Zionism

Content type
Collection
Stern College Students March in Salute to Israel Parade, New York City, 2003.

Zionism in the United States

Jewish women constructed an approach to American Zionism that reflected their own unique position in American and Jewish society, employing the category of gender as a variable in the historical analysis of American Zionism. A complex interplay of gender, social class, and religio-ethnic culture shaped the ways in which women helped to direct the course of Zionism in America.
Sophie Udin looking down at a sheet of paper with a large seal at the bottom

Sophie A. Udin

Sophie A. Udin fought for women's rights and equal pay, but she is best known for helping found the first libraries in Israel and creating important American archives about Zionism, helping preserve vital documents and making them accessible.
Henrietta Szold, 1893

Henrietta Szold

Henrietta Szold was an educator, essayist, editor, social and communal worker, Zionist organizer, and politician. She was the founder of Hadassah, which became the largest and most powerful Zionist group in the United States. Szold played important roles in organizing the Yishuv’s infrastructure and Israel’s modern medical services. She created Hadassah, the women’s organization devoted to aiding Israel, which oversaw organizing and fundraising efforts in America for the Yishuv, and served as a member of the early Knesset, organizing the Yishuv’s infrastructure and organizing Israel’s modern medical services.

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.

Edith Rosenwald Stern

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.
Estelle Joan Sommers

Estelle Joan Sommers

Estelle Joan Sommers was a designer, entrepreneur, and executive who made her career in retail dancewear, introducing innovative designs for Capezio’s dance and exercise clothing.

Rosa Sonneschein

Rosa Sonneschein

Rosa Sonneschein created and edited the American Jewess, the first English-language magazine for Jewish women in the United States, where she advocated for the expansion of women’s roles in the synagogue and the Jewish community and expressed her strong support for Zionism.

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.

Elizabeth Blume Silverstein

Elizabeth Blume Silverstein’s long and productive life revolved around her work in criminal law, real estate management, and Jewish life. After successfully defending Orzio Ricotta on a homicide charge, a first for a New Jersey woman lawyer, Silverstein became a public speaker, and she was involved in law, politics, and Zionism.

Letter from Henrietta Szold to Alice Seligsberg, October 8, 1931

Alice Lillie Seligsberg

A passionate social worker and Zionist, Alice Lillie Seligsberg devoted herself to underprivileged youth and to the Zionist movement. Although Seligsberg is best known for her leadership in the national Hadassah organization, her work in social services in New York City also led to historic changes in the field.

Bertha Singer Schoolman

Bertha Singer Schoolman gave a lifetime of service to the betterment of Jewish education and the cause of Youth Aliyah, the movement to bring Jewish youth out of Germany to live in children’s villages in Israel. Schoolman risked her life under fire to help bring convoys to and from kibbutzim.

Rose Schneiderman

Rose Schneiderman

For nearly half a century, Rose Schneiderman worked tirelessly to improve wages, hours, and safety standards for American working women. She saw those things as “bread,” the very basic human rights to which working women were entitled. But she also worked for such “roses” as schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks for trade union women, because she believed that working women deserved much more than a grim subsistence.
Jessie Sampter, 1934

Jessie Ethel Sampter

Jessie Sampter was an important Zionist activist, writer, and educator. As an influential member of Hadassah, the woman’s Zionist organization, she advocated for an inclusive vision of Zionism. Putting her ideas into practice, she moved to Palestine in 1919. Although Sampter’s disability and non-normative family structure did not align with Zionist ideals of strong, healthy bodies, she championed Zionism, though not always uncritically.

Lily Rivlin

Lilly Rivlin

Lilly Rivlin is a documentary filmmaker whose films are centered around feminism, the Arab-Israeli peace process, Jewishness, and her family relationships. Rivlin’s films The Tribe (1984), Miriam’s Daughters Now (1986), and Gimme a Kiss (2000), all of which explore Jewishness and family, are among her best.

Freda Resnikoff

Freda Resnikoff was a founder and dedicated leader of the Mizrachi Women’s Organization and mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother-in-law of three of its national presidents.

Tamar De Sola Pool

Born into a family deeply involved in Jewish activism and scholarship, Tamar De Sola Pool spent over a decade as both a Hadassah chapter president and later Hadassah’s national president. She wrote two books in collaboration with her husband, volunteered at displaced persons camps in Cyprus, and helped resettle Jewish children in Palestine with Hadassah.

Pioneer Women Leaders

Pioneer Women in the United States

Pioneer Women was created in The United States in 1925 to help the pioneer women’s cooperatives in Palestine through American-based philanthropic efforts. During its first convention in 1926 in New York City, the group articulated goals to help create a homeland in Palestine, to support Mo’ezet ha-Po’alot, and to educate American Jewish women to a more conscious role in American society.

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.

Constance Sporborg

National Council of Jewish Women

In its early years, the National Council of Jewish Women concentrated on combating assimilation by educating Jewish women about Judaism. In contemporary times, the Council continues to play an important role as a bridge between traditional motherhood and political activity, between the Jewish community and other women’s organizations, between Judaism and politics, and between diverse segments of the Jewish community itself.
JEWISH IN TRADITIONAL COSTUME FROM THE REGION OF IFRANE ATLAS SAGHIR

Morocco: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The Moroccan Jewish community was the largest Jewish community in North Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The status of Moroccan Jewish women was affected by a variety of factors, including a patriarchal order and social changes brought about by economic development, urbanization, and contact with European countries.

Kadya Molodowsky, Ida Maze, and Rokhl Korn

Kadya Molodowsky

Kadya Molodowsky was a major figure in the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw (from the 1920s through 1935) and in New York (from 1935 until her death in 1975). She published extensively in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, and founded and edited two journals. Recurrent themes in her work include the lives of Jewish women and girls Jewish tradition in the face of modernity, Israel, and the Holocaust.

Margo Glantz, 2001

Mexico

The communal culture developed by Mexican Jewry emphasized unity, harmony, and consensus regarding groups, politics, and gender. Mexican-Jewish women participated widely in and contributed to the vibrant community’s cultural, artistic, social, and educational endeavors. They continue to redefine their role in Jewish community spaces amidst the new organizations, profiles, and activities of the twenty-first century.
Adah Isaacs Menken

Adah Isaacs Menken

In her short but remarkable life, actress Adah Isaacs Menken became legendary for her scandalous defiance of convention. One of the most glamorous celebrities of the 1860s, Menken also cultivated a literary following. She wrote poetry and developed relationships with Walt Whitman and Charles Dickens, among others.

Golda Meir on "But Can She Type?"

Golda Meir

A direct, no-nonsense politician who participated in Israel’s governance from its independence onward, Golda Meir served as Israel’s first female Prime Minister through the turbulent period of the Yom Kippur War.

Nita Lowey

Nita M. Lowey

Congresswoman Nita M. Lowey used her position to fight for women’s health, public broadcasting, and support for Israel. In 2001, she became the first woman to chair the Democratic Congressional Committee.

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