Writing

Anna Strunsky Walling was a Russian-born author, journalist, lecturer, and social activist. She produced several novels and memoirs and was involved in a number of political organizations, including the Socialist Labor Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which she and her husband helped found.

Regarded by many of her friends and colleagues as the most important among the young Israeli poets of the 1960s, Yona Wallach has had a profound effect on Israel’s cultural life ever since her works began to appear in periodicals in the early 1960s, despite her early death from cancer in 1985.

Salka Viertel was an influential actress, writer, and organizer of Jewish European immigrants in Hollywood. Viertel co-wrote screenplays for several Greta Garbo films. Her Hollywood salon welcomed émigrés such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Fred Zinnemann, Arnold Schoenberg, and Reinhardt.

Miriam Dworkin Waddington was a distinguished and pioneering Canadian poet and literary critic. Her original poetry included many explicit references to her Jewish secular outlook, and other poems were infused with a commitment to social justice that drew on that same source. Impatient with the Canadian “canon” of her time, she introduced to wider audiences the works of A.M. Klein and poets writing in Yiddish with her literary criticism and her translations.

Rahel Levin Varnhagen was the first intellectual Jewish woman in German history who established herself as an independent thinker. Her way of writing was dialogical; she wrote to and together with her addressees.

Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson rescued the faltering Jewish Museum in New York. She shifted the museum’s focus from avant-garde art back to Judaica, launched exhibitions of art rescued from the Holocaust, and restored the struggling institution’s financial stability. She also created the Dorot Foundaiton, launching some of the finest non-denominational Jewish study programs worldwide.

Malka Heifetz Tussman introduced into Yiddish poetry one of the most rigid verse forms, the triolet, and mastered another, the sonnet corona. A teacher of Yiddish language and literature in the Midwest and the West, Tussman was awarded the Itzik Manger Prize for Yiddish poetry in Tel Aviv in 1981.

The Jewish population of Turkey navigated far-reaching changes in the political, social, and geopolitical spheres in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as the Ottoman Empire pursued reform and collapsed and the Turkish Republic that took its place imposed a process of “Turkification” on its residents. During this period, Jewish women partook in traditional customs relating to religion, family, and the home, while also accessing new opportunities in the public sphere through education and political engagement.

Mina Tomkiewicz was a Polish author who wrote two books based on her personal experience growing up in Warsaw, Poland, and her deportation to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Marie Trommer was an early twentieth-century writer, poet, artist, art critic, and contributor to American Jewish newspapers. After attending the Cooper Union Art School, Trommer became known for her contributions to Jewish newspapers, her poetry, and her oil and watercolor paintings. She was a member of the Creative Writers Group, Society of Independent Artists, and Art Alliance of America. 

With suffragist spirit and comedic skill, Bessie Thomashefsky adapted great American and British plays for Yiddish-speaking audiences. Thomashefsky performed Yiddish adaptations of plays by Chekov, Wilde, and Shakespeare, as well as modern Yiddish creations at the People’s Theater in New York, playing many strong female characters. From 1915 to 1919, she ran the People’s Theater and renamed it for herself. 

Nechama Tec's sociological work, informed by her experience as a Holocaust survivor, addresses the silences and inaccuracies surrounding the Holocaust and reveals untold stories of righteousness and rescue. Her experiences inspired the movie Defiance.

Helen Tanzer was an educator and translator in the early twentieth century. Contributing to the dissemination of classical and archaeological works, Tanzer well fulfilled the rigorous requirements of scholar and teacher.

Helen Brooke Taussig was one of the most celebrated physicians of the twentieth century. Through her research and teaching. she was a leader in the development of the medical specialty of pediatric cardiology, pioneering treatment for infants with congenital cardiac defects.

Born in Budapest, Eva Szekely was forced to stop swimming during the Nazi occupation of Hungary. However, she returned to the sport after the war and went on to win thirty-two national individual swimming titles and eleven national team titles. At the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, she set a new Olympic record in the 200-meter breaststroke.

Hannah Szenes has attained legendary status in the pantheon of Zionist history. After immigrating to Israel, Szenes agreed to participate in a military operation as a paratrooper. Hungarian authorities captured her and tortured her, but Szenes refused to talk. She was killed by a firing squad in 1944. Szenes mother published her daughter’s diary, poetry, and plays posthumously.

Margarete Susman published her first writings, a book of poetry, in 1901 and went on to have a prolific writing career that included plays, books, and journal articles. Susman combined literature and theory, often reflecting seminal texts of modern theory and addressing political issues and women’s rights. Her writings concentrate on the most problematic issues of the modern world: God and human beings, man and woman, Jew and Christian.