Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Peace Movement in the United States

Throughout the twentieth century, Jewish women played a major role in American peace organizations and movements. Jewish women have also been in prominent roles advocating for peace between Israel and Palestine, both in the Knesset and with private organizations.

Justine Wise Polier

As the first woman judge appointed in New York, Justine Wise Polier focused on helping the most vulnerable population: children. From the bench, Polier helped reform both foster care and the school system, ensuring that minority children had access to services. She also worked an informal second shift, volunteering for important causes ranging from prison reform to trying to evacuate Jewish children from Europe during the Holocaust.

Adrienne Cecile Rich

Adrienne Rich was an influential poet, thinker, and political activist. In her essays and poems, Rich explored the intersections of the personal and the political, focusing in particular on questions of identity while drawing on her own experiences as a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew.

Ernestine Rose

Ernestine Rose’s speeches on religious freedom, public education, abolition, and women’s rights earned her the title “Queen of the Platform.” In the 1850s, she was more famous than her co-workers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Yet soon after her death in 1892, she was forgotten because of her status as an immigrant, an atheist, a radical, and a woman.

Vivian Leburg Rothstein

Vivian Leburg Rothstein’s early experiences fighting for civil rights led her to a long career advocating for peace, women’s rights, and the labor movement.

Marilyn Safir

Marilyn Safir is an American psychologist who played a critical role as a feminist activist in sparking the Israeli women’s movement and in establishing the academic field of women’s studies in Israel. Her academic career has focused on sex, sexuality, and gender.

Bunny Sandler and Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Bernice Sandler

Bernice (Bunny) Sandler was an activist and education expert who theorized Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, the federal law that mandates sexual equality in educational institutions that receive federal funding. As such, Sandler was an architect of the 1970s feminist “women’s liberation” movement. She continued to fight sex discrimination in education in the following decades, especially on issues of racial inequity and sexual assault.

Angiola Sartorio

Angiola Sartorio was a prolific dancer, teacher, and choreographer who subverted fascism in her artistic choices. Sartorio had a company and school, and her company was widely well-received in Italy until it performed for Hitler in Vienna and she had to flee to the United States.

Ottilie Schönewald

Deeply involved in several women’s and Jewish organizations, Ottilie Schönewald was an activist who became a politician to advance her causes. She worked with the League of Jewish Women and helped Jews emigrate from Nazi Germany. After Schönewald and her family fled in 1939, she continued her social work during and after the war.

Florence Schornstein

Florence Schornstein spent a lifetime making New Orleans a better place to live, and Hurricane Katrina only strengthened her resolve.

Debra L. Schultz

Debra Schultz served as an advisor to the Jewish Women’s Archive in creating the Living the Legacy curriculum based on research she had done on the history of Jewish women in the civil rights movement.

Ethel Baskin Schwartz

From Depression-era protests to twenty-first century marches, Ethel Baskin Schwartz dedicated her life to organizing and fighting for unions and civil rights.

Felice Nierenberg Schwartz

Recognizing the hurdles that can stop women from achieving, Felice Nierenberg Schwartz founded Catalyst, an organization to help women with children enter the workforce, created a national network of resource centers and programs to enable women to work part time, and advocated for working mothers in her widely published writing.

Shirley Siegel

The only woman in the Yale Law School class of 1941, Shirley Adelson Siegel became a trailblazer as head of the New York State Attorney’s first Civil Rights Bureau in 1959.

Carol Ruth Silver

Carol Ruth Silver was one of the first two white women to be jailed in the Freedom Rides, an experience that sparked a career in law and politics, fighting for the rights of others.

Virginia Snitow

Virginia Levitt Snitow was a multifaceted woman who was a teacher, political activist, pre-Second Wave feminist, poet, writer and founder of US/Israel Women to Women. Ahead of her time in the fight for both civil and women’s rights, Snitow was unafraid to take unpopular stances when fighting for others.

Judy Somberg

Judy Somberg’s work with the Sister Cities Project in El Salvador helped locals return to their villages after the military takeover in 1987 and freed eleven people who had been “disappeared.”

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.

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem was a leader of second-wave feminism and the co-founder of Ms. Magazine, the first feminist periodical with a national readership. As a journalist and spokesperson, she mobilized a generation of women to advance the cause of women’s liberation. Steinem has worked tirelessly all her life as an advocate for change.

Edith Rosenwald Stern

Edith Rosewald Stern used her family’s wealth for her community’s good. In New Orleans, she helped fund schools to offer her children and their peers a progressive education. Stern also fought to clean up voting rights in the city, organizing voter registration, auditing voter rolls, and bringing voting machines into high schools to educate future voters.

Harriet Tanzman

Harriet Tanzman was a chronicler of the civil rights movement, creating new entry points into civil rights history.

Lillian D. Wald

Guided by her vision of a unified humanity, Lillian D. Wald passionately dedicated herself to bettering the lives and working conditions of immigrants, women, and children. She founded the Henry Street Settlement in New York City and initiated America’s first public-school nursing program. A talented activist and administrator, Wald’s pathbreaking work continues to be memorialized.

Miriam Waltzer

As the first woman elected to the New Orleans Criminal District Court, Miriam Waltzer fought for the civil rights of minorities, children, and women.

Anita Weinstein

As founding director of EZRA, Anita Weinstein created local and far-reaching programs to relieve hunger and homelessness.

Cora Wilburn

Cora Wilburn was one of the most prolific American Jewish women writers of her time. Much of her work appeared in secular and Spiritualist publications, but during her final decades she published poetry in Jewish publications. Her autobiographical novel, Cosella Wayne, published serially in 1860, is the first coming-of-age novel to depict Jews in the United States.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Activism: Civil Rights