Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Mary Moss

Despite living with her parents for much of her life, Mary Moss lived a vivid existence through the characters she investigated as a journalist and the ones she invented in her fiction. Her journalism covered Yiddish theater, child care facilities, women in asylums, the immigrant experience, and women cranberry workers,. She also wrote two novellas and two novels.

Barbara Myerhoff

An award-winning anthropologist and feminist scholar, Barbara Myerhoff emphasized the importance of storytelling and studying one’s own community. Myerhoff’s work pioneered the study of elderly Jews and highlighted the role of women in religion, which had been previously neglected by the scholarly world.

Bess Myerson

When Bess Myerson encountered anti-Semitism as the first Jewish Miss America, she used her new-found fame to fight hatred through the Anti-Defamation League. Myerson stayed close to the Jewish tradition and people throughout her career, always presenting herself as a Jewish public figure.

Lazarus, Nahida Ruth

Nahida Ruth Lazarus was a German-Jewish cultural and literary critic, author, journalist, and essayist who was born in Berlin to a German-Christian family and converted to Judaism in 1895. She is best known for her published source book, The Jewish Woman (1891), a product of her fundamental interest in both feminism and Judaism that remains an important text for women’s and gender studies.

Doña Gracia Nasi

Doña Gracia Nasi was the embodiment of passionate solidarity among exiles. As a young woman she inherited her husband’s fortune, and fled from Lisbon to Venice to Ferrara, where her family lived openly as Jews for the first time. In Constantinople, she assumed a role of leadership in the Sephardi world of the Ottoman Empire.

Adele Gutman Nathan

Adele Gutman Nathan was a prolific writer, theater director, and creator of historical pageants and commemorative events. She wrote fourteen children’s books, in addition to newspaper and magazines articles. Nathan directed theater in Baltimore and New York and staged events from the 1933 and 1939 World’s Fairs to the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Joan Nathan

Award-winning journalist and cookbook author Joan Nathan is a transformative figure in documenting and exploring the evolving Jewish experience both in America and around the globe through the powerful lens of food. A long-standing contributing writer to The New York Times and Tablet Magazine, Nathan is the author of eleven books, as well as hundreds of articles, podcasts, interviews, and public presentations about Jewish, global, and American foodways.

Maud Nathan

After her daughter’s death, Maud Nathan battled grief by throwing herself into social justice work, transforming herself from a society wife into an influential social reformer. She devoted her life to leading organizations that worked to expose poor working conditions for women and children and was a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage.

Irene Nemirovsky

Irène Némirovsky was a French novelist of Ukrainian-Jewish origin who wrote fourteen novels in thirteen years before her death in Auschwitz in 1942. Némirovsky’s sentiment towards Jews and conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1939 has drawn criticism in recent years.

Sheryl Baron Nestel

Sheryl Baron Nestel’s activism in the childbirth reform movement led to her investigation of how race and racism affect healthcare.

Cover of "Stunden der Andacht" ("Hours of Devotion")

Fanny Neuda

Fanny Neuda was born into a Moravian family of rabbis and acted in line with her family tradition when she published a book of prayers. The book, which was specifically aimed at women, was hugely popular. Neuda continued to write until the end of her life, emphasizing the importance of a moral upbringing for Jewish girls.

Bernice L. Neugarten

Beginning the 1950s, Bernice Neugarten began groundbreaking research on aging that exploded many myths about the elderly and emphasized the importance of tailoring services to the needs of individual elderly people. She became the University of Chicago’s first tenured professor of human development in 1960 and wrote eight books and more than 150 articles on her research.

Jewish Women in New Zealand

Although New Zealand’s Jewish community is small, “Kiwi” Jewish women have punched well above their weight and account for a significant number of the country’s “historic firsts” and remarkable achievements.

Isadora Newman

Isadora Newman was a celebrated writer, storyteller, poet, and artist. Born in New Orleans, her stories often focused on Creole and Black life and legend and folktales from foreign countries. Her books were translated into many languages and she later became an accomplished painter and sculptor.

Lesléa Newman

Lesbian feminist writer Lesléa Newman made history in 1989 with her controversial children’s book, Heather Has Two Mommies. Inspired by Newman’s friend, a lesbian mother who complained that there were no children’s books with families that looked like hers, the book sparked national controversy. Newman has written countless books for children, adolescents, and adults on homosexuality, Jewish identity, eating disorders, and AIDS.

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit risked her own safety to become one of the first female refuseniks to protest for the right to leave Soviet Russia.

Diane Noomin

Diane Noomin was an acclaimed cartoonist and editor and the creator of her alter ego, DiDi Glitz. Noomin was a central figure in women’s comics beginning with the early feminist publications of the 1970s. In 2011 she published an anthology of her work, Glitz-2-Go: Diane Noomin Collected Comics.

Idra Novey

Through her poetry, translation, and fiction, Idra Novey relishes playing in the space between languages.

Miriam Novitch

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.

Achy Obejas

Writer, translator, and activist Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956 and moved to the United States with her parents six years later. She is known for stories with characters and themes related to gender, queer sexuality, Cuban-ness, and Jewishness, as well as migration, displacement, and diaspora.

Jessica Posner Odede

Jessica Posner Odede first came to Nairobi with dreams of volunteering with a theater program, but her experiences in the slums of Kiberia drew her to co-found Shining Hope for Communities, creating a girls’ school as a hub for social services ranging from medical aid to clean power and water initiatives.

Dalia Ofer

Dalia Ofer is an Israeli historian whose work mainly focuses on women’s experiences in the Holocaust and collective memory of the Holocaust in Israeli society. Ofer has published a multitude of books and articles on these topics during her career, and she has held positions at many prestigious universities around the world including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Old Yiddish Language and Literature

Women played a central role in the development and evolution of Old Yiddish literature. Old Yiddish literature was published with women’s literacy in mind, most nominally for women’s religious practice and learning.

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen was an American-Jewish author, professor, feminist, and social activist whose powerful fiction about the lives of the working poor, women, and minorities have shaped the development of the American literary cannon. Tillie Olsen’s own struggles to combine writing with working and raising a family spurred her to recover the writing of other silenced women writers, revolutionizing the study of women’s literature.

Suze Orman

Susan Lynn “Suze” Orman has made a career of advising people to take more direct control of their finances.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Writing