Both through her poetry and her teaching, Myra Cohn Livingston inspired children to explore the music of language. She eventually wrote more than twenty collections of as well as several books on writing poetry, serving as an inspiration for students to enjoy poetry.

Novelist, essayist, and poet Amy Levy was a popular and successful writer of the late nineteenth century. Admired by Oscar Wilde, she was the second Jewish woman to attend Cambridge and the first at Newnham College. Her work reflects the autonomous and achievement-oriented ideals of the “New Woman,” as well as her own struggles with depression.

A writer of lyrical and sometimes sentimental poetry, Malka Lee was one of the most beloved female poets writing in Yiddish in America during her lifetime. Her poems had great folk appeal to Yiddish readers as reflections of their own experiences in the Old World and the New.

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887), an internationally known poet and essayist, created the role of the American Jewish writer. She lent her voice to the Statue of Liberty to enunciate a vision for America, but she herself was in no doubt about the Jewish roots of her vision in tikkun olam (repairing the world) through righteousness, justice, and compassion.

Else Lasker-Schüler was a German-Jewish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright. Born in Elberfeld (today part of Wuppertal, Germany) in 1869, Lasker-Schüler is best known for her dream-like, bohemian poetry.

Pearl Lang was the first dancer Martha Graham allowed to perform some of Graham’s own roles. She also brought elements of the ecstatic poetry and dance of Jewish traditions to her own praised work.

Ewa Kuryluk is an author, writer, essayist, artist, and art historian. Born in Poland, she did not know for a long time that her mother was a Jew and a member of the underground whose survival had been facilitated by her future husband. Kurlyuk has published in the field of art history, produced art held by museums around the world, and written poetry and novels.

Hedwig Lachmann was a poet and translator in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to her original poetry, she translated works by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Honoré de Balzac.

Isa Kremer (Belz, Bessarabia, 1887-Córdoba, Argentina, 1956) traveled the world performing art, folk, and classical music. She studied and sang opera in Italy but appeared as an art singer in Odessa, where she was the wife of Israel Heifetz, the editor of The Odessa News. Her great legacy is her Isa Kremer Sings Jewish Life in Song, a book and album of Jewish songs.

Rokhl Häring Korn is a major figure in modern Yiddish literature. She published eight volumes of poetry and two collections of fiction, much of which focused on themes of homelessness, the upheaval of war, and her experience during the Holocaust.

Poet Feiga Izrailevna Kogan was born into the Moscow Jewish community in 1891. Throughout her life she composed books of and about Russian poetry while harboring a love of Hebrew. Some of her works include: Moia dusha (My Soul) and Plamennik (The Torch).

Shirley Kaufman’s poetry deals with family relationships, personal identity, aging and death, violence, and the meaning of Jewish fate. Moving to Israel later in life, she worked on many translations of Hebrew poetry and was noted for her series of poems about the suffering of women in the Bible, set in modern Israel.

Ilona Karmel transformed details of her experiences as a Polish-Jewish prisoner in Nazi work camps and as a patient undergoing a prolonged convalescence into two compelling and memorable novels. Karmel was a distinguished writer, winning a fiction contest from Mademoiselle and teaching awards from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mascha Kaléko was a German-Jewish poet whose literary works have made her a mainstay of the German poetic cannon. She is best known for content, diction, rhythm, and Kalékoesque rhyme.

When the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS) was established in 1969 as the professional organization of scholars in the interdisciplinary field of Judaic studies, there were no women among its founders. Within the past few generations, however, a field that was traditionally dominated by men has gradually witnessed the emergence of many women scholars.

Marie Jahoda was a major figure in social psychology, known for her work on the effects of unemployment on emotional well-being, as well as the social impact of McCarthy-era blacklisting. Jahoda received an award for distinguished contributions to the public interest from the American Psychological Association in 1979.

Women writers faced many obstacles in the early years of modern Hebrew, but by the end of the twentieth century they had overcome marginalization to become a central part of the country’s literature. The achievements of women’s writing in Hebrew rank among the unquestionable triumphs of Israeli feminism.

Rebekah Gumpert Hyneman was one of a small group of American Jewish women who published their work in the nineteenth century. She used her writing to showcase her love and devotion to Judaism. In her work, she encouraged American Jews to resist assimilation and understand the significance of their religion and also aimed to educate uninformed and anti-semitic non-Jews.