Crafts

Content type
Collection

Sarah Thon

Sarah Thon was born in Lvov, Galicia. She married Yaakov Thon and they settled in Ottoman Palestine at the end of 1907. She became the representative of the Women’s Association for Cultural Work in Palestine and established five workshops for girls. She was also influential in the establishment of the girls’ farm at Kinneret and in the fight for Jewish women’s suffrage.

Bertha Schaefer

Bertha Schaefer broadened the definition of interior decorator to designer, innovator, and pioneer in integrating fine arts and architecture with interior design. Schaefer’s two New York City businesses – an interior design firm and an art gallery – showcased defining features of the postwar period, garnering her significant praise and attention in the world of art and design.

Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle

Bouena Sarfatty Garfinkle, a Sephardi woman, risked her life over and over again to aid to her community during World War II. At a later stage in her life, Bouena’s historical-literary acumen enabled her to record Jewish life in Salonika during the twentieth century, including the devastation to her community at the hands of the Nazis.

Gertrud Amon Natzler

Gertrud Amon Natzler’s collaboration with her husband, Otto Natzler, over almost four decades produced some of the twentieth century’s finest ceramics. Their nearly 25,000 pieces now reside in 70 museums and countless private collections worldwide.

Joyce Kozloff

Joyce Kozloff is an internationally recognized painter, public muralist, and feminist whose long-term passions have been history, culture, and the decorative and popular arts. One of the founders of the pattern and decoration movement, Kozloff is dedicated to creating her own work and giving the folk art of women of color a voice. Kozloff is known as one of America’s more original and engaging artists.

Ethiopian Jewish Women

Jewish women in Ethiopian villages were traditionally inactive in public and were in charge of the domestic sphere. After immigration to Israel, their lives changed dramatically, with some young women acquiring higher education and becoming high-profile career women.

Entrepreneurs: From Antiquity Through the Early Modern Period

Jewish women have been recorded in entrepreneurial roles as early as the fifth century BCE, and many women held vital roles in their communities’ economies. Around the world, Jewish women took part in moneylending, trading, and property ownership, both with their husbands and independently.

Dulcea of Worms

Dulcea of Worms was the wife of Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, a major rabbinic figure. They were part of the elite leadership class of medieval Germany Jewry. Eleazar’s account of Dulcea’s murder in 1196 is an important source for the activities of medieval Jewish women.

Stella Drabkin

Stella Drabkin was a talented painter and mosaicist who innovated new methods of printmaking. She is known for her experiments with multitype, a variation on monotype printing with layers of texture and color, creating mosaic panels on biblical themes, and creating prints with poems. Following her death, in 1972 the Art Alliance established the Stella Drabkin Memorial Award Fund in her honor. 

Friedl Dicker-Brandeis

Friedl Dicker was an artist and educator who studied at the Bauhaus school then led art classes at Terezin.  In the ghetto, Dicker taught drawing to hundreds of children, designed sets and costumes for children’s performances, and made an exhibition of children’s drawings in a basement. She also created her own sketches, many of which were discovered in the 1980s.

Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay was known for her vivid use of color and her bold, abstract patterns, breaking down traditional distinctions between the fine and applied arts as an artist, designer, and printmaker. She designed costumes for operas and ballets around Europe and created her own fashion design company. Deluanay was the first female artist to have a retrospective show of her work at the Louvre in 1964.

Ruth Dar

Renowned Israeli designer Ruth Dar works consistently with the top directors in Israeli theater. Her talents as a set and costume designer are demonstrated in her fruitful and creative dialogue with her theatrical partners and the visual transposition of the director’s conceptual emphases.

Hannah Chizhik

Hannah Chizhik was an advocate for women’s emancipation and she was committed to the women workers movement. She became an expert in vegetable farming, agricultural work, and domestic labor for the groups of women pioneers. In 1926 she established a women’s smallholding in Tel Aviv, which became an important center for pioneer youth.

Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago is one of the most internationally recognized contemporary artists in the United States. Early in the 1970s women’s movement, Chicago consciously sought to explore what it means to be both a woman and an artist. She is best known for her large, multi-media projects such as The Dinner Party, The Birth Project, The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light, and Resolutions: A Stitch in Time.

Sarah Bavly

Dutch-born Sarah Bavly was a pioneer nutritionist in the Yishuv who laid the groundwork for Israel's nutritional infrastructure and educational programming, directing Hadassah's hospital nutrition departments and school lunch programs and establishing the State's first College of Nutrition.

Austria: Jewish Women Artists

Most Jewish women artists from Austria have been forgotten due to the male domination of the Austrian art sphere and the Holocaust. However, many Jewish female artists in Austria created influential work and established their own system of education and their own organizations, leading to a flourishing female art world until 1938.

Artists: Yishuv and Israel: 1920-1970

 While women are often excluded from the historical narrative of Israeli art-making, women artists made significant contributions to the canon of Israeli art throughout the twentieth century. Depicting landscapes, creating ceramics, and painting beautiful portraits, many female artists made significant contributions to the development of the Bezalel Art school and Israeli modern art. In 1952, the artistic Group of Ten was founded, to use a modern language in order to express the Israeli experience and landscape. 

Artists: Israeli, 1970 to 2000

The inclusion of feminism in Israeli art was seen as irrelevant in the 1970s, when Israel was seen as a state of gender equality. But in the following decades, amid vast changes in Israeli society, women worked hard to make themselves seen and have their stories told in the wider world of Israeli art.

Mezuzas on the Moon?

Jordan Namerow

"And you shall write them on the doorposts of your ... spaceship?" Jewish artist, Laura Cowan, has been making space-travel themed mezuzot for years. She was taken by surprise, however, when she received a call from American Jewish astronaut, Greg Chamitoff, asking if he could bring two of her rocket-inspired ritual objects into outer space.

Topics: Crafts

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