Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Mexico

The communal culture developed by Mexican Jewry emphasized unity, harmony, and consensus regarding groups, politics, and gender. Mexican-Jewish women participated widely in and contributed to the vibrant community’s cultural, artistic, social, and educational endeavors. They continue to redefine their role in Jewish community spaces amidst the new organizations, profiles, and activities of the twenty-first century.

National Council of Jewish Women

In its early years, the National Council of Jewish Women concentrated on combating assimilation by educating Jewish women about Judaism. In contemporary times, the Council continues to play an important role as a bridge between traditional motherhood and political activity, between the Jewish community and other women’s organizations, between Judaism and politics, and between diverse segments of the Jewish community itself.

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit risked her own safety to become one of the first female refuseniks to protest for the right to leave Soviet Russia.

Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Israel, 1948-2000

While the earliest women’s NGOs in Israel focused on contributing their share to nation-building, today’s organizations advocate and practice feminism. Over the past few decades, they have grown in number, modified their strategies, and raised new issues, yet hurdles continue to undermine their influence.

Achy Obejas

Writer, translator, and activist Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956 and moved to the United States with her parents six years later. She is known for stories with characters and themes related to gender, queer sexuality, Cuban-ness, and Jewishness, as well as migration, displacement, and diaspora.

Old Yishuv, People Praying at the Western Wall

Old Yishuv: Palestine at the End of the Ottoman Period

Women of the Old Yishuv saw their immigration to the Holy Land as serving spiritual sanctification at the expense of material suffering. Jewish women lived restricted lives as the result of child marriage, high infant mortality rates, and being confined to the domestic sphere in the Old Yishuv.

Philanthropy in the United States

In the United States, Jewish women’s philanthropy generally occurred through three main types of organizations: autonomous women’s organizations, women’s organizations that included some men, and women’s auxiliaries of male-dominated groups. In recent decades, changes in Jewish philanthropy and in gender roles have influenced contemporary styles of Jewish women’s philanthropy.

Poetry in the United States

The contributions of Jewish women poets to American literary history and political activism, as well as to the enrichment of Jewish culture and practice, are astounding. Many Jewish women poets write with a strong sense of social responsibility and a desire to create poetry that can shape reality, drawing on the Jewish teachings of tikkun olam.

Cecilia Razovsky

Cecilia Razovsky was a remarkably active woman who spent her life striving to assist immigrants in adapting to life in the United States and other countries. Razovsky found countless ways to help Jewish refugees in particular, from writing plays and pamphlets to running committees and organizations for immigrant aid.

The Women’s Mizrachi Federation in America, Detroit Meeting, circa 1960s

Religious Zionist Movements in Palestine

Religious Zionism, distinguished from the secular Zionists by its religious nature and from the ultra-Orthodox community by its Zionism, consisted of two major movements in the Yishuv: the Mizrachi and the Ha-Po’el ha-Mizrachi, a trade union. Women created their own organizations within these movements but distinguished themselves from the men through their support of women and their interests.

Julia Richman

A polarizing and important social reformer, Julia Richman sought to better manage the massive influx of immigrants in New York by Americanizing the new arrivals as quickly as possible, particularly through intense training in English. An educator who eventually became district superintendent of the Lower East Side schools in 1903, she created playgrounds, improved school lunches, and enforced health examinations for students.

Russian Immigrants in Israel

Approximately 350,000 Jewish women moved to Israel from the Former Soviet Union after 1989. Among the key issues they faced were occupational downgrading, sexuality and family life, sexual harassment, marital distress, and single-parent families.

Hannah Sandusky

Called “the angel” and “the saint” by her patients, midwife Hannah Sandusky was remarkable both for the sheer number of births she oversaw and for the respect that male doctors granted her for her skills.

Ada Ascarelli Sereni

Ada Ascarelli Sereni helped thousands of Jews emigrate to Palestine during and after World War II following the death of her husband, a Jewish volunteer for the British army who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe.

Irene Kaufman Settlement House Childcare, 1924

Settlement Houses in the United States

Founded beginning in the 1880s in impoverished urban neighborhoods, settlement houses provided recreation, education, and medical and social service programs, primarily for immigrants. Jewish women played significant roles as benefactors, organizers, administrators of, and participants in these institutions.

Kate Simon

Kate Simon wrote numerous books, including a series of guidebooks for Meridian Books. It was her raw, honest account of her life in her three-volume memoir, however, that was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “a classic of autobiography.”

Berta Singerman

Berta Singerman (1901-1998) was an Argentine actress and reciter of poetry, famous throughout the Ibero-American cultural world. Born in Russia to a family of traditional singers (chazanim), she immigrated to Buenos Aires, Argentina, when she was four years old.

Anna Sokolow at Emanuel Sisterhood of Personal Service, 1922

Sisterhoods of Personal Service in the United States

Sisterhoods of Personal Service coordinated the philanthropic work of synagogue sisterhoods across New York City and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assisting a considerable number of immigrants through a variety of financial, vocational, educational, and social programs.

Rachel Skidelsky

In 1894, at a time when “working mother” was a contradiction in terms for middle-class women, Rachel Skidelsky, a Russian immigrant with a husband and two children under age ten, was a well-known physician in the city of Philadelphia.

Socialism in the United States

Disproportionate numbers of Jewish immigrant women in America were associated with socialism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their ideological commitment was expressed mainly in activism in left-leaning garment workers' unions. Their radicalism grew out of the same sources as male radicalism (changes experienced in late 19th century Europe and America, including proletarianization and secularization), but Jewish working women's radical consciousness and collective action emerged in the face of additional and different obstacles.

Sociodemography

Over the last several decades, Jewish women attained significant achievement in the socio-economic sphere and played a leading role in maintaining Jewish continuity. In general, Jewish women are educated and participate in the labor force at higher rates than their non-Jewish counterparts.

Barbara Miller Solomon

Barbara Miller Solomon was not only an educator but a pioneer in the field of women's history. Named the first female dean of Harvard College in 1970, she laid the groundwork for the formal establishment women’s studies there. Her scholarship on the history of immigration and women's history remains influential today.

Gil Marcus, Nelson Mandela, and Michael Katz, December 1990

South Africa

Over time, Jewish women’s status and achievements have risen within the South African Jewish community and the wider society. White Jewish women used their historically privileged position (unprecedented for Jews) to assist those suffering from the oppressions of apartheid, notwithstanding democratization since 1994. Women have been prominent in more recent innovations and initiatives, so that even in the face of demographic decline, the community exhibits paradoxical vitality and resilience.

Ruth Sperling

Ruth Sperling is an esteemed Israeli scientist. Her work with her husband included a revolutionary discovery of the 3-D structure of spliceosomes, the cell's "machinery" for chopping up and re-attaching pieces of DNA to create its requisite assortment of functional proteins.

Constance Amberg Sporborg

Constance Amberg Sporborg was a career clubwoman who dedicated her life to the advancement of women’s rights, immigrant settlement, international organizations, and world peace. Working in New York City in the early twentieth century, Sporborg aided both Jews and gentiles.

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Politics and Government: Immigration