Marilyn Safir is an American psychologist who played a critical role as a feminist activist in sparking the Israeli women’s movement and in establishing the academic field of women’s studies in Israel. Her academic career has focused on sex, sexuality, and gender. 

Charlotte Charlaque was a transgender trailblazer, actress, and translator in Weimer Berlin and post-Shoah New York City. 

Elana Dykewomon was a poet, novelist, editor, theorist, lesbian, and cultural worker. Her lesbian and Jewish identities and commitments informed and shaped her award-winning novels and other writings, and she made significant theoretical contributions to lesbian separatism and fat liberation.

The historian Judith Laikin Elkin Is best known as the founder of the Latin American Jewish Studies Association (LAJSA). She was the author of the foundational text The Jews of Latin America as well as research guides and two memoirs.

Through her socio-political artworks, Israeli painter Ruth Schloss (1922-2013) directed the viewer's attention to the human conditions of the downtrodden and marginalized in Israeli society from the 1940s through the early 2000s. She depicted figures and images people usually prefer to ignore, such as the poor and the unprivileged, the working class, newcomers, Mizrahi Jews, Palestinian refugees, the disastrous ruins of the wars in Israel, the Intifada in the occupied territories, women and children, newborns, and the elderly.

In 1927, Elza Niego, a young Jewish woman was stabbed to death by an older Turkish man whose romantic advances she had repeatedly refused. Her murder sparked an intense emotional reaction from Jews, which the Turkish press found unacceptable, leading to antisemitic publications and outbursts, including the arrest of nine Jewish leaders.

Analía Bortz is the first Latin American woman ordained as a Conservative rabbi. Her approach to spirituality and religion combines with her medical training. As a doctor specializing in bioethics, she has also helped women and couples with fertility issues. 

Taube Kaplan (the Greene Rebitzin) was the principal fundraiser and founder of the Hebrew Maternity Ward, founded in 1916 in the Plateau-Mont Royal neighborhood of Montréal, Quebec. Her efforts contributed to a reduction in maternal and infant mortality in Montreal’s Jewish community. Kaplan also raised funds for the establishment of the Jewish General Hospital, which opened its doors in 1934. 

Teresa de Lucena was born in Toledo, Spain, in 1467, the fifth of six daughters in a distinguished converso family. She faced the Spanish Inquisition twice—at seventeen and at 62—and she survived. Details about how she and her peers defied the Inquisition and continued to practice Judaism in secret come to life in her trial testimony, captured by scribes as she spoke.

Miriam Novitch was a member of the French Resistance during World War II and, after, an advocate for education on the Jewish resistance and the experiences of Holocaust survivors. She was one of the founders of the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum (also known as the Ghetto Fighter’s House, or GFH) and served as the curator for its art collection for many years. 

The Mexican Ashkenazi poet Gloria Gervitz (1943–2022) is known for her award-winning, book-length poem Migrations (Migraciones). This poem, an epic journey through the individual and collective memories of Ashkenazi women emigrants to Mexico, which she began writing in 1976, took her 44 years to complete. In 2018, Gervitz won the prestigious Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award for Migraciones.

Rachel Luria (Rokhl Lurye) was a writer of Yiddish short fiction and investigative journalism in the early twentieth century. She was known for her complex and often cynical writing about immigrant life, especially in regards to portrayals of sexuality and gender.

Berta Singerman (1901-1998) was an Argentine actress and reciter of poetry, famous throughout the Ibero-American cultural world. Born in Russia to a family of traditional singers (chazanim), she immigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, when she was four years old.

Julie Johanna Isner Engel dreamed of becoming a professional opera singer in Germany in the 1930s, but the rise of the Nazis interrupted that dream. Escaping to the United States, she trained her voice in synagogue choirs and local opera performances. In the 1970s, she took a cantorial position at a synagogue in Queens, one of a pioneering generation of women cantors.

Julia Vinograd was a street poet and the author of 68 slender volumes of verse widely admired for their vivid portraits of bohemians and street people in twentieth-century Berkeley, California. Her writing, which evolved in café open mic readings, is notable for its oratorical clarity, emotional warmth, and surreal imagination. 

Bettina Aptheker is an American feminist, writer, educator, and political activist. She advocated for racial justice, studied and taught African American women’s history, and founded the Feminist Studies department at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Chai Feldblum is a distinguished lawyer and legal scholar known especially for her work advocating for the rights of disabled and LGBTQIA people. She was the lead drafter of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as many other important bills affirming the rights of marginalized Americans. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Joan Nestle is an activist, writer, and educator known for her work on lesbian identity, sexuality, culture, and history, among other topics. Nestle also co-founded the New York-based Lesbian Herstory Archives, the largest lesbian-focused archive in the world, in 1975. Her essays and stories, which she began writing in the late 1970s, have been published in three anthologies.

Elsie Chomsky, one of the many young Jewish educators influenced by reformer Samson Benderly, taught Modern Hebrew and organized arts activities for many years at Gratz College in Philadelphia. She trained and supervised student teachers who taught in local Reform and Conservative Hebrew schools.  

Sarah Goldblatt was a staunch advocate of the Afrikaans language of South Africa. Despite learning the language later in life, she devoted herself to her adopted tongue, publishing multiple books in Afrikaans and serving on the editorial board of an Afrikaans newspaper. Trained as a teacher, she also taught the language to students around the country.

A self-proclaimed individualist, Gluck painted outside abstract contemporary trends. Instead, Gluck naturalistically painted subjects reflecting her personal life and social circle, making her a unique character in the modern British art scene. Gluck was also proud of her queer, androgynous identity, which she infused into her artwork.

Esther Barsel was a lifelong activist, committed to the Liberation struggle in South Africa from her high school days. She sold anti-apartheid newspapers, participated in a hunger strike, and endured three years of imprisonment and hard labor followed by a 20-year banning order, all in the name of ending apartheid in South Africa.

Zoe Benjamin was a twentieth-century Australian teacher who pioneered liberal ideas in early child education, child rearing, and child psychology. She wrote and lectured, both in person and over the radio, in depth on these topics. Her work gained such distinction that she was known overseas in England as well as Australia.