Poetry

Holocaust Literature

Literature by and about women and the Holocaust explores the impact of the Nazi genocide on women during and after the war, its impact on subsequent generations, and the reflections of women on the implications of the Holocaust. Encompassing a range of literary genres, including fiction, poetry, drama and memoir, women’s Holocaust writing explores the intersection of history, imagination, Jewishness and gender.

Judith Herzberg

Judith Herzberg is a Dutch Jewish poet, essayist, screenwriter, and professor who has been hailed as one of the greatest living Dutch poets for her ability to imbue everyday objects with unexpected meaning. Making her debut as a poet in the early sixties, Herzberg has written poems, essays, plays, film scripts, and television dramas, with many translations and adaptations to her name.

Hebrew Song, 1880-2020

Hebrew song as a whole, including songs of Erez Israel and the State of Israel, is a unique socio-cultural phenomenon that has developed over time. The dawning of Hebrew song can be traced to the period between 1880 and 1903, and it has grown to reflect the diverse aspects of Israeli society since then. The contribution of women to Hebrew songs, in general, has risen steadily over the years.

Haskalah Literature: Portrayal of Women

The image of women in Haskalah literature reflects the relationship between the sexes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ashkenazi Jewish society and European culture. But Haskalah writers wished to shape new patterns of male-female relationships among their reading public; to change, at least partly, the attitude of men towards women; and to ‘improve’ women’s conduct within the home and community.

Shulamith Hareven

Born in Poland in 1930, Shulamith Hareven was an Israeli poet, author, essayist, and political activist. From capturing the lingering pain of Holocaust survivors to describing the harsh conditions of Palestinian refugee camps, Hareven used her writing to push Israelis to confront uncomfortable truths.

Marion Hartog

Marion Hartog and her sister Celia published influential poetry and books on Jewish themes, including works that were among the first fictions ever published by Jewish women anywhere in the world. Hartog later created and edited the first Jewish women’s periodical in history, The Jewish Sabbath Journal.

Käte Hamburger

Käte Hamburger was a German literary scholar and philosopher who developed a philosophical theory of literature.

Michal Govrin

Michal Govrin, born in 1950 is an Israeli poet, writer, and stage director. She takes a highly individualized perspective on Israeli-Jewish post-Holocaust reality by combining artistic experimentation with Biblical and Rabbinic sources and philosophical discourse. In her poetry, prose and essays she examines places and spaces within a polyphonic context of architecture, art and theater, the sanctity of land, and the national narrative.

Claire Goll

Claire Goll’s poetry and prose were fueled by the tragedies and scandals that shaped her life. She and her husband, writer Yvan Goll, were central cultural figures of the French avant-garde, and her prolific body of work includes journalism, multiple novels, short fiction, and numerous translations of other authors’ works.

Anna Maria Goldsmid

Anna Maria Goldsmid was a Victorian Jewish advocate of women’s education and Jewish emancipation who made a name for herself as a translator, lecturer, philanthropist, and poet.

Lea Goldberg

Lea Goldberg was a Russian-Israeli poet, author, playwright, literary translator, researcher, and professor. One of the great poets of modern Israeli literature, Goldberg used the forms of Eastern European folk songs to capture the world lost in the Holocaust.

Mire Gola

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.

Karen Gershon

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.

Luisa Futoransky

Poet, novelist, music scholar, and journalist, Luisa Futoransky has led a life characterized by travel and the arts: she has published over two dozen books (poetry and narrative fiction), many of which have been translated into English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Japanese, and German, and other languages. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991, the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1990, the Centre National des Lettres Fellowship in 1993 and 2010, and was the Regent’s Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997.

Rokhl Korn, Kadya Molodowsky, and Ida Maze

Dvoyre Fogel

Dvoyre Fogel was a Polish-Jewish philosopher, professor, translator, and Yiddish modernist writer of poetry, prose, and literary and art criticism. Fogel’s remarkable experimental poetry was radically avant-garde and attuned to all the modernist minimalisms.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, 1923

Fiction in the United States

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.

Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein was the preeminent Jewish woman literary author in late 20th- and early 21st-century England and a leading European Jewish writer. An award-winning poet, novelist, and translator, her works explore Jewish women’s identities as writer, wife, friend, and mother; assimilation; antisemitism; the Holocaust and its transgenerational impact; Soviet Russian poets; European Jewish life in the 20th century; Israel and Zionism; and the meanings of a literary life.

Marcia Falk

Marcia Falk is a poet, translator, and liturgist whose knowledge of the Bible and of Hebrew and English literature informs the feminist spiritual vision of her work. She is widely considered one of the foremothers of, and foremost contributors to, the Jewish feminist movement.

Ruth Fainlight

Writer and poet Ruth Fainlight’s work interweaves feminism and elements of Judaism, often using biblical imagery and reflecting on her own Jewish identity and the Holocaust.

Elisheva Bichovsky

After making Aliyah in 1925, Elisheva Bichovsky (born in Russia as Elizaveta Zhirkova), helped shape the Yishuv’s literary scene as one of Palestine’s first Hebrew poets. Her 1926 Kos Ketannah and 1929 Simta’ot were, respectively, the first poetry collection and first novel written by a woman to be published in Palestine.

Celia Dropkin

Celia Dropkin’s sexually explicit poetry expanded possibilities for the depiction of relationships between men and women in modern Yiddish poetry. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, her poems appeared in avant-garde Yiddish literary publications. Infused with erotic energy, the themes of Dropkin’s poetry – sex, love, and death – shocked her contemporaries.

Sophia Dubnow-Erlich

After finishing her education, Sophia Dubnow-Erlich became an active member of both the Social Democratic Labor Party and the Jewish Labor Party and wrote for Bund journals before fleeing Vilna for Warsaw in 1918. After emigrating to America in 1942, she remained politically active and continued her prolific writing career.

An illustration of a woman in a short, sparkling costume standing astride two white horses

Stella Drabkin

Stella Drabkin was a talented painter and mosaicist who innovated new methods of printmaking. She is known for her experiments with multitype, a variation on monotype printing with layers of texture and color, creating mosaic panels on biblical themes, and creating prints with poems. Following her death, in 1972 the Art Alliance established the Stella Drabkin Memorial Award Fund in her honor.

Lucie Domeier

Polish writer Lucie Domeier is best known for her work critiquing the portrayal and role of women, especially as presented in literature. She wrote several books in the early nineteenth century, most notably her critique in German of Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, which often addressed the challenges faced by women authors.

Selina Dolaro

A determined and talented performer, Selina Dolaro raised four children alone while pursuing an illustrious acting and singing career in late nineteenth-century England and America. Dolaro performed in various London operas, most notably as the title role in the first English version of Carmen. She made her American debut as Carmen in 1879.

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