Writing

Born in Breslau, Hedwig Kohn was one of the early woman pioneers in physics. After a narrow escape from Nazi Germany, she went on to teach at Wellesley College and pursue independent research at Duke University in the field of flame spectroscopy, measuring absorption features of atomic species in flames.

Sarah Kofman was a French Jewish philosopher and professor who published many books on Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau, and more.

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).

Blanche W. Knopf made the publishing firm she shared with her husband one of the most respected in the world, bringing some of the greatest American and European thinkers of the twentieth century to an American audience.

Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein has used her experiences to educate countless people through her books, television appearances, and motivational speaking. Among numerous other awards for her work, Klein was appointed to the United States Holocaust Commission by President Clinton in 1997, and in 2011 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

Bronia (Bronka) Klibanski was one of the heroic Kashariyot (couriers) of the Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. She became the primary kasharit for the Dror Zionist group in 1943, obtaining critical weapons for the Bialystok ghetto revolt, gathering intelligence, rescuing other Jews, and saving the secret archive of the ghetto.

Chajka Klinger, a member of Ha-Shomer ha-Za’ir, was active in the resistance against the Nazis in Bedzin and Warsaw. Her mission was to live, so that she could keep the flame and memory of resistance alive. Her diaries were the first written evidence about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to escape Nazi Europe.

A Holocaust survivor from Vienna (1931-2020), Ruth Klüger emigrated to the United States in 1947 and pursued a career in academia. Her German-language autobiography weiter leben: Eine Jugend (1992) revealed her personal experience of the Holocaust to the public, establishing her as one of the leading public intellectuals on the Holocaust in Austria and Germany.

As a member of the General Jewish Workers’ Bund, Helene Khatskels fought to realize socialist ideals about autonomy and liberation. As a Yiddish teacher and writer in Tsarist Russia and later the Soviet Union, she demonstrated a commitment to spreading and inspiring pride in Yiddish culture.

Rashel Mironovna Khin hosted salons that made her the toast of Imperial Russia, and, with the help of the novelist Ivan Turgenev, became the first Jewish woman to publish major literary works in the Russian language. As an affluent member of the Jewish merchant class, she received a first-class European education and portrayed the anxieties of the Russian-Jewish elite in her fiction.

Lena Nemerovsky Kenin made major contributions to both gynecology and psychology with her successful medical practice and her groundbreaking work on postpartum depression.

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.

Bel Kaufman was the author of Up the Down Staircase, a novel that gently parodied the public school system in New York City. Published in 1964, the book went on to sell six million copies, spent 64 weeks on the best-seller list, and inspired a film adaptation in 1967 and a popular school play. She was also the granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, whose stories formed the musical Fiddler on the Roof.

Writer Sue Kaufman is best-known for her novel, Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967), which was made into a movie in 1970 with Carrie Snodgress in the title role. Her numerous books focus on observations of the upwardly mobile urban middle class in which she lived.

Miriam Karpilove was a pioneer among women writers of Yiddish fiction. She produced scores of works of short fiction and many novels about the roles of women in immigrant Jewish culture, most of which were serialized in the American Yiddish press during the first half of the twentieth century.

Regarded as one of the wittiest women in New York during the 1930s and 1940s, Beatrice Kaufman edited important works of modernist poetry and fiction, published short stories of her own in the New Yorker, and saw several of her plays produced on Broadway. Her life demonstrated that a perceptive, ironic, and acculturated Jewish woman could become a valuable contributor to New York’s literary subculture.