Ruth Barcan Marcus
Regina Margareten
Regina Margareten was hailed as the “Matzah Queen” and the “matriarch of the kosher food industry” for both her business sense and her innovations to improve the quality of her products.
Anna Margolin
Despite her short writing career, Anna Margolin is regarded by literary critics as one of the finest early twentieth-century Yiddish poets in America. She was an active member of a circle of Jewish immigrant intellectuals in New York and her work influenced several major writers of her time, including the Yiddishist Chaim Zhitlovsky.
Bessie Margolin
Bessie Margolin was raised in New Orleans’s Jewish orphanage, where she learned powerful lessons in social justice that propelled her trailblazing legal career through the New Deal and Nazi War Crimes Trials to the United State Supreme Court, where she championed the rights of millions of American workers. A reluctant feminist who became the nation’s top fighter for equal pay for women and a co-founder of NOW, Margolin used intellect and charm to open courtroom doors for countless women who have followed.
Julianna Margulies
Maria the Jewess
Maria the Jewess was one of the founding practitioners in western alchemy, in the 1st–3rd centuries CE. She invented several types of chemical apparatus, ran a school of alchemy in Alexandria, Egypt, and was noted for her alchemical sayings. She is the earliest recorded Jewish woman to have published a book.
Mariamme I The Hasmonean
Mariamme, granddaughter of the last Hasmonean rulers, was the wife of King Herod of the new dynasty. After bearing him five children, she was executed by the king in 27 B.C.E.
Marilyn Golden
Marilyn Golden was a long-time disability rights advocate who played a leading role in advancing accessible architecture and transportation in the United States. She was a key player in developing the accessibility provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act and ensuring their effective implementation.
Fania Marinoff
Miriam Markel-Mosessohn
Alicia Markova
Dame Alicia Markova, Britain’s first and the first Jewish prima ballerina, combined amazing technique and personal strength with tremendous artistry to become one of the finest classical dancers of her generation. Through her touring and early recognition of the power of mass media, she was also one of ballet’s greatest ambassadors in the mid-twentieth century. Markova extended her legacy through choreography, teaching, and commitment to coaching the next generation of dancers.
Jessie Marmorston
Jessie Marmorston was a professor of experimental medicine, researching a stunning range of medical disciplines including immunology, endocrinology, psychoanalysis, and cardiology. Her research into hormone secretion led to breakthroughs in our understanding of the ways stress can contribute to heart attacks and certain cancers.
Judith Marquet-Krause
Judith Marquet-Krause was an archeologist who contributed her talents to early twentieth-century excavations of ancient cities across Palestine, most notably leading the excavation of Ai.
Marriage in Halakhic Judaism
Lenore Guinzburg Marshall
Lenore Guinzburg Marshall, novelist, poet, activist, and literary editor, pushed her publishing company to publish William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury after it had been rejected by twelve other publishers. She published her first novel, Only the Fear, in 1935 and her first poetry collection, No Boundary, in 1943, going on to write poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and a memoir.
Martha Ackelsberg
Martha Ackelsberg is a Jewish feminist lesbian anarchist activist, community leader, and academic. She is a leading scholar of anarchism and of anarchist women’s organizations of the Spanish Civil War. A founder and/or early leading visionary in pivotal United States Jewish developments, Ackelsberg has been a key voice shaping feminist, lesbian, and havurah contributions to twentieth- and twenty-first century Jewish life.
Martha, daughter of Boethus
One of the richest women in Jerusalem during her time, Martha, daughter of Beothus, used her wealth to change the laws of marital status to marry Joshua ben Gamla, a High Priest.
Hester Martinez
Hester Rose Martínez Nardea is a Mexican dancer, teacher, choreographer, director, promoter, and administrator. She is currently the director of the International Festival of Extremadura Dance-Contemporary Language and is the founding director of WIROMA Circle Dances.
Martyred Mother with seven sons (2MACC): Apocrypha
Following the passage of King Antiochus IV’s laws prohibiting the practice of Judaism, an unnamed mother leads a family through martyrdom.
Martyred mother with seven sons (4MACC): Apocrypha
Dalia Marx
Lilli Marx
Born in Berlin, Lilli Marx emigrated to England as a young adult but returned to Germany, where she helped institute a national Jewish weekly newspaper and worked to create a dialogue between German society and the Jewish community. She contributed to the creation of several Jewish organizations, notably the League of Jewish Women, and continued to work in social work until her death.
Maskilot, Nineteenth Century
Nineteenth-century maskilot were Jewish women proponents of the Haskalah, who wished to take part in the cultural and social revolution it preached. Despite assumptions that the Haskalah was an exclusively male movement, a small number of women read Hebrew literature, wrote in Hebrew, and regarded themselves as part of the Haskalah movement.
Sophie Maslow
A leader of the New Dance Group, Sophie Maslow was among the generation of dancers involved in the labor movement of the 1930s. Maslow saw her work as inspired by a personal heritage rather than by political ideology; she believed that dance “could enrich the lives of workers in and of itself.”
