Non-Fiction

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Collection

Ruth Gavison

Ruth Gavison was an Israeli human rights expert and law professor. In addition to her academic work as a lecturer and researcher and her work in social organizations, Gavison has also been a member of various committees. Her work has been amply recognized and awarded.

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.

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal brought her passion for art and history to her leadership of Hadassah. Among other leadership positions, she served as the national president from 1956 to 1960.

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan was the author of a pathbreaking feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, which sold millions of copies and helped to provoke a feminist movement in the United States. She was an activist and writer who hoped to improve women’s lives by co-founding the National Organization for Women and other women’s political groups. Her many books focused on women’s rights, the women’s movement, and aging.

Anna Freud

Anna Freud’s life was a constant search for useful social applications of psychoanalysis. Through her studies of children, she shaped the fields of both child psychology and developmental psychology.

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.

Jennie Maas Flexner

Jennie Maas Flexner was the head of the circulation department at the Louisville Public Library and later the readers’ advisor at the New York Public Library. Her sympathy for self-taught and adult learners drove her to create innovative reading lists for adults embarking on a new life or second career.

Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone was one of the founders of radical feminism in the United States. At age 25, she published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which brought together the dialectical materialism of Marx and the psychoanalytic insights of Freud in an effort to develop an analysis of women’s oppression that was inclusive of the dimensions of class and race.

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.

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

Elaine Feinstein was the preeminent Jewish woman literary author in late 20th- and early 21st-century England and a leading European Jewish writer. An award-winning poet, novelist, and translator, her works explore Jewish women’s identities as writer, wife, friend, and mother; assimilation; antisemitism; the Holocaust and its transgenerational impact; Soviet Russian poets; European Jewish life in the 20th century; Israel and Zionism; and the meanings of a literary life.

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.

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.

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.

Ariel Durant

Ariel Durant was an internationally acclaimed writer. She helped her husband William Durant organize materials for his opus, The Story of Civilization. They coauthored numerous works, including Rousseau and Revolution, for which they won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize. The Los Angeles Times awarded her the 1965 Woman of the Year Award in Literature.

Andrea Dworkin

A lightning rod for controversy, American feminist Andrea Dworkin denounced violence against women, advocated women’s self-defense, and drafted groundbreaking legislation claiming that pornography violated women’s civil rights. In 1974, Dworkin and Ricki Abrams co-wrote Woman Hating in which they charged that pornography incited violence towards women and that consensual sex subjugated women.

Lily Edelman

Lily Edelman, a dynamic and much-sought-after lecturer, committed her life to learning, to teaching, and to understanding multicultural society. She published books for adults and children and was able to unite her interests in adult education and writing with her work at B’nai B’rith.

Tilly Edinger

Tilly Edinger made her mark as one of the leading vertebrate paleontologists of the twentieth century. Her pioneering work in paleoneurology, the study of fossil brains, established her international reputation as the outstanding woman in her field. She performed research in Germany before World War II and continued researching and teaching in the United States until her untimely death in 1967.

Sophia Dubnow-Erlich

After finishing her education, Sophia Dubnow-Erlich became an active member of both the Social Democratic Labor Party and the Jewish Labor Party and wrote for Bund journals before fleeing Vilna for Warsaw in 1918. After emigrating to America in 1942, she remained politically active and continued her prolific writing career.

Lucie Domeier

Polish writer Lucie Domeier is best known for her work critiquing the portrayal and role of women, especially as presented in literature. She wrote several books in the early nineteenth century, most notably her critique in German of Germaine de Staël’s De l’Allemagne, which often addressed the challenges faced by women authors.

Helene Deutsch

Helene Deutsch was mentored by Sigmund Freud and was the first psychoanalyst to write a book on female psychology. In the 1920s she emerged as one of the most successful teachers in the history of psychoanalysis and in 1924 she became the first woman to head a psychoanalytic clinic.

Esther Dischereit

Esther Dischereit, a German-Jewish writer living in Berlin, speaks for the second and third generation of children of Holocaust survivors. Her prolific production covers all genres, including prose, poetry, sound installations, and concept art. She uses her many talents to fight anti-semitism and racism and to give a voice to the persecuted and forgotten.

Midge Decter

Though she began her career in publishing at liberal Jewish journals, Midge Decter became a prominent neoconservative in the 1970s, famous for her attacks on the women’s liberation movement. By the 1980s, Decter turned to foreign policy and became a vocal Cold Warrior opposed to the Soviet Union because of the threat it posed to the United States and Israel.

Maya Deren

Maya Deren pursued an ambitious career as a writer, publishing poetry, essays, and newspaper articles. She was also one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of her time for her use of experimental editing techniques and her fascination with ecstatic religious dances. In 1946 she used a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph Haitian dance.

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