Lillian D. Wald was a practical idealist who worked to create a more just society. Her goal was to ensure that women and children, immigrants and the poor, and members of all ethnic and religious groups would realize America's promise of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Gertrude Weil's passion for equality
and justice shaped the course of her long
life. Inspired by Jewish teachings that
"justice, mercy, [and] goodness were
not to be held in a vacuum, but practiced in
our daily lives," Weil stood
courageously at the forefront of a wide range
of progressive and often controversial
causes, including women's suffrage, labor
reform and civil rights. She worked
tirelessly to extend political, economic and
social opportunities to those long denied
them.
Hannah Greenebaum Solomon dared to go out into the world and establish the first national association of Jewish women. A superb organizer, Solomon emphasized unity, and orchestrated agreements among Jewish, gentile, and government groups on local, national, and international levels.
Henrietta Szold enlisted generations of American Jewish women in the practical work of supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine and Israel. As an essayist, translator, and editor, she became one of the few women to play a foundational role in creating a meaningful American Jewish culture.
Emma Goldman dedicated her life to the
creation of a radically new social order.
Convinced that the political and economic
organization of modern society was
fundamentally unjust, she embraced anarchism
for the vision it offered of liberty, harmony
and true social justice. For decades, she
struggled tirelessly against widespread
inequality, repression and exploitation.
As the founder and secretary of
Philadelphia's earliest women's
philanthropic organizations, Rebecca Gratz
helped define a new identity for American
women. She devoted her
adult life to providing relief for
Philadelphia's underprivileged women and
children and securing religious, moral and
material sustenance for all of
Philadelphia's Jews.
One of the first successful Jewish American authors, Lazarus was part of the late nineteenth century New York literary elite and was recognized in her day as an important American poet. In her later years, she wrote bold, powerful poetry and essays protesting the rise of antisemitism and arguing for Russian immigrants' rights. She called on Jews to unite and create a homeland in Palestine before the title Zionist had even been coined.
Myerhoff was a renowned scholar, heading the University of Southern California's anthropology department in Los Angeles where she lived and raised her family. A creative and extremely popular professor, she urged her students to use the tools of anthropology to question and better understand their own lives and the lives of others. But Myerhoff's influence also reached far beyond academia, and she touched a broad audience with her books and films.
For over seventy years, Molly Picon, star of Yiddish theater and film, delighted audiences with her comic song and dance performances. Picon performed on stage and in Yiddish and Hollywood films for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences around the world. Her engaging persona and powerful performances helped keep Yiddish culture alive by bringing it out of the shtetl and into mainstream American culture.
An outspoken
activist and a "fighting judge,"
Justine Wise Polier was the first woman
Justice in New York. For 38 years she used
her position on the Family Court bench to
fight for the rights of the poor and
disempowered. She strove to implement
juvenile justice law as treatment, not
punishment, making her court the center of a
community network that encompassed
psychiatric services, economic aid, teachers,
placement agencies, and families.
During the workday, Canadian Olympic medalist Fanny "Bobbie" Rosenfeld was a stenographer in a Toronto chocolate factory. It was only on evenings and weekends that she had time to resume her role as the "world's best girl athlete." On any given day she could be seen winning softball games before crowds of thousands, breaking national and international track records or leading an ice hockey or basketball team to a league championship.
Anna Sokolow was a dancer and
choreographer of uncompromising integrity.
Believing strongly that dance could be more
than mere entertainment, she explored the
most pressing issues of her day—from the
Great Depression, to the Holocaust, to the
alienated youth of the 1960s—and challenged
her audiences to think deeply about
themselves and their society.
A formidable leader of the women’s movement, Bella Abzug fought to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and other vital legislation for the rights of women. During her three terms in Congress, she advocated for groundbreaking bills including the Equal Rights Amendment and crucial support of Title IX.
"Madame" Beatrice Alexander knew how to dream big. Born into a world in which many women worked but few achieved prominence in business, she built her own company virtually singlehandedly. Raised amidst teeming poverty, she amassed a significant fortune. From the obscurity of an immigrant neighborhood, she became one of the foremost female entrepreneurs of the twentieth century.
Gertrude Elion's accomplishments over the course of her long career as a chemist were tremendous. Among the many drugs she developed were the first chemotherapy for childhood leukemia, the immunosuppressant that made organ transplantation possible, the first effective anti-viral medication, and treatments for lupus, hepatitis, arthritis, gout, and other diseases.
Ray Frank's position in American Jewry
was truly a novel one. In 1890, she became
the first Jewish woman to preach formally
from a pulpit in the United States,
inaugurating a career as "the Girl Rabbi
of the Golden West" that would help to
blaze new paths for women in Judaism.
Virtually overnight, Frank became a sensation
in the Jewish world, and she would remain so
for nearly a decade.
First cousins Ruth Fein (1927-2024), Merle Goldman (1931-2023), and Judy Moore (1927-2023) all came of age as young women in the restrictive 1950s. From a certain distance, you might assume that they all conformed to a simple and restrictive script – the one prescribed for women of their era, race, and class status. But in truth none of them did. In fact, what is so striking about these three cousins is how each, in her own way, defied the expectations of the era in which they came of age.
Mimi’s achievements were legion. She was a pioneer in opinion research relating to consumers and was at the forefront of shifting the thinking from what manufacturers make, to what consumers want. Her ground-breaking work in the transformation of sociology as a tool for studying people in general into a tool for the study of people as consumers helped to formulate many of what became widely-adopted methods of surveying public opinion and doing consumer research.
Abstract notions of feminism never interested Joan; specific women and their stories did. Yet without setting out to do so, Joan Silver influenced generations of women to come. She was a trail-blazer, a risk-taker, a champion of other women directors.
Pioneering lawyer, Supreme Court Justice, and pop culture icon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg redefined gender equality through vision, persistence, precision, and dissent. This collection of reflections on her life and work honors her tremendous legacy as a lawyer, judge, feminist, and Jew.
Elsa Dorfman is best known as a photographer who used a large format Polaroid camera to make 23 by 36 inch portraits of a wide range of individuals, from celebrities such as Allen Ginsberg, Andrea Dworkin, Bob Dylan, and members of the Big Apple Circus, to children, families with their pets, babies, and couples.
Activist, agitator, proud Brooklynite, feminist, lesbian, socialist, wit, wife, cherished friend and relative. Vicki Levins Gabriner was articulate, principled, often ahead of her times.
Bunny’s passion for changing the field of education’s treatment of women was spurred by her own experience in academia. In 1969, after earning a doctorate at the University of Maryland, she hoped to secure one of seven open teaching positions in her department at that university. When she learned that she had not been considered for any of them, she asked a male colleague why. His reply was, “Let’s face it. You come on too strong for a woman.” For Bunny, those were fighting words, and battling discrimination in educational institutions became her lifelong passion.
Every inflection point in Rachel’s life became a source of mission and activism: as half of a young intermarried couple in the 1970s, she pushed for inclusivity in the Jewish community… When she became Jewish and then a rabbi (she was ordained in 1989 by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion), she used her dual perspective as both outsider and insider to sense what was needed in the Jewish world.
Carole gave millions of children the affirming soundtrack to their childhoods. You can say a lot of things about Carole, but she left this world better than she found it.