Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein has used her experiences to educate countless people through her books, television appearances, and motivational speaking. Among numerous other awards for her work, Klein was appointed to the United States Holocaust Commission by President Clinton in 1997, and in 2011 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

Bronia (Bronka) Klibanski was one of the heroic Kashariyot (couriers) of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. She became the primary kasharit for the Dror Zionist group in 1943, obtaining critical weapons for the Bialystok ghetto revolt, gathering intelligence, rescuing other Jews, and saving the secret archive of the ghetto.

Chajka Klinger, a member of Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir, was active in the resistance against the Nazis in Bedzin and Warsaw. Her mission was to live, so that she could keep the flame and memory of resistance alive. Her diaries were the first written evidence about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to escape Nazi Europe.

A Holocaust survivor from Vienna (1931-2020), Ruth Klüger emigrated to the United States in 1947 and pursued a career in academia. Her German-language autobiography weiter leben: Eine Jugend (1992) revealed her personal experience of the Holocaust to the public, establishing her as one of the leading public intellectuals on the Holocaust in Austria and Germany.

Sarah Kofman was a French Jewish philosopher and professor who published many books on Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and more.

Berlin-born Gisela Konopka built an international reputation as a group social worker and expert on youth issues. Lauded for her involvement in the rebuilding of social services and education in post-war Germany and beloved by her students at the University of Minnesota, Konopka received more than 42 awards in her lifetime.

Rozka Korczak-Marla was active in underground resistance during World War II, serving in the United Partisan Organization to smuggle weapons into the Vilna Ghetto and help Jews escape. After the war she immigrated to Palestine and settled into kibbutz life.

A writer of lyrical and sometimes sentimental poetry, Malka Lee was one of the most beloved female poets writing in Yiddish in America during her lifetime. Her poems had great folk appeal to Yiddish readers as reflections of their own experiences in the Old World and the New.

Fanny Lewald was a successful and respected writer in nineteenth-century Germany. She established a salon in Berlin and became tremendously productive, writing novels, essays, and articles. In her influential autobiography, she argued for the emancipation of women. Lewald believed that women’s professional work was the basis of their liberation.

Journalist, essayist, novelist, and translator Clara Malraux spent her early life involved with antifascist activities and joined the French Resistance during World War II while in hiding with her daughter. Her work often describes her attempts to make a place for herself in a misogynistic and antisemitic society.

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.

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.

Kadya Molodowsky was a major figure in the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw (from the 1920s through 1935) and in New York (from 1935 until her death in 1975). She published extensively in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, and founded and edited two journals. Recurrent themes in her work include the lives of Jewish women and girls Jewish tradition in the face of modernity, Israel, and the Holocaust.