Many a bar mitzvah boy beginning in the 1980s received the celebratory volume Great Jews in Sports by Robert Slater, first published in 1983. The frequently reissued book, most recently in 2005, is a collection of biographies of outstanding athletes—including a few women—written to spread Jewish pride.   

There was no companion book for bat mitzvahs until Slater and his wife co-authored Great Jewish Women in 1994. Since then, other biography collections of women have been published, but the recent surge of such volumes showcasing the lives of remarkable Jewish women—all excellent choices for girls and their mothers, too—is especially welcome.

Indeed, in this challenging time for Jews, shadowed by the events of October 7 and rising antisemitism, the idea of honoring Jewish women for their leadership, accomplishments and resilience is particularly resonant. We need heroes, as we try to inspire a kinder and more peaceful world.

Whether described as mensches, in the book She’s a Mensch!; icons, in Iconic Jewish Women; more than nice, in “Nice” Jewish Girls; or bursting with sheer chutzpah in Chutzpah Girls, the superlatives are well deserved. These four recent collections of short biographies celebrate Jewish women who broke barriers, pioneered new fields and made a difference in the world.

“For too long, the stories of Jewish women—facing both gender and religious discrimination—have been overshadowed or omitted, even within the Jewish community itself. We felt it was time to rectify this historical bias by shining a spotlight,” Julie Esther Silverstein, co-author with Tami Schlossberg Pruwer of Chutzpah Girls: 100 Tales of Daring Jewish Women (Toby Press), wrote in an email.

A few women appear in all four titles: Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, poet and immigration advocate Emma Lazarus, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

For Silverstein, these four were “essential inclusions because each exemplifies extraordinary moral courage and transformative leadership with lasting impact on Jewish identity and broader society.” Though the women are from different eras and broke ground in different fields, they “share a legacy of using their influence not for personal gain but to uplift their communities.”

Rochelle Burk, the co-author with her daughter Alana Baroch of She’s a Mensch!: Jewish Women Who Rocked the World (Intergalactic Afikomen), agreed. “You couldn’t do a book without them,” she said.

The other women featured across the books include a wide selection drawn from politics, arts, entertainment, science, law, education, religion, space exploration, Jewish leadership and more.

Chutzpah Girls

The timeline of the 100 profiles in Chutzpah Girls spans the period from the biblical Sarah to changemakers of the 21st century, more than 3,000 years of Jewish life. In the book, I discovered some Jewish women I’d never heard of, such as Annalouise Paul, born in 1964, who is the leader of the Annalouise Paul Dance Theatre.

A dancer and choreographer from Australia who today tours around the world, she began studying flamenco as a teenager. In the process, she learned about flamenco’s development during the Spanish Inquisition as a melding of Jewish, Roma and Arab influences. Paul also discovered that on one side she is a descendant of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492: “Flamenco was not just a beautiful dance but part of Annalouise’s core being, her DNA,” write the authors in Chutzpah Girls.

Then there’s the Latvian-born Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, who in the 19th century made history as “the first woman to set off on a solo cycling trip around the world”; and Asenath Barzani, from Mosul in 16th-century Kurdistan, now Iraq, who was the daughter of a legendary rabbi. Asenath studied with her father and eventually became head of his yeshiva. She was an authority on Jewish law and liturgy—and, “according to legend, she had supernatural powers. She once saved a burning synagogue and its holy books by unleashing a flock of angels with only a whisper.”

Chutzpah Girls also honors heroes from October 7, including Inbal Lieberman, who defended Kibbutz Nir Am on that dark day. The combat veteran was the first woman to lead security in her kibbutz near the Gaza border, holding off the attackers until army reinforcements arrived. Thanks to her efforts, not a single member of the kibbutz was hurt that day.

Attractively designed, the book features accompanying original portraits of all 100 women, created by 12 Jewish female artists from around the world. The paintings, too, tell memorable stories. Moran Samuel, an Israeli paralympic world champion rower who won a gold medal for Israel at the 2024 Paris Paralympics, is seen both rowing and in a wheelchair. Samuel took up the sport after a rare spinal stroke curtailed her basketball career.

She’s a Mensch!

She’s a Mensch! is illustrated with vibrant artwork by Arielle Trenk. The book opens with the line, “They rock! Jewish women ’round the world have talent, strength and smarts. They shine like stars in every field from science to the arts.” Geared toward the youngest audiences, aged 5 to 10, this title features 20 women who lived at some point over the past 140 years.

“You want to get girls thinking at an early age about how they can do anything,” Burk, one of the co-authors, said in an interview. “For the women we profiled, even their childhoods are fascinating. They didn’t just become who they were in adulthood.” Indeed, many of these women came from humble beginnings and, often with the support of others, crafted lives of wide renown.

