Writing
Bella Perlhefter
Elisheva Carlebach is Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society, and Co-Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University. She is the author of The Pursuit of Heresy (National Jewish Book Award); Divided Souls: Jewish Converts to Christianity in Early Modern German Lands; Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe (AJS Schnitzer Prize); and Confronting Modernity: 1750-1880, vol. 6 in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization. She has held fellowships at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, the Katz Center at University of Pennsylvania, and the Tikvah Center at NYU Law School. She served as Editor of the AJS Review and as President of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
Helen Harris Perlman
With almost seventy years as a social work practitioner, supervisor, teacher, consultant, and author to her credit, Helen Harris Perlman was a legend in her field. She pioneered the “Chicago School” of social work, arguing that many people in crisis needed short-term therapy and solutions rather than long-term Freudian analysis.
Radia Perlman
Wendy Perron
Wendy Perron is a dance writer, educator, teacher, performer, and choreographer. Across her thirteen-year tenure at Dance Magazine, Perron contributed nearly 1,000 individual pieces of dance journalism.
Shoshana Persitz
Born in Russia to wealthy parents, Shoshana Persitz was a passionate Zionist and a leader in education reform. She operated a Hebrew-language publishing house in Russia before making Aliyah to Israel, where she continued in publishing and served three terms in the Knesset.
Rose Pesotta
Rose Pesotta was an iconic labor organizer and president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) in the early twentieth century. Pesotta saw her union organizing as an opportunity to fulfill the anarchist mandate “to be among the people and teach them our ideal in practice.”
Roberta Peters
Singer Roberta Peters led a career spanning more than half a century as one of the Metropolitan Opera’s most popular sopranos. A frequent performer on the radio, television, and stages around the world, Peters was also involved with many public health and Jewish organizations throughout her life.
Irna Phillips
Irna Phillips created hugely popular soap operas for radio and television and introduced plotlines that shaped the format of many soaps that followed.
Marion Phillips
As Chief Women’s Officer of the Labour Party, Marion Phillips was one of the most important figures in the campaign to free women from domestic drudgery at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her work brought a quarter of a million women into the Labour Party.
Molly Picon
A lively comic actress, Molly Picon brought Yiddish theater to a wider American audience. She acted in the first Yiddish play ever performed on Broadway and insisted on performing in Yiddish on a 1932 tour of Palestine. Filming on location in Poland, on the eve of World War II, Picon captured a view of shtetl life soon to be erased by the Holocaust.
Marge Piercy
Novelist and poet Marge Piercy's life and life’s work reflect her deep engagement with political activism, feminism, and Judaism. In genres including fiction, poetry, liturgy, memoir, and essays, Piercy’s work brings together spirituality, creativity, memory, sensuality, and political engagement.
Harriet Fleischl Pilpel
Harriet Fleischl Pilpel was a prominent participant and strategist in women’s rights, birth control, and reproductive freedom litigation for over half a century.
Clara Asscher Pinkhof
Clara Asscher Pinkhof dedicated her life and work to helping and advocating for Jewish children, initially as a teacher and later as an author. She is most known for her accounts of the experiences of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation.
Mimi Pinzón
Mimi Pinzón published a wide variety of acclaimed literary works in Yiddish, including her childhood novel Der hoyf on fenster, along with numerous Yiddish periodicals in Argentina and elsewhere. Pinzón is arguably the sole significant Yiddish writer who spent none of her school years in Eastern Europe.
Alejandra Pizarnik
With a vast body of work that includes books of poetry, prose works, essays, and diaries, Alejandra Pizarnik (Argentina, 1936-1972) stands out as one of the most important and influential figures in twentieth-century Latin American poetry.
Maya Plisetskaya
Maya Plisetskaya was one of the legendary ballerinas of her generation. Her aunt and uncle, Sulamif and Asaf Messerer, helped to guide her into the ballet world, despite the persecution they faced during World War II. In 1943 she joined the Bolshoi and remained a principal dancer well into the 1960s.
Pauline Podbrey
Pauline Podbrey was a committed Communist and anti-Apartheid activist. A Lithuanian child migrant to South Africa, she moved away from her Jewish roots and endured exile as a result of her mixed-race marriage, only to become disillusioned with Communism.
Poetry in the United States
Abigail Pogrebin
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Letty Cottin Pogrebin--a writer, activist, editor, organizer, and advocate--gained national recognition first in the national women’s movement and later as a spokesperson for Jewish feminism and issues related to Israel-Palestine. In her work, Pogrebin writes intimately about her own life’s complexities, while echoing the experiences of millions of women.
Anna Sophia Polak
Anna Polak was an important figure in the Dutch women’s movement in the early twentieth-century, who served as director of the National Bureau of Women’s Labor in The Hague for 28 years. Her controversial views on the importance of involving women in the working world led to her international recognition; she was beloved and admired by many.
Poland: Early Modern (1500-1795)
Polish Jewish Women played a complex role in their society and culture during the early Modern Period. This role was usually gender segregated, but upon a closer look, was more gender flexible than one might think.
Poland: Interwar
A minority habitually ignored by scholars, Polish-Jewish women played important roles in the changing cultural and political framework of the interwar years.
Eileen Pollack
Tamar De Sola Pool
Born into a family deeply involved in Jewish activism and scholarship, Tamar De Sola Pool spent over a decade as both a Hadassah chapter president and later Hadassah’s national president. She wrote two books in collaboration with her husband, volunteered at displaced persons camps in Cyprus, and helped resettle Jewish children in Palestine with Hadassah.

