Vladka Meed was an underground courier who smuggled weapons to the Jewish Fighting Organization inside the Warsaw Ghetto while passing as a Christian outside its walls. In 1948 she published a memoir about her experiences, On Both Sides of the Wall. Meed received many awards for her work in Holocaust education and memorialization.

A direct, no-nonsense politician who participated in Israel’s governance from its independence onward, Golda Meir served as Israel’s first female Prime Minister through the turbulent period of the Yom Kippur War.

Alice Davis Menken was an influential social reformer whose many published works had a notable impact on the field of penology. She became interested in delinquency among young female Jewish immigrants while working at a settlement house on the Lower East Side. Menken proceeded to pioneer the argument that therapy, not punishment, is the most effective treatment for young delinquents.

One of the finest actors of her day, as well as a producer and a philanthropist, Helen Menken devoted her entire life to the American theater. While she was known for playing a lesbian in The Captive, for which she was arrested during a performance, and her role as Elizabeth I in Mary of Scotland, her biggest contribution to theater was creating the 1942–1946 Stage Door Canteen through the American Theater Wing, in which Broadway stars performed for service people.

Following successive careers as a New York City politician president and director of a major Jewish organization, Ruth Messinger has become nothing less than an icon of American Jewish progressive leadership. She became Manhattan borough president in 1990. After losing the 1997 mayor’s election to Rudolph Giuliani, she became the president and CEO of the American Jewish World Service, a position she held from 1998 to 2017.

Annie Nathan Meyer promoted women’s higher education and founded Barnard College, New York’s first liberal arts college for women. She also chronicled women’s work, dramatized women’s status in plays, novels, and short stories, and raised funds for Jewish and black students to attend Barnard.

G. G. Michelson (1925-2015) was a corporate and civic leader who was a trailblazer for women. As chair of Columbia University’s board of trustees from 1989 to 1992, she was the first woman to head the board of an Ivy League institution; she was also the first woman on the New York State Financial Control Board. In her 47-year career at Macy’s, she rose from management trainee to senior vice president and, as an executive, negotiated with unions representing twenty thousand employees.

The Mo’ezet Ha-Poalot was founded in 1921 as the women’s branch of the Histadrut, the General Federation of Workers in mandatory Palestine. In the name of women workers, the organization struggled for many years for equality in the eyes of the Histadrut, though it ultimately came to represent more broadly the interests of Jewish women in Palestine and Israel, including immigrants and housewives.

Lady Eva Violet Mond Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading, was born into one remarkable family and married into another. She occupied a unique place in Anglo-Jewry; as Vice President of the World Jewish Congress and President of its British section she was an eloquent and vocal supporter of the Zionist cause and the young state of Israel.

Lilian Helen Montagu was a British social worker, a magistrate in the London juvenile courts, suffragist, writer, religious organizer, and spiritual leader who founded and long remained the driving force behind the Liberal Jewish movement in England.

Belle Moskowitz served for two decades as a settlement worker, social and civic reformer, and labor mediator. In the early 1920s she became one of New York governor Alfred E. Smith’s closest advisers.

Margarete Muehsam-Edelheim was a journalist with a doctorate in law. In her native Berlin, she co-founded the organization Women Law Graduates and served as a City Councilor. In the United States, Muehsam-Edelheim was a founding member of the Leo Baeck Institute’s Women Auxiliary, as well as serving in many capacities for various organizations.

Shulamith Nardi helped shape relations between Jews and gentiles in the fledgling State of Israel through her writing and editing for several Zionist publications, her analysis of Jewish literature, and her work as advisor on Diaspora affairs to four Israeli presidents.