A passionate idealist, Mire Gola organized anti-German resistance in World War II as a Communist in occupied Poland. She inspired others with her eloquent poetry and her fortitude through imprisonment and torture.

After surviving the Holocaust and immigrating from Budapest to Brazil, dancer Marika Gidali became an influential performer, teacher, and choreographer at a time when the arts faced serious repression under military dictatorship. In 1956 Gidali began dancing with the Ballet Company of Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. Gidali later set up her first school, which was the meeting point for many artists in the mid-1960s.

The Jewish Reform movement did not liberate women from their subordinate religious status, and the nineteenth-century bourgeois German family ideal with its rigid gender roles soon eclipsed the fluid structure of premodern Jewish families. Jewish women were expected to transmit German bourgeois values while also shaping their children’s Jewish identity.

Writer and poet Karen Gershon escaped the Holocaust by being sent to England on the Kindertransport. Her best-known book, We Came as Children (1966), documented the collective experiences of refugee children and established her literary reputation in England. Her introspective poetry often reflects on her family and the Holocaust.

Carl Friedman was a Dutch writer who published several international bestsellers about the Holocaust and second generation trauma. Though writing from a Jewish perspective, in 2005 it was revealed that Friedman did not have a Jewish background. The controversy marred Friedman’s literary career.

German-born Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in 1933, which assisted in sending Jewish European teenagers to Palestine prior to World War II to be trained as agricultural pioneers on kibbutzim. Although she was responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jewish youth, Freier’s efforts were not officially acknowledged until 1975, when she was eighty-three years old.

Anne Frank is famous for the diary she wrote during the Holocaust, in which she describes her life while hiding in an Amsterdam attic. She was caught and perished in Bergen-Belsen. Her diary, which is often part of school curricula, has become one of the central symbols of the Holocaust and human suffering.

From the French Revolution to the twenty-first century, Jewish women in France have undergone radical legal, political, cultural, and religious transformations. Seizing upon the increasing number of opportunities available to them, both as Jews and as women, Jewish women have left their marks on all areas of French society.

After Paulette Fink’s husband, serving in the French Army, escaped capture, Fink and her family fled to the unoccupied zone of France and joined the Resistance, hiding Jewish children and helping them escape. Despite her husband’s death, Fink continued working with the Resistance and the Jewish Brigade. When the war ended, she continued her work with refugees before settling in Minneapolis.

Gisi Fleischmann was a steadfast and brave fighter in the underground resistance to Nazism during World War II. Many times, she refused to escape Slovakia to safety and instead chose to stay and fight for her people to the bitter end.

A Polish-born writer who survived the Holocaust, Ida Fink published several collections of short stories and a novel that explore the experiences and after-effect of the Holocaust. Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past.

Literature by American Jewish women reflects historical trends in American Jewish life and indicates the changing issues facing writers who worked to position themselves as Americans, Jews, and women.

Minna Regina Falk was a historian, writer, and professor who is remembered for her work on German history. She became the first female full professor in New York University’s history department in 1963.

Born in 1939, Rachel Ertel is a translator and an essayist. She remains one of the most prolific translators from Yiddish to French and dedicated her life to the survival of Yiddish culture in France and America.

Ruth Dreifuss was the first Jewish member of the Federal Government of Switzerland and the first female President of the country. When she became President of the Confederation in 1999, she was the first Jew and the first woman to hold the office.

Gusta Dawidson Draenger was active in resistance movements during World War II, enduring imprisonment and torture. Her famous work, Justina’s Diary, recalls her experiences within the resistance and while incarcerated.