Creating a Storm

Here Isabelle Seddon reveals the astonishing contributions made by British born Jewish women in the arts during the twentieth century. Some of the women you will meet here were well-known in their fields such as singers Amy Winehouse, an iconic figure who defined her era, Alma Cogan, Britain’s greatest female recording star of the 1950s and Helen Shapiro, who took the charts by storm in the early 1960s. The book also chronicles the lives and careers of those whose names are less familiar, but whose contributions to their fields are no less notable. Among many others, these pages introduce you to Rebecca Solomon, a painter of social injustices, Hannah Gluckstein (Gluck), one of the most rebellious artists of her day, Dorothy Levitt, the first Englishwoman to win an automobile race, pioneering racing driver Sheila van Damm and writer Naomi Jacob who transgressed codes of femininity and class respectability.The intersection of gender, Jewishness, social status and education links the experiences of all of the women featured in this volume, across their varied cultural outputs and contributions from acting to musicianship, writing to art, sport to cookery. The persecution of the Jews across the ages, including the Holocaust, is one of the factors that ties many of these highly accomplished women together. This, alongside the legacies of immigrant and refugee backgrounds, motivated and inspired them to shape British culture in remarkable and fascinating ways.