Writing

Doris Fleischman

Doris Fleischman made history as the first American married woman issued a passport under her own name. Her prolific writing career and public feminism brought her national recognition.

Shulamith Firestone was one of the founders of radical feminism in the United States. At age 25, she published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which brought together the dialectical materialism of Marx and the psychoanalytic insights of Freud in an effort to develop an analysis of women’s oppression that was inclusive of the dimensions of class and race.

Ida Fink

A Polish-born writer who survived the Holocaust, Ida Fink published several collections of short stories and a novel that explore the experiences and after-effect of the Holocaust. Her subtle and nuanced writing brings memory and imagination to bear on a traumatic past.

Fiction, Popular in the United States

The explosion of writing by American Jewish women in the twentieth century produced not only serious fiction, poetry, essays, and autobiography but also a range of popular literature geared towards pleasure and light entertainment. Popular fiction by American Jewish women in the twentieth century featured genres from regional novels, sagas, historical novels, romances, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, and humor.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Paris, 1923

Fiction in the United States

Literature by American Jewish women reflects historical trends in American Jewish life and indicates the changing issues facing writers who worked to position themselves as Americans, Jews, and women.

Edna Ferber

Prolific writer Edna Ferber celebrated America in her many works, even as she exposed its shortcomings. Her novel So Big won a Pulitzer Prize in 1925, and the film Giant and the musical Show Boat were both based on her novels. Ferber’s work was shaped by her childhood experiences of antisemitism and frequently featured strong and talented women.

Naomi Feinbrun-Dothan

Naomi Feinbrun-Dothan helped pioneer the scientific analysis of native Israeli flora and establish the study of botany and genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein was the preeminent Jewish woman literary author in late 20th- and early 21st-century England and a leading European Jewish writer. An award-winning poet, novelist, and translator, her works explore Jewish women’s identities as writer, wife, friend, and mother; assimilation; antisemitism; the Holocaust and its transgenerational impact; Soviet Russian poets; European Jewish life in the 20th century; Israel and Zionism; and the meanings of a literary life.

Ruth Fainlight

Writer and poet Ruth Fainlight’s work interweaves feminism and elements of Judaism, often using biblical imagery and reflecting on her own Jewish identity and the Holocaust.

Minna Regina Falk

Minna Regina Falk was a historian, writer, and professor who is remembered for her work on German history. She became the first female full professor in New York University’s history department in 1963.

Rose Eytinge

Reportedly the first American theater actress to earn a three-figure salary, Rose Eytinge was praised for her fiery, passionate performances. Known for taking on physically demanding roles, on a performance tour stop in Washington, she was invited to the White House by President Abraham Lincoln. In 1905 she published her autobiography, Memories of Rose Eytinge, detailing her life in theater.

Marcia Falk

Marcia Falk is a poet, translator, and liturgist whose knowledge of the Bible and of Hebrew and English literature informs the feminist spiritual vision of her work. She is widely considered one of the foremothers of, and foremost contributors to, the Jewish feminist movement.

Sara Riwka B’raz Erlich

An exemplar of the amalgamation of cultures in the Diaspora, Sara Riwka Erlich was a Brazilian-Jewish woman author and scientist whose writings drew from her work in psychiatry, her Jewish heritage, and her experiences in Brazil and Israel. The daughter of Polish immigrants, Erlich was born in Recife, Brazil, in 1935 and published memoirs, stories, poems, and essays in Portuguese until the early twenty-first century.

Claire Epstein

Claire Epstein is an outstanding example of a spirited woman archaeologist who worked untiringly and out of true love in search of the past in the Land of Israel. She received two important awards for her work: the Israel Museum’s Percia Shimmel Award in Archaeology and the Israel Prize for archaeology.

Rachel Ertel

Born in 1939, Rachel Ertel is a translator and an essayist. She remains one of the most prolific translators from Yiddish to French and dedicated her life to the survival of Yiddish culture in France and America.

Phoebe Ephron

Phoebe Ephron was not only a successful playwright and Hollywood screenwriter but also the mother of four daughters, three of whom achieved success in the film industry as well, thereby proving that women could have both a career and a family. Ephron's family life influenced her writing, and the lessons she learned at her job were also taught to her children.

Nora Ephron

As a journalist, writer, and filmmaker, Nora Ephron used her provocative wit, biting sarcasm, and ability to make the mundane entertaining to write her way into the lives of millions. Heeding her mother’s advice that “everything is copy,” Ephron drew upon her own experiences – childhood dreams, observations about aging, and her two divorces – in her articles, books, and screenplays.

Judith Kaplan Eisenstein

The first American girl to publicly celebrate a bat mitzvah, Judith Kaplan Eisenstein went on to become a Jewish educator, composer, and musicologist. Her accomplishments included studying at the school that would later become Julliard, teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary Teacher’s Institute, and writing a songbook for children.

A weathered piece of papyrus written with Hebrew script

Elephantine

The documents found on the Egyptian island of Elephantine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which date from the fifth century BCE, extensively feature women. The women enjoyed extensive financial and property rights and their narratives show a society in which women had significant rights, rare for the time.

Elisheva Bichovsky

After making Aliyah in 1925, Elisheva Bichovsky (born in Russia as Elizaveta Zhirkova), helped shape the Yishuv’s literary scene as one of Palestine’s first Hebrew poets. Her 1926 Kos Ketannah and 1929 Simta’ot were, respectively, the first poetry collection and first novel written by a woman to be published in Palestine.

Racheli Edelman

Racheli Edelman, a leading Hebrew publisher in her own right, is a scion of two of Israel’s most distinguished book and newspaper publishing families—Schocken and Persitz.

Andrea Dworkin

A lightning rod for controversy, American feminist Andrea Dworkin denounced violence against women, advocated women’s self-defense, and drafted groundbreaking legislation claiming that pornography violated women’s civil rights. In 1974, Dworkin and Ricki Abrams co-wrote Woman Hating in which they charged that pornography incited violence towards women and that consensual sex subjugated women.

Lily Edelman

Lily Edelman, a dynamic and much-sought-after lecturer, committed her life to learning, to teaching, and to understanding multicultural society. She published books for adults and children and was able to unite her interests in adult education and writing with her work at B’nai B’rith.

Tilly Edinger

Tilly Edinger made her mark as one of the leading vertebrate paleontologists of the twentieth century. Her pioneering work in paleoneurology, the study of fossil brains, established her international reputation as the outstanding woman in her field. She performed research in Germany before World War II and continued researching and teaching in the United States until her untimely death in 1967.

Ariel Durant

Ariel Durant was an internationally acclaimed writer. She helped her husband William Durant organize materials for his opus, The Story of Civilization. They coauthored numerous works, including Rousseau and Revolution, for which they won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize. The Los Angeles Times awarded her the 1965 Woman of the Year Award in Literature.