Art

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.

Lea Nikel

Lea Nikel, one of the central pillars of Israeli painting, had more than fifty years of magnificent creativity to her credit. She belonged to no art group or movement and over the years did not change her distinctive style, even when new styles became fashionable. Her works were exhibited throughout Israel from the early 1950s into the 2000s.

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.

Carrie Marcus Neiman

A born saleswoman, Carrie Marcus Neiman made her family’s department stores synonymous with high-end retail fashion. Dallas’s legendary Neiman Marcus specialty store owes its style, its personal brand of service, and its first cache of merchandise to Neiman, the fashion authority who helped launch a retailing concept.

Gertrud and Otto Natzler at their Brandeis Camp Studio circa 1956-1960

Gertrud Amon Natzler

Gertrud Amon Natzler’s collaboration with her husband, Otto Natzler, over almost four decades produced some of the twentieth century’s finest ceramics. Their nearly 25,000 pieces now reside in 70 museums and countless private collections worldwide.

Lillian Nassau

Lillian Nassau, the doyenne of New York City antiques dealers, was instrumental in the revival of international interest in turn-of-the-century lamps and metalwork.

Mela Muter

Mela Muter was the first professional Jewish woman painter in Poland. She immigrated to Paris in 1901, and her portraits, landscapes, and still lifes reveal the influence of major artistic currents of the turn of the century: synthetism of École de Pont-Aven, van Gogh’s expressionism, French fauvism, and cubism. Her works have been shown in exhibits throughout France and New York.

Regina Mundlak

Regina Mundlak was a skilled artist who exhibited her works in Warsaw at the Society for Promotion of Fine Arts and at the Aleksander Krywult Salon, and the Cassirer Salon in Berlin. She was interested in depicting Jewish life in the Diaspora, first through sketched portraits and later with oil paint. In 1942 she was probably deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp.

A drawing of a stage surrounded by red seats, with a grey, cubist set design featuring three doorways, several staircases, and a balcony held up by five pillars

Tanya Moiseiwitsch

Regarded as one of the foremost designers in twentieth-century theater, Tanya Moiseiwitsch was an innovative designer of costumes, sets, and stages, responsible for over two hundred productions in England, Canada, and the United States. She made an impact in the male-dominated world of stage design.

Sally Milgrim

In the early twentieth century, when well-to-do women dressed three or four times a day to carry on their daily social lives, Sally Milgrim designed for any and all of these occasions, always incorporating luxury and detailing into the richness of her designs. Adorning First Ladies and movie stars alike, Milgrim’s designs are remembered to this day.

Linda Rosenberg Miller

Linda Rosenberg Miller devoted herself to Jewish studies and collecting art and archeological treasures.

Ellen Lehman Mccluskey

Ellen Lehman McCluskey, a firm believer that quality design is a result of close communication between architect and interior designer, built her own design firm into a business with national, international, and professional respect.

Etta Wedell Mastbaum

Etta Wedell Mastbaum was the scion of a prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century Philadelphia family. A philanthropist, department store executive, art collector, and director of a national chain of motion picture theaters, Mastbaum donated a collection of Rodin sculptures and ephemera to the city of Philadelphia.

Lane Bryant Malsin

Lane Bryant Malsin revolutionized the clothing industry with her classy maternity wear and clothes for plus–size women. Malsin was a deeply ethical employer, offering pensions, health insurance, and profit–sharing at a time when few other businesses did.

Madame d'Ora

Madame d’Ora’s vibrant portraits of twentieth-century artists and intellectuals remain important testaments to European cultural life at the turn of the century and beyond. D’Ora was the first woman accepted by the Association of Austrian photographers, and one of the first photographers to focus on modern dance and fashion. She paved the way for many Jewish female photographers to find success.

Mary Ann Cohen Magnin

Until her death, Mary Ann Cohen Magnin took an active interest in the department store she founded, I. Magnin and Company, an exclusive chain that specialized in women’s clothing. Energetic, stubborn, and with an outstanding intuition for business, Magnin rose to stunning success at the turn of the twentieth century.

Dorothea Litzinger

Dorothea Litzinger was a talented painter, known for her paintings of flowers and landscapes. Although she died at the young age of 35, she was actively involved in her local community and a successful artist, who had many gallery exhibitions.

Charlotte Lipsky

Charlotte Schacht Lipsky found an unusual balance between activism and pragmatism: on one hand, a follower of the revolutionary Emma Goldman, on the other, the owner of a successful interior decorating business. In her later years, she was involved in Hadassah and the Women’s American ORT, an organization that taught trade skills to Jews around the world.

Batia Lichansky

Batia Lichansky, Israel’s first woman sculptor, famously expressed the pioneer Zionist spirit during the formative years of the State of Israel through her portrait sculptures, reliefs, and memorials sculpted in stone, wood, and bronze. After studying across Europe, Lichansky became a prominent Israeli artist and won the Tel Aviv-Jaffa Dizengoff Prize twice, in 1944 and 1957.

Florence Nightingale Levy

Florence Nightingale Levy’s most significant achievement was the founding of the American Art Annual in 1898. A comprehensive directory of the American art world, the Annual catalogued schools, associations, exhibitions, and artists nationwide. Levy went on to perform invaluable editing, organizing, and educational roles in the American art world for the next fifty years.

Paola Levi-Montalcini

Paola Levi-Montalcini was an influential twentieth-century Italian painter who aimed for a synthetical expressiveness and played a key role in the development of the Movimento Arte Concreta in the 1950s. She debuted as a painter in 1931 at the first Quadriennal of National Art of Rome and continued to exhibit throughout Italy. The Rome Institute of Enciclopedia Italiana devoted an important retrospective exhibition to Levi-Montalcini after her death.

Judith Leiber

Judith Leiber carved a unique place for herself in the world of fashion as the designer of some of the most inventive and sought-after handbags in the world. After fleeing the Nazi occupation of Hungary, Leiber worked for various handbag manufacturers in America before starting her own company in 1963.

Annie Leibovitz

For decades, Annie Leibovitz and her camera have exposed to the public eye subtleties of character that lay beneath the celebrity personae of rock stars, politicians, actors, and literary figures. As chief photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, she fueled the American fascination with rock ’n’ roll dissidents in the 1970s; in the 1980s and 1990s, she captured the essence of the day’s great cultural icons with her work for Vanity Fair.

Estée Lauder

Estée Lauder became a household name for beauty thanks to the luxurious makeup, lotions, and perfumes she created. An astute businesswoman, she made a fortune manufacturing, marketing, and distributing cosmetics around the world and was regularly honored for her business achievements.

Phyllis Lambert

Phyllis Lambert is a Canadian architect and philanthropist. After receiving her M.S. in architecture in 1963, she established herself as a leader in urban conservation and public architecture. She has received many awards and honors, including the Gold Medal from the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada in 1991—Canada’s most prestigious architectural award.