Writer Laura Z. Hobson is best known for her book Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), about anti-Semitism in America, which was turned into the Oscar winning film starring Gregory Peck. Her unconventional life as a single mother of two in the 1930s was reflected in her writing, as well as in Consenting Adult (1975), about a mother’s growing understanding of her son’s homosexuality.

For over fifty years, Israeli author Yehudit Hendel succeeded brilliantly in making a presence of her bold, independent, “other” voice, bringing us face to face, in her own way, with the fragilities of an Israeliness in search of itself.

A leader in the American feminist movement, Carolyn G. Heilbrun wrote some of the women’s movement’s most widely read texts, including Toward a Recognition of Androgny (1973) and Reinventing Womanhood (1979). These texts encouraged readers to reconceive the role of women in society and challenge conventional notions of masculinity.

Hundreds of compilations of Hasidic literature, a genre derived from oral traditions, were published in Eastern Europe between the start of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II. The image of “woman” varies in Hasidic literature according to the character in the story, its narrator, and its setting in time and place; therefore we can only refer to individual women, each on her own, and not to woman in general or women as a gender.

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.

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.

Born in Berlin, Sophie von Grotthuss grew up with a mother who resented her Judaism and who married her off at fifteen into an unhappy relationship. In her later years she became a prolific author, but only a few of her works, including a story and a play, have survived.

A multi-faceted Yiddish writer, Shira Gorshman embodied the vision and struggles of Jewish socialism throughout her long and productive life. Her work encompassed the shtetl of Lithuania, pioneering Palestine, the Soviet experiment, the Holocaust, and finally the return to modern Israel. In all these journeys her characters, many of whom are women, are revealed in their full humanity and individuality.

Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and political activist. Ginzburg is considered one of the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century, and her award-winning literary work is recognized for its exploration of family relationships and politics throughout fascism in modern Europe and during World War II.

Élisabeth Gille (1937-1996) was a French author known most of all for biography of her mother, best-selling novelist Irène Némirovsky, murdered at Auschwitz. It was written borrowing Némirovsky’s voice, narrated in the first person as “dreamt memoirs.”