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Feminism

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Lilith

Lilith’s character has evolved throughout the years. She began as a female demon common to many Middle Eastern cultures, was transformed by Medieval Jewry into Adam’s first wife, and was finally reclaimed by Jewish feminists as an icon.

Paula E. Hyman

Distinguished historian Paula Hyman was engaged deeply in Jewish feminism and wrote extensively on the history of Jewish women in an effort to integrate their experience into the Jewish historical narrative. A role model for many, she challenged sacrosanct beliefs and stereotypes with vigor and knowledge and left behind a myriad of scholarly contributions and a profound vision for Jewish women.

Florence Howe

“The chief editor, fund raiser, cheerleader and occasional staff photographer” is the way the Chronicle of Higher Education described Florence Howe’s work at the Feminist Press. She made the publishing company her life’s work, and her contributions to the field of women’s studies as scholar, editor, and publisher are unparalleled.

Gladys Heldman

After originally planning to be a medieval historian, Gladys Heldman became a competitive tennis player and later an advocate for women’s tennis. The current generation of women tennis players owe their equal status to her important efforts.

Health Activism, American Feminist

American women have been the “perennial health care reformers.” Women’s health activism has often coincided with other social reform movements. Since the late 1960s, Jewish women have helped create and sustain the women’s health movement through decades of substantial social, political, medical, and technological change.

Jane Harman

The child of a refugee from Nazi Germany, Jane Harman began her career in law. After being elected in 1992, she spent 20 years as a vocal advocate of Israel, pro-choice legislation, and women’s issues as a Representative for California’s 36th Congressional District. After leaving Congress for the private sector, Harman held leadership positions in several prominent political organizations.

Haganah

Women played many different roles in the operations of the Haganah. Though their stories are frequently excluded from the story of the Jewish paramilitary organization in British Mandate Palestine, women served as caretakers and nurses, as well as fighters and commanders.

Hadassah in the United States

Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, has been the largest Zionist organization in the world, one of the largest American women’s volunteer organizations, American Jews’ largest mass-membership organization, and probably the most active Jewish women’s organization ever.

Miriam Shomer Zunser

Miriam Shomer Zunser, journalist, playwright, and artist, was an important promoter of Jewish culture in America during the period before World War II. Born in Odessa in 1882, Zunser left a strong legacy in the Yiddish literary world and in the world of Jewish activism and organization.

Yiddishe Froyen Asosiatsiye-YFA (Jewish Women's Association)

The Yiddishe Froyen Asosiatsiye (YFA) was the only Jewish women’s organization in Poland during its time. The YFA was a feminist organization that sought to education and empower Jewish women, who faced double discrimination for their gender and religion.

Women's Studies in the United States

Jewish women were instrumental in creating women’s studies as an academic discipline and contributed significantly to its growth and evolution. They have been critical not only as political activists, administrators, and editors of the key women’s studies journals, but also as prominent thinkers in the field’s intellectual debates.

Women's Tefillah Movement

The Women’s Tefillah Movement grew out of a need for Orthodox Jewish women for more meaningful and participatory roles in prayer services that remain within the boundaries of Jewish law and practice. With the growth of “partnership minyanim,” the number of Women’s Tefillah Groups has diminished somewhat, but they are still important places within Orthodoxy especially for young girls celebrating becoming a Bat Mitzvah.

Women of the Wall

Women of the Wall (WOW) is an international community of women who, since 1988, have sought the freedom to conduct women-led Torah services in the women’s section at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. WOW’s legal claims and political strategies raise questions about women’s rights to equality within Judaism and under Israeli law, the nature of religious toleration for non-Orthodox Jewish movements, and Israel’s identity as a Jewish and democratic state.

Women's Studies in Israel

In the 1980s and 1990s, Women and Gender Studies programs were established at the five Israeli Universities, emerging from the “New Women’s Liberation” movement of the 1970s. The programs faced many challenges, especially a lack of university support, but today are popular with students and faculty. Women’s Studies programs also developed at Israeli colleges, and the Israeli Association for Feminist and gender Studies is a national organization of feminist scholars.

Belle Winestine

During a career that spanned over seventy years, Belle Winestine devoted her time, money, and energy to the development of women’s rights legislation. As a member of the women’s movement, Winestine believed that she contributed to the historical process that encouraged women to seek public employment and to pursue professional lives.

Rosa Welt-Straus

Rosa Welt-Straus was a women’s rights activist who was active in the struggle for women’s suffrage in both New York and Mandatory Palestine. She helped form the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in New York and later became head of the Union of Hebrew Women in Palestine, which she went on to represent internationally.

Gertrude Weil

A dedicated activist for women’s rights and racial equality, Gertrude Weil showed that local, small-scale political action could have far-reaching effects. Her decision to associate herself with a relatively radical social and political agenda was unusual for a southern woman and even more uncommon for a southern Jew. Weil, however, strayed from this norm, because she believed that women had a responsibility to participate in the political process.

Yona Wallach

Regarded by many of her friends and colleagues as the most important among the young Israeli poets of the 1960s, Yona Wallach has had a profound effect on Israel’s cultural life ever since her works began to appear in periodicals in the early 1960s, despite her early death from cancer in 1985.

Simone Veil

Holocaust survivor Simone Veil was a pioneer in the French government and the European Union. As Minister of Health, she presented and successfully argued the law decriminalizing abortion in France. She was the first woman to preside over the European Parliament and the fifth woman to be interred in the Panthéon.

Roosje Vos

Roosje Vos was an organizer of the Dutch socialist movement and an editor of De Naaistersbode, the journal of the seamstresses’ trade union. She represented the interests of feminists and women in the movement, at times at odds with her fellow leaders.

Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Erez Israel

The Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Erez Israel was founded in 1919 by a nonpartisan group of Jewish women who perceived women’s rights as being fundamentally entwined with the Zionist vision. After a long battle with the Orthodox parties, the Union won the support of the National Assembly in 1926 when the Assembly declared that women would have equal voting and participation rights.

Rahel Straus

Rahel Goitein Straus, a pioneering woman medical doctor trained in Germany, was a model “New Jewish Woman” of the early-20th century. Successfully combining a career as a physician with marriage and motherhood, she committed herself to Jewish and feminist causes and organizations throughout her life, while also embracing Zionist ideals.

Judith Solis-Cohen

Judith Solis-Cohen had a prolific literary career that covered a wide range of topics, from clothing to education to women’s suffrage. She was also active in Philadelphia’s Jewish intellectual circles and introduced Jewish literature to the blind.

Virginia Snitow

Virginia Levitt Snitow was a multifaceted woman who was a teacher, political activist, pre-Second Wave feminist, poet, writer and founder of US/Israel Women to Women. Ahead of her time in the fight for both civil and women’s rights, Snitow was unafraid to take unpopular stances when fighting for others.

Vicki Shiran

Vicki Shiran was an Egyptian-born Israeli social activist dedicated to feminism, anti-occupation activism, and fighting discrimination against Mizrahim in Israel, all of which she viewed as interconnected. In 1999 she helped found Ahoti, For Women in Israel, which promoted the labor rights of lower-class women in Israel, and in 1981 she led a fierce fight against the Israel Broadcasting Authority for its exclusion of Mizrahim in its telling of the history of the Israeli state.

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