The Book of Genesis is the first book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. Its Hebrew name is the same as its first word, Bereshit. Genesis is an account of the creation of the world, the early history of humanity, and of Israel's ancestors and the origins of the Jewish people.
Shmuel Yosef Agnon was one of the central figures of modern Hebrew literature. In Hebrew, he is known by the acronym Shai Agnon. In English, his works are published under the name S. Y. Agnon.
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels include the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant and Ice Palace (1958), which also received a film adaptation in 1960. She helped adapt her short story "Old Man Minick", published in 1922, into a play (Minick) and it was thrice adapted to film, in 1925 as the silent film Welcome Home, in 1932 as The Expert, and in 1939 as No Place to Go.
Golda Meir was an Israeli politician, teacher, and kibbutznikit who served as the fourth prime minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974. She was the first woman to become head of government in Israel.
Zipporah, or Tzipora, is mentioned in the Book of Exodus as the wife of Moses, and the daughter of Reuel/Jethro, the priest and prince of Midian.
Grace Aguilar was an English novelist, poet and writer on Jewish history and religion. Although she had been writing since childhood, much of her work was published posthumously. Among those are her best known works, the novels Home Influence and A Mother's Recompense.
Henrietta Szold was an American-born Jewish Zionist leader and founder of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America. In 1942, she co-founded Ihud, a political party in Mandatory Palestine dedicated to a binational solution.
Gila Almagor Agmon is an Israeli actress, film star, and author. In Israel, she is known as "queen of the Israeli cinema and theatre".
Anita Shapira is an Israeli historian. She is the founder of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, professor emerita of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, and former head of the Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism at Tel Aviv University. She received the Israel Prize for History in 2008.
Yocheved (Juki) Weinfeld is an artist, museum educator and developer of interactive exhibitions for children. She studied at the Tel Aviv University and the State Art Teacher's College (Israel); at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town in South Africa).
Lev Tahor is an extremist Jewish sect founded by Shlomo Helbrans in 1988. Often described as a cult, it consists of about 200–300 members. The group follows a fundamentalist form of Jewish practice and adheres to its own atypical interpretations of Jewish law, including practices such as lengthy prayer sessions, arranged marriages between teenagers, and head-to-toe black coverings for girls and women beginning at the age of three. The group has faced allegations of kidnapping, sexual abuse, and child abuse.
Ida Fink was a Polish-born Israeli author who wrote about the Holocaust in Polish.
Esther David is an Indian Jewish author, an artist and a sculptor. She is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award.
Ayala Procaccia is a retired Israeli Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel. Before being elected to the Supreme Court in 2001, she served as a judge in the Jerusalem Magistrates’ Court until 1993 and in the Jerusalem District Court from 1993 to 2001. While active in the Israeli law courts, Ayala Procaccia worked to change Israeli law to champion equality for all, regardless of gender or religion.
Edith Bruck is a Hungarian-born writer, director and Holocaust survivor. She has lived most of her life in Italy and writes in Italian.
Dorit Rabinyan is an Israeli writer and screenwriter.
Naomi Frankel, also spelled Fraenkel and Frenkel, was a German-Israeli novelist. Born in Berlin, she was evacuated to Mandatory Palestine with other German-Jewish children in 1933. She became a member of Kibbutz Beit Alfa, where she lived until 1970. She began writing novels in 1956 and achieved fame with her trilogy Shaul ve-Yohannah, a three-generational tale of an assimilated German-Jewish family in prewar Germany. She wrote four other novels for adults as well as several books for children. In the 1980s Frankel abandoned her leftist convictions and adopted right-wing ideology, settling in the West Bank, where she died in 2009, aged 91.
Jessica Kairé is a Guatemalan artist. She is based in New York and Guatemala.
Judith Katzir is an Israeli writer of novels, short stories, and children's books in Hebrew. Her works have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, Estonian, German, Italian, Macedonian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish. She is noted for her rich language, her lyrical yet matter-of-fact tone, and her distinct style, which is often characterized by a female second-person narrator and sometimes by the syntactic use of long and short sentences to suggest the rhythm of events. Critics have identified her as one of the first Israeli women novelists to break into what had been, until the 1980s, a male-dominated field.
Rebekah Hyneman was an American Jewish author and poet, best known for her 1853 work The Leper and Other Poems.
