Writing: Non-Fiction
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.
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.
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.
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
Shulamith Firestone
Edith Fisch
With great courage and dogged determination, Edith Lond Fisch became a lawyer, legal writer, and law professor despite severe physical limitations, educational prejudices, and sexual discrimination. Edith Fisch wrote an important book on evidence which became regularly cited by judges and used in law schools throughout New York.
Jennie Maas Flexner
Selma Fraiberg
Selma Fraiberg was a psychoanalyst, author, and pioneer in the field of infant psychiatry. Her classic parenting book The Magic Years was the result of her years of research in the field of social work and her experiences as a stay-at-home mother.
Lillian Simon Freehof
Lillian Simon Freehof (1906-2004) was a leader in developing transcription services for people with visual impairments and blindness, working with Sisterhood volunteers at Rodef Shalom Congregation in Pittsburgh, PA, and, at the national level, with the Federation of Temple Sisterhoods (now WRJ). She also wrote books and plays for children and young adults and books on needlework and Jewish festivals for adults. She was the wife of Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof.
Anna Freud
Miriam Freund-Rosenthal
Betty Friedan
Jaclyn Friedman
Norma Fields Furst
Higher education was not merely a family priority for Norma Fields Furst; it also became her professional focus. Furst used her positions of authority at different colleges and universities to garner support for civil rights and gender equality within academia.
Mamie Gamoran
Evelyn Garfiel
Evelyn Garfiel’s Jewish scholarship on topics like the prayer book and the Hebrew language helped make Jewish study accessible to the broader public. She served on the boards of several Jewish women’s organizations and published a book in 1957 that explored the prayer book and explained the origins and purpose of different prayers.
Ruth Gavison
Ruth Gay
Through her writing, Ruth Glazer Gay captured an engaging view of the Jewish community, both past and present. As a writer, journalist, and archivist, she demonstrated throughout her life the possibility of having an intellectually vibrant career while still accommodating marriage and motherhood.
Abraham Geiger
Abraham Geiger (1810-1874) was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the nineteenth century. He was one of the major intellectual leaders and founders of the Reform movement in Germany and a strong supporter of Jews entering European society. As part of his vision of Judaism, he argued for a Judaism oriented around the home and domestic life, but also a Judaism that both elevated and sidelined the women that had long created that domestic life.
Elisabeth Rozetta Geleerd
Elizabeth Rozetta Geleerd’s work on extreme psychological conditions such as amnesia and schizophrenia led to new methods for treating seriously disturbed children and adolescents. Along with opening her own private practice, Geleerd became a training analyst and a member of the educational committee of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and helped shape its child and adolescent analysis program.
Masha Gessen
Sheyna Gifford
Sheyna Gifford’s passion for both scientific exploration and writing has enabled her to work for NASA in many different capacities, from science journalist to health and safety officer on a year-long simulated mission to Mars.
Élisabeth Gille
Élisabeth Gille (1937-1996) was a French author known most of all for biography of her mother, best-selling novelist Irène Némirovsky, murdered at Auschwitz. It was written borrowing Némirovsky’s voice, narrated in the first person as “dreamt memoirs.”
