Sonia Levitin mined both her personal history and major historical events for her award–winning books for children and young adults. Her 1970 book Journey to America, which detailed her family’s struggle during the Holocaust, was an instant classic.

Novelist, essayist, and poet Amy Levy was a popular and successful writer of the late nineteenth century. Admired by Oscar Wilde, she was the second Jewish woman to attend Cambridge and the first at Newnham College. Her work reflects the autonomous and achievement-oriented ideals of the “New Woman,” as well as her own struggles with depression.

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.

Polish-born writer Elisa Lispector was nine years old when her family immigrated to Brazil in 1920. Alongside her successful career as a public servant, Lispector was a writer who published seven novels and three books of short stories. Her second novel is semi-autobiographical in its grappling with Lispector’s Jewish immigration story.

Adeline Cohnfeldt Lust was a writer who published two novels and numerous short stories, newspapers articles, and editorials over her trailblazing career as a Jewish woman in journalism in the early twentieth century.

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.

Ida Maze was a “communitarian-proletarian” Yiddish writer who turned her Montreal home into a magnet for Yiddish writers and culture. After emigrating from Belarus to North America at age twelve in 1905, Maze began writing lyrical poems that were original and inspiring to young people.

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.

Marga Minco (b. 1920) is a Dutch writer famous for her literary work relating to the Holocaust and for her economical use of words. Both topic and writing style have made her work unique.

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.

Elsa Morante (1912-1985) was an Italian author whose writing often addressed persecution and injustice. After fleeing Fascist authorities during World War II, Morante traveled extensively while continuing to write prolifically; she later won the Viareggio literary prize, Strega Prize, and Prix Medicis.