Writing

Gella Sänger (née Hirsch) was a Neo-Orthodox author, editor, and bookseller living in Fürth in Bayern, Germany. She was the first woman affiliated with (Neo-)Orthodoxy to write a guide to Jewish law and practice for women and girls. 

Galinka Ehrenfest, born in Estonia but raised in the Netherlands, was the chief originator, designer, and illustrator behind “ El Pintor,” a collective that created beautiful and imaginative children’s books published in the Netherlands during World War II. 

Alicia Partnoy, a survivor of Argentina’s so-called “Dirty War” (1976-1983), is an Argentine author, activist, and scholar who lives in Los Angeles, California. Her best known work is The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival, which was introduced as evidence in the trials against the perpetrators in charge of the secret detention camps in her hometown and in the South of the country. 

Winner of numerous championship victories, including the triple crown, Helen Hull Jacobs was a force to be reckoned with on the tennis court in the 1920s and 1930s. Her love for the court was only rivaled by her passion for writing, to which she dedicated the second half of her life, writing over 21 books, many about tennis.

Bertha Klausner was an influential literary agent in New York and Los Angeles. One of the earliest female literary agents, she represented major writers and cultural figures throughout the twentieth century.

Rising to prominence as a journalist in Weimar-era Berlin, Gabriele Tergit, née Elise Hirschmann (1893–1982), was an important chronicler of German-Jewish life. In her journalistic writings and novels, Tergit wrote biting social satires, sweeping panoramic novels, and lucid, hard-hitting commentaries on current events. A liberal whose writings reveal her strong commitments to social justice, women’s rights, and humanism, Tergit was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and settled permanently in London in 1938.

Selina Solomons was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century activist and writer, best known for her leadership role in the 1911 suffrage campaign that granted California women the right to vote. Solomons belonged to a prominent Jewish American family and spent her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She employed multiple genres in advocacy of women’s rights, including speeches, poetry, drama, short fiction, and a manual-cum-suffrage history titled How We Won the Vote in California.