inventing the term “gynocriticism,” a new theoretical framework that argued that that women had been using the language of men for far too long and that they needed to develop a new critical approach to better understand the female subcultures that operate within male-dominated power structures. 

Professor Hanna Herzog is a key advocate for feminism in Israel. Herzog combines academic achievement and social activism, emphasizing the importance of listening to diverse voices and critically examining marginalized people. Her journey into sociology was influenced by her own experiences of marginalization, starting from her time at Reali High School in Haifa, which ultimately led to her interest in research and the pursuit of knowledge.

Marilyn Safir is an Israeli-American psychologist who played a critical role as a feminist activist in sparking the Israeli women’s movement and in establishing the academic field of women’s studies in Israel. Her academic career has focused on sex, sexuality, and gender. 

Charlotte Charlaque was a transgender trailblazer, actress, and translator in Weimer Berlin and post-Shoah New York City. 

Bettina Aptheker is an American feminist, writer, educator, and political activist. She advocated for racial justice, studied and taught African American women’s history, and founded the Feminist Studies department at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The year 2023 brought the deaths of several powerful and influential Jewish women, whose insights and voices changed the world and are all the more painful to lose in this difficult time. 

A self-proclaimed individualist, Gluck painted outside abstract contemporary trends. Instead, Gluck naturalistically painted subjects reflecting her personal life and social circle, making her a unique character in the modern British art scene. Gluck was also proud of her queer, androgynous identity, which she infused into her artwork.

Despite their small numbers, the introspective and penitential religious outlook of the German-Jewish Piestists had a significant and lasting impact on European Jewry. Written by men and intended for a male audience, the Pietists’ writings heighten the profound ambivalence toward women that is inherent in the rabbinic tradition

Gail Twersky Reimer is a teacher, writer, editor, passionate advocate for the humanities, and visionary pioneer of Jewish feminism. Reimer founded the Jewish Women’s Archive in 1995 to ensure that Jewish women’s stories would become integral parts of the historical record. Under her leadership, JWA pioneered the use of virtual technology in collecting, chronicling, and transmitting knowledge of Jewish women’s lives.

Anthropologist Riv-Ellen Prell initiated ethnographic study of ordinary American Jews that paid attention to religion, gender, ritual, and cultural performance. Her work addresses the primacy of gender in twentieth-century Jewish life and looks at economic and power relations often expressed through negative stereotypes of Jewish women.

Julie Eichberg Rosewald was America’s first woman cantor. Known as the “Cantor Soprano” at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, she served between 1884 and 1893. Rosewald enjoyed a brilliantly successful career in opera as well as being a composer, author, teacher, and professor of music.

Debra R. Kaufman has been a central voice in sociology, feminist studies, and Jewish Studies for over four decades. Her scholarship has spanned topics such as the role of women in Orthodox Judaism, post-Holocaust Jewish identity narratives, and contemporary American Jewish identity.

The New Testament describes Jewish women’s social roles in the late Second Temple period: in the home, in business ventures (especially textiles), in synagogues and the Temple, serving as patrons of the early Jesus movement, and as suffering from and being healed of various ailments. Despite the variety of examples of women’s agency, many Christian interpreters paint an historically inaccurate picture of a misogynistic culture in order to show Jesus, Paul, and their early movement as progressive on women’s issues. 

Ladino or Judeo-Spanish Sephardic songs are primarily a women’s repertoire. The two main traditions are that of northern Morocco and the Eastern Mediterranean, primarily today’s Turkey, Greece, the Balkans.

If Gerda Lerner were alive today, I think she’d use TikTok to educate its millions of users about women’s history.

Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community (AWP) was founded by Shifra Bronznick in 2001 as an intervention “to advance Jewish women into leadership, stimulate new models of shared leadership, and promote policies for healthy, effective workplaces.” Over fifteen years, AWP conducted groundbreaking research and adapted strategies from other sectors that engaged women and men in decisive, systems-based change.

Kate Bornstein is a pathbreaking transgender lesbian activist, theorist, and performance artist. She is known for tackling social ills and personal pain with joyful optimism.

Therezadeiras, prayer-women, began to play an important role in crypto-Jewish practice after the late fifteenth-century Expulsions from Spain and then Portugal forced anyone who wanted to live as a Jew to do so in secret.  

In the Hebrew Bible and ancient Jewish literature, most warriors are men. However, a few women go to war or kill: Deborah, Jael, the unnamed woman of Thebez, and Judith.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is a highly regarded Torah scholar and author. Her complex interpretive lens is both contemporary, in drawing from literary sources, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, and very traditional, in reading the Bible through the lens of classic commentaries and rabbinic midrash.

“Daughter Zion” or “Fair Zion” (in Hebrewbat 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.

Women who ministered at the entrance of the Tabernacle gathered around to donate their copper mirrors (Exodus 38:8), which were then smelted down to make the basin where the priests would wash before entering the sanctuary. The women may have served as guards, warding off evil with their mirrors. Midrash, however, conjectures that the women used these mirrors to seduce their husbands in Egypt, raising up the hosts of Israelites.

The Hebrew Bible tells six stories of barren women: three of the four matriarchs (Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel); the unnamed wife of Manoah/mother of Samson; Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel; and the Shunnamite woman, an acolyte of the prophet Elisha.  Each woman suffers a period of infertility, in some cases exacerbated by the presence of a fertile, though less beloved, rival wife. Eventually, God intervenes and the woman conceives, but the beloved son is then dedicated back to God, either in service or in sacrifice.

The story of the rape of Tamar, the daughter of King David, by Amnon, her half-brother (2 Samuel 13) is told in the wake of the king’s sins of adultery and murder. Tamar’s is the only woman’s voice in the Bible to be heard in resistance to rape, though she is ultimately silenced by her full brother, Absalom. He murders Amnon in vengeance and stages an insurrection against the king, his father, while she lives the rest of her life forlorn in Absalom’s house.

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.