The Jewish Reform movement did not liberate women from their subordinate religious status, and the nineteenth-century bourgeois German family ideal with its rigid gender roles soon eclipsed the fluid structure of premodern Jewish families. Jewish women were expected to transmit German bourgeois values while also shaping their children’s Jewish identity.

Writer and poet Karen Gershon escaped the Holocaust by being sent to England on the Kindertransport. Her best-known book, We Came as Children (1966), documented the collective experiences of refugee children and established her literary reputation in England. Her introspective poetry often reflects on her family and the Holocaust.

Shoshana Gershonowitz was a leading woman soldier in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during World War II and in the early years of the Women’s Corps in the Israel Defense Forces.

After surviving the Holocaust and immigrating from Budapest to Brazil, dancer Marika Gidali became an influential performer, teacher, and choreographer at a time when the arts faced serious repression under military dictatorship. In 1956 Gidali began dancing with the Ballet Company of Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. Gidali later set up her first school, which was the meeting point for many artists in the mid-1960s.

Focusing on difficult roles written for older women, Therese Giehse earned a reputation as a talented actress who brought Bertolt Brecht’s works to life. She co-founded an anti-Nazi literary cabaret called The Peppermill in 1933 and was known for touring successful anti-fascist theaterical works. She had a long collaboration with Brecht and developed a reputation as an “intellectual popular actress.”