Germany: 1750-1945
The Jewish Reform movement did not liberate women from their subordinate religious status, and the nineteenth-century bourgeois German family ideal with its rigid gender roles soon eclipsed the fluid structure of premodern Jewish families. Jewish women were expected to transmit German bourgeois values while also shaping their children’s Jewish identity.
Karen Gershon
Writer and poet Karen Gershon escaped the Holocaust by being sent to England on the Kindertransport. Her best-known book, We Came as Children (1966), documented the collective experiences of refugee children and established her literary reputation in England. Her introspective poetry often reflects on her family and the Holocaust.
Shoshana Gershonowitz
Shoshana Gershonowitz was a leading woman soldier in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during World War II and in the early years of the Women’s Corps in the Israel Defense Forces.
Edith Gerson-Kiwi
Edith Gerson-Kiwi was a world-renowned musicologist and a pioneer in the research of the music of the Jewish communities in Israel. In 1970 she received the Engel Prize of the Tel Aviv Municipality for her scholarly work in Jewish music.
Berta Gersten
Berta Gersten, a tall, regal, soft-spoken actor, was a highly acclaimed leading lady in the Yiddish art theater movement for fifty years. Her career on the English-language stage, though shorter, was also distinguished. Gersten was one of the original members of Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater, toured worldwide, performed in English films, and acted on Broadway.
Gloria Gervitz
The Mexican Ashkenazi poet Gloria Gervitz (1943–2022) is known for her award-winning, book-length poem Migrations (Migraciones). This poem, an epic journey through the individual and collective memories of Ashkenazi women emigrants to Mexico, which she began writing in 1976, took her 44 years to complete. In 2018, Gervitz won the prestigious Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award for Migraciones.
Masha Gessen
Tavi Gevinson
Temima Gezari
Artist and innovator Temima Gezari made a lasting impact on Jewish education through her vivid artwork, illustrations of children’s books, and many years of teaching. Her philosophy of using art to teach about Jewish holidays and customs left an indelible mark on countless schoolchildren. After more than 60years in the field, she was a legendary presence in Jewish education.
Marika Gidali
After surviving the Holocaust and immigrating from Budapest to Brazil, dancer Marika Gidali became an influential performer, teacher, and choreographer at a time when the arts faced serious repression under military dictatorship. In 1956 Gidali began dancing with the Ballet Company of Theatro Municipal do Rio de Janeiro. Gidali later set up her first school, which was the meeting point for many artists in the mid-1960s.
Miriam Gideon
Therese Giehse
Focusing on difficult roles written for older women, Therese Giehse earned a reputation as a talented actress who brought Bertolt Brecht’s works to life. She co-founded an anti-Nazi literary cabaret called The Peppermill in 1933 and was known for touring successful anti-fascist theaterical works. She had a long collaboration with Brecht and developed a reputation as an “intellectual popular actress.”
Sheyna Gifford
Sheyna Gifford’s passion for both scientific exploration and writing has enabled her to work for NASA in many different capacities, from science journalist to health and safety officer on a year-long simulated mission to Mars.
Gabrielle Giffords
Ruth Gikow
Ruth Gikow’s figurative paintings and murals offered her a means to comment on society and urban life. She worked on commissions for public spaces in New York, and in the 1960s and 1970s she created political works, depicting scenes from the civil rights and anti-war movements. Gikow’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, among others.
Melissa Gilbert
Susan Brandeis Gilbert
Élisabeth Gille
Élisabeth Gille (1937-1996) was a French author known most of all for biography of her mother, best-selling novelist Irène Némirovsky, murdered at Auschwitz. It was written borrowing Némirovsky’s voice, narrated in the first person as “dreamt memoirs.”
Carol Gilligan
The pioneering work of American psychologist Carol Gilligan changed the way the field of psychology studied women and, arguably, the way society views women. Challenging mainstream psychology through her interrogation of the accepted benchmarks of moral and personal development, she proposed that women and men have different moral criteria and follow different paths in maturation.
Blanche Gilman
A native New Yorker, Blanche Pearl Gilman contributed her energy and resources to a variety of religious, health, social, and activist organizations. Gilman devoted her career to bringing diverse groups together, from her interfaith work to her leadership in the Pro-Falasha (Ethiopian Jewry) Committee.
Rosa Ginossar
Rosa Ginossar’s determined lobbying of the British Authority in Palestine won women the right to practice law in Israel.
Ida Ginsburg
Mirra Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a unique figure in the history of American law, and indeed, of the twentieth-century women’s rights movement. The founder of the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project in 1972, she was confirmed for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in 1980 and became the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court in 1993.
Adele Ginzberg
Known as “Mama G.” by generations of admirers, Adele Ginzberg was an influential figure in the Conservative Movement as wife of the famed Louis Ginzberg, professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and was an active member of the National Women’s League of the United Synagogue. Ginzberg was a role model and inspiration to rabbinical students and women leaders and an early supporter of equal rights for women in synagogue rituals.