Among the noteworthy portraits are those of actor Marlee Matlin, who in 1987 became the first deaf person to win an Oscar, and astronaut and scientist Jessica Meir, part of the first all-woman spacewalk in 2019.

I was also thrilled to see Marthe Cohn, a French nurse who became a spy in World War II. With her fluent German and blond hair, she passed as a non-Jewish German nurse and was able to uncover Axis military secrets. Cohn, who deserves to be more widely known, was awarded France’s highest military honor for her wartime efforts. The question posed with her bio is: “How can you be brave?”

I had the honor of interviewing Cohn in 2019 when an excellent documentary about her life, La Chichinette: The Accidental Spy, was released. For about 60 years, until the film was made, she remained silent about her experiences. Now 104, she lives in California.

“Nice” Jewish Girls

None of these books claim to be comprehensive or definitive; the authors all recognize that many other luminaries might have been included. As Julie Merberg writes in the introduction to “Nice” Jewish Girls (Downtown Bookworks) of her final list, “It’s just where I landed.” Her biographies are more extensive than those in the previous two works and are highlighted by Georgia Rucker’s bold and colorful illustrations.

Her 36 women include several not featured in the other books, such as the four “wondrous Wojcicki women”—sisters Anne, Janet and Susan and their mother, Esther. Anne co-founded genetic testing company 23andMe; Janet is an anthropologist and pediatric epidemiologist researcher; and Susan, who passed away in 2024 from lung cancer, was one of Silicon Valley’s most successful female executives. She was involved in the creation of Google, working as its first marketing manager, and was CEO of YouTube from 2014 to 2023. All have credited their mother, an educator and parenting expert, for their success.

Merberg explained in an interview that she felt an immediate level of comfort with her subjects as she researched them, relating to their warmth and humor, or commitment to social justice, education and family. She has tried to recreate that sense of connection in these pages, and near the end includes a “Jewish Geography” chart. “It’s a small Jewish world” she writes on the chart, and with minute drawings and dotted lines shows readers how interconnected the lives of many women featured in the book are: Barbra Streisand held a fundraiser for political trailblazer Bella Abzug when Abzug first ran for elected office, for example, and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg mentored Anne Wojcicki.

Iconic Jewish Women

Of all the books here, Iconic Jewish Women: Fifty-Nine Inspiring, Courageous, Revolutionary Role Models for Young Girls (Gefen) is the one most clearly aimed at bat mitzvah girls. In the introduction, Israeli author Aliza Lavie, a former member of Knesset, writes that she was inspired to pen a book for this audience when, while on a tour for her 2008 book, A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book, she met a number of 80-year-old women preparing for the bat mitzvahs they never had when young.

She includes Israeli women not as well known in the United States—for example, Miriam Ben-Porat, Israel’s first female Supreme Court judge, and Yehudit Nisayho, one of the Mossad agents who captured Adolf Eichmann—along with Americans like Holocaust historian and ambassador Deborah Lipstadt and Abzug.

Lavie provides thoughtful guidance for bat mitzvah planning, encouraging readers to select a woman whose life story speaks to them and honor her by incorporating her into the bat mitzvah ceremony.

Each of Lavie’s biographies includes sections with project and activity ideas, from one that focuses on ways to “Give Back”—such as finding organizations that support causes connected to the woman chosen by the bat mitzvah—to one with suggestions on how to “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone.”

In the “Get Out of Your Comfort Zone” section in Ben-Porat’s biography, for example, Lavie asks readers to imagine a dialogue between Justice Ginsburg and the Israeli judge: “Both were named for strong women from the Bible; both had families that hailed from Eastern Europe. Both broke glass ceilings throughout their lives, oftentimes while also navigating society’s expectations of them as women.”

The book also recounts how Ginsburg and other women at Harvard  Law School were asked how they could justify taking the place of a man in the program; and how Ben-Porat’s landlord told her that she could still reconsider her law program: “It’s hard to be a nice girl and a lawyer. You have to choose between the two.”

Over the years, other books have been published to satisfy the desire for female role models—women who have refused to allow society to make choices for them. These include the 1989 photography collection The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women by Diana Bletter and Lori Grinker and a coloring book of influential Jewish women, Real-Life Jewish Women That Changed the World, published last year.

There is also a Canadian-focused book for ages 6 to 10, She’s a Mensch!: Ten Amazing Jewish Women by Anne Dublin. Additionally, RBG’s Brave & Brilliant Women: 33 Jewish Women to Inspire Everyone features a list of remarkable women compiled by Ginsburg, with biographies written by Moment Magazine editor Nadine Epstein.

Ultimately, all these books are about highlighting possibilities. Henrietta Szold seems to be speaking directly to young women when she said, as quoted in Chutzpah Girls, “Dare to dream, and when you dream, dream big.”

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Sandee Brawarsky is an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.