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Birth of conservative intellectual Gertrude Himmelfarb

August 8, 1922

Gertrude Himmelfarb, who was born on August 8, 1922, has made her career as an intellectual historian, but she has perhaps made her larger ma

Emma Goldman's "What I Believe"

July 19, 1908

"It is too bad that we no longer live in the times when witches were burned at the stake or tortured to drive the evil spirit out of them. For, indeed, Emma Goldman is a witch!

Meetings held to plan National Organization for Women

June 30, 1966

The foundation for the National Organization for Women was laid at a meeting in Betty Friedan's hotel room in Washington, DC.

Publication of "Jewish and Female"

June 1, 1984

Susan Weidman Schneider's Jewish and Female: Choices and Changes in Our Lives Today was published on June 1, 1984.

Sylvia Porter one of first women honored as "Headliner"

June 5, 1943

When the National Headliners' Club included women in its ranks of prizewinning journalists for the first time in 1943, Sylvia Porter was one

"What is Women's History?"

June 5, 2005

On June 5, 2005, acclaimed historian Gerda Lerner received an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Birth of feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin

June 9, 1939

Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who has become one of the most well-known figures in both the Jewish and secular feminist movements, was born on Jun

Jane Eisner appointed first female editor of "The Forward"

May 18, 2008

Trailblazing journalist Eisner breaks one more barrier, becoming the first woman editor of the country's largest Jewish newspaper.

Carol Gilligan publishes "In a Different Voice"

May 24, 1982

Carol Gilligan has built a career out of challenging the mainstream.

Paula Hyman discusses publication of "The Jewish Woman in America"

April 20, 1976

When Paula Hyman, Charlotte Baum, and Sonya Michel published The Jewish Woman in America in 1976, it was a groundbreaking work.

Helene Deutsch publishes first volume of "The Psychology of Women"

April 27, 1944

Born in Poland and trained in psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud, Helene Deutsch immigrated to Boston in 1935, where she joined the faculty of the ne

Historian Deborah Lipstadt is Vindicated in Libel Suit Brought by Holocaust Denier

April 11, 2000

When Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt published Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory in 1994, she

Rachel Adler receives National Jewish Book Award

March 11, 1999

Rachel Adler was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought on March 11, 1999.

"New York Times" Reviews "Our Bodies, Ourselves"

March 13, 1973

In 1969, a group of women began meeting in the Boston area to discuss women's health issues.

E.M. Broner publishes "The Telling"

March 1, 1993

Publication of E.M. Broner's "The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality Through Community and Ceremony."

Hilde Bruch publishes "The Importance of Overweight"

March 4, 1957

When The Importance of Overweight was published on March 4, 1957, Hilde Bruch was already a leading childhood obesity researcher.

Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" appears in "The New Yorker"

February 16, 1963

When Hannah Arendt published her first article about Adolf Eichmann's war crimes trial in The New Yorker in its February 16, 1963 issue, s

Publication of "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan

February 17, 1963

The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, on February 17, 1963, is often cited as the founding moment of second-wave femin

Early music harpsichordist Wanda Landowska plays Bach at New York City's Town Hall

February 21, 1942

Born in Warsaw in 1879, Wanda Landowska studied piano at the Warsaw Conservatory, from which she graduated at age 14. In 1900, she moved to Paris, where she taught piano and performed.

Yiddish Literature in the United States

Writers of a broad range of texts—passionate and erotic lyrical verse, social realist fiction, affecting descriptions of immigrant life, nostalgic paeans to their Eastern European homes, dirges to those murdered in the Holocaust—Yiddish women writers were modernists and traditionalists, romantics and realists, prose writers and poets. They represent no single school or line of development, but rather the range of women’s voices contained in Yiddish literature.

Rosalyn Tureck

Pianist Rosalyn Tureck toured the world as a consummate interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Tureck made her Carnegie Hall debut in 1935 before touring in Europe, South America, Israel, Turkey, South Africa, and Australia. In 1994 she founded the Oxford-based Tureck Bach Research Institute.

Barbara W. Tuchman

From a young age, Barbara W. Tuchman was engaged with contemporary international affairs. Her passion for research and engaging writing style won her two Pulitzer Prizes for her popular histories The Guns of August and Stilwell and the American Experience in China.

Tkhines

Tkhines were collections of prayers published in Yiddish, often specifically for women, across Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The prayers addressed many themes of domestic and family life, although some also suggested women ought to be allowed into traditionally male spaces.

Amy Swerdlow

Amy Swerdlow (1923-2012), child of a Communist household in the Bronx, shared her parents’ dedication to making a better world but developed her own political agenda. She became a leader of the global women’s peace movement, a pioneer in the field of women’s history, and a professor of history and women’s studies at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.

Marie Syrkin

Marie Syrkin is best known as a polemicist for the State of Israel, whose keen arguments appeared in a wide range of publications for a period of almost seventy years. Her life touched almost every significant aspect of Jewish life in America and Europe in the twentieth century.

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