Media
Esther Jungreis
Amalia Kahana-Carmon
Amalia Kahana-Carmon was an Israeli author, activist, literary critic, and feminist. She was the recipient of many prestigious literary prizes, the “darling” of Israeli academe, and the subject of several scholarly Hebrew monograph. Her Woolfian Modernist literary works have contributed to the development of Israeli postmodernist, multicultural feminism.
Florence Prag Kahn
Madeline Kahn
Miriam Kainy
Miriam Kainy, Israel’s first established woman playwright, won the Israel Prime Minister’s Literary Prize in 1997. All sixteen of her plays were written in Hebrew and produced by Israel’s established theater companies. Kainy has also written manuscripts for radio and television and adapted dramas from English and Yiddish into Hebrew.
Bertha Kalich
Known for her majestic bearing, great beauty, and fine diction, Bertha Kalich was the first female actor to make the transition from the Yiddish to the English stage. Kalich performed 125 roles in seven languages and was a star of Yiddish theater in Europe before immigrating to the United States and rising to fame in American Yiddish theater and mainstream films, plays, and radio shows.
Ita Kalish
Ita Kalish was a Zionist activist, Jewish Agency employee, Israeli civil servant, journalist, and memoir writer. Born into the Warka Hasidic dynasty, Kalish rejected her upbringing and went on to write nuanced portrayals and female-centered literature about the Hasidic community. Kalish’s memoirs are a rich source on the inner life of the Hasidic courts of Poland at the turn of the twentieth century and center around her own and her friends’ journey to leave what they considered the stifling atmosphere of the Hasidic world.
Fay Kanin
Over a sixty-year career as a writer, actor, co-producer, and activist, Fay Kanin was awarded several Emmys and Peabodys, the ACLU Bill of Rights Award, the Crystal Award from Women in Film, the Burning Bush Award from the University of Judaism, and nominations for Oscar and Tony awards. She was the second female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Regina Kaplan
Regina “Kappy” Kaplan was nurse, teacher, hospital administrator, and health care innovator. Most notably, Kaplan helped break down gender barriers in medicine by creating the first nursing school in the South that admitted male students.
Kashariyot (Couriers) in the Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust
Kashariyot were young women who traveled on illegal missions for the Jewish resistance in German-occupied Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. They smuggled goods, news, and other Jews in and out of the ghettos of Poland, Lithuania, and parts of Russia. While those who fought the Germans within the ghettos are often most celebrated for their heroism, kashariyot were essential in the survival of Jews within ghettos.
Shulamith Katznelson
Shulamith Katznelson helped make Israel a home for a wider range of people as both a pioneer of Hebrew-immersion programs and an advocate for Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.
Joyce Jacobson Kaufman
Judith S. Kaye
Judith S. Kaye was the first woman to serve as chief judge of the state of New York and chief judge of the Court of Appeals of the state of New York.
Helene Khatskels
As a member of the General Jewish Workers’ Bund, Helene Khatskels fought to realize socialist ideals about autonomy and liberation. As a Yiddish teacher and writer in Tsarist Russia and later the Soviet Union, she demonstrated a commitment to spreading and inspiring pride in Yiddish culture.
Loolwa Khazzoom
Clare Kinberg
Francine Klagsbrun
Gerda Weissmann Klein
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.
Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein was a pioneer in the psychoanalysis of children and inventor of the “play technique.” She contributed important insights regarding the treatment of individuals suffering from psychosis and personality disorders. Born to a Jewish family in Vienna at the turn of the century, she later lived and practiced in Budapest, Berlin, and London.
Blanche Wolf Knopf
Blanche W. Knopf made the publishing firm she shared with her husband one of the most respected in the world, bringing some of the greatest American and European thinkers of the twentieth century to an American audience.
Sarah Koenig
Sarah Kofman
Sarah Kofman was a French Jewish philosopher and professor who published many books on Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and more.
Hedwig Kohn
Born in Breslau, Hedwig Kohn was one of the early woman pioneers in physics. After a narrow escape from Nazi Germany, she went on to teach at Wellesley College and pursue independent research at Duke University in the field of flame spectroscopy, measuring absorption features of atomic species in flames.
Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut
Gisela Peiper Konopka
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.
