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World War II

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Geneviève Janssen-Pevtschin

Geneviève Janssen-Pevtschin was an accomplished lawyer, magistrate, and human rights activist in Belgium. She was active in resistance movements during World War II and is remembered for her passion, respect for human liberty, and dignity.

Laura Margolis Jarblum

Laura Margolis Jarblum’s deft management of wartime social services on three continents for the Joint Distribution Committee saved the lives of thousands. After World War II, in 1946, she became the JDC’s first female country director in France.

Jean Jaffe

Jean Jaffe was one of the leading Yiddish journalists of her time and covered a variety of subjects, from theater to international politics. She was a field reporter at a time when women were usually relegated to women’s pages and a Yiddish-language journalist at a time when most American reporters wrote in English, making her career doubly remarkable.

Irina Jacobson

Irina Jacobson, the wife of the prolific and innovative Soviet-Russian choreographer, Leonid Jacobson, was a living archive of his scores of radical and innovative ballets. A former soloist with the Kirov Ballet and the protégé of Agrippina Vaganova, she emigrated to the West in 1982 and was in demand internationally as a teacher and stager of Jacobson’s works, as well as of Romantic and Classical ballets.

Anna Jacobson

As a member of Hunter College's German department and scholar of German literature, Anna Jacobson fought to preserve the study of German language and literature during the 1930s and 1940s, when many felt that it was inappropriate for American students to study the language of the Nazis. She was also a noted expert on the writer Thomas Mann.

Dore Jacobs

Dore Jacobs developed her own pedagogy, which viewed physical education as a holistic project, out of which came her own unique method of gymnastics. In 1923 she founded her School for Physical Education and Rhythmic Development; she was also a founding member of the German socialist organization called the Bund-Gemeinschaft für Sozialistisches Leben.

Izieu, Women of

Nazi Klaus Barbie’s capture, deportation, and murder of forty-four Jewish children living at a home in Izieu, France, in 1944 is known primarily as a story of children, but the bravery of five women is also a significant part of the tale. Sabine Zlatin, Léa Feldblum, Suzanne Levan-Reifman, Fourtunée Benguigui, and Ita-Rosa Halaunbrenner were workers at the home or mothers of children who lived there. They played critical roles testifying against Barbie in his 1987.

Modern Italy

Jewish women were crucial both to changes in post-emancipation Italian Jewish life and to the overall condition of women in modern Italy. This article reflects on the changes in the role of Jewish women in modern Italy within the Jewish press and institutions, their activism in shaping a secular civil society, and their experiences through the Fascist regime, the trauma of the 1938 Racial laws, emigration, resistance, deportation, survival, and reconstruction.

Irgun Zeva'i Le'ummi (I.Z.L.)

The Irgun Zeva’i Le’ummi was a Jewish underground armed organization formed in 1931 to fight British mandatory forces and Palestinian Arabs and their allies in the effort to form a Jewish state. Women were involved in all parts of the organization, from propaganda production and distribution to combat.

Holocaust Studies in the United States

Jewish American women have made contributions to the field of Holocaust studies in a variety of areas, including general history, women and gender, children, literary criticism, autobiography and biography, curriculum development, religious studies, sociology, psychoanalytic theory, biomedical ethics, and archive and museum curatorship.

Holocaust Literature

Literature by and about women and the Holocaust explores the impact of the Nazi genocide on women during and after the war, its impact on subsequent generations, and the reflections of women on the implications of the Holocaust. Encompassing a range of literary genres, including fiction, poetry, drama and memoir, women’s Holocaust writing explores the intersection of history, imagination, Jewishness and gender.

Historians in the United States

American Jewish women have made important contributions to historical scholarship, especially in the arenas of social history of the United States and Europe, women’s history, and Jewish history. Jewish women, sensitive to the situations of minority groups, became pioneers in these fields as they developed from the 1970s on.

Nini Hess

In the years between 1914 and 1933, numerous significant personalities in art, culture, politics, society and sport met in the photographic portraiture studio of Nini and Carry Hess. With their technical and aesthetic brilliance, the sisters were among the leading photographers in Germany of the time.

Judith Herzberg

Judith Herzberg is a Dutch Jewish poet, essayist, screenwriter, and professor who has been hailed as one of the greatest living Dutch poets for her ability to imbue everyday objects with unexpected meaning. Making her debut as a poet in the early sixties, Herzberg has written poems, essays, plays, film scripts, and television dramas, with many translations and adaptations to her name.

Florence Heller

An important benefactress of Brandeis University, Florence Grunsfeld Heller made her mark as one of the first women to run a general Jewish organization, the Jewish Welfare Board. She also founded the Florence Heller Graduate School for Advanced Studies in Social Welfare at Brandeis in 1959.

Bela Ya’ari Hazan

On the outbreak of World War II, Bela Hazan escaped her hometown of Rozyszcze, Poland, for Vilna, where she worked as a smuggler for the Dror movement. She was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, where she served as a nurse, then to Ravensbruck, and finally to Leipzig, from which she was liberated. She immigrated to Israel, where she died in 2004.

Clara Haskil

Pianist Clara Haskil was one of the greatest performers of her time. As an early prodigy, Haskil began studying music at age six and grew to have an international career, performing throughout the world and appearing at the most prestigious music festivals, in spite of chronic health challenges. 

Hasidism

Hasidism is a spiritual revival movement associated with the founding figure of Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (Besht, c. 1700–1760). Although some have depicted the movement as nothing less than a “feminist” revolution in early modern Judaism, in actuality the Hasidic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries conceptualized gender in conventional terms drawn unquestioningly from the classical rabbinic, philosophical, and kabbalistic sources.

Ida Haendel

In a life that spanned the greater part of the twentieth century, Ida Haendel was one of the most enduring idols of the concert platform, an inspiration to both performers and music-lovers through her many recordings as well as her live performances and broadcasts. A musical prodigy who began performing at age four, Haendel continued her passionate violin performances into her late eighties.

Ruth Gruber

Reporter and writer Ruth Gruber dedicated her life to rescuing and covering the stories of suffering Jews worldwide. She made history as the youngest PhD in the world, escorted European refugees on a secret mission to America, and famously reported on the crisis of the Exodus 1947 and the foundation of Israel.

Rivka Guber

Through her work as a soldier, writer, teacher, and volunteer supporting immigrants, Rivka Guber exhibited selflessness for her neighbors and for the young State of Israel as a whole, earning her the title “Mother of the Sons” and the respect of the nation.

Tatyana Grosman

Tatyana Grosman nurtured an entire generation of printmakers and raised printmaking in the United States to the status of major fine art. Universal Limited Art Editions, which she founded in 1957, published prints by many major American artists, and launched collaborative endeavors between artists and writers. Much of the press’s work was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Haika Grosman

Politically active from a young age, Haika Grosman played a key role in the underground resistance to Nazi occupation and the Holocaust and put her safety on the line in the name of the movement.

Greek Resistance During World War II

Sephardi and Romaniote women during the resistance movements in Greece and in Auschwitz Birkenau have been rarely mentioned in the literature on World War II, but they made varied contributions to the movement.

Michal Govrin

Michal Govrin, born in 1950 is an Israeli poet, writer, and stage director. She takes a highly individualized perspective on Israeli-Jewish post-Holocaust reality by combining artistic experimentation with Biblical and Rabbinic sources and philosophical discourse. In her poetry, prose and essays she examines places and spaces within a polyphonic context of architecture, art and theater, the sanctity of land, and the national narrative.

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