In this amazing clip from MAKERS, Barbara Walters speaks of breaking not just the glass ceiling—but the steel ceiling. It’s hard to imagine Barbara Walters as anything other than successful and confident.

Adapted from The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America, by Joyce Antler (Schocken Books, 1997). 

Bel Kaufman, the daughter of East European immigrants and granddaughter of Yiddish novelist Sholom Aleichem, emigrated from Odessa with her family in 1923 when she was twelve, quickly learned English, and used the public libraries voraciously. 

On the Thursday night before Hanukkah began, I attended an event called A Sip of Eser, an introductory session to the ten-part young adult learning program Eser (meaning 10) run by Hebrew College in nearby Newton, MA. Amidst the tumult of a Boston bar, and alongside several dozen people I had never met, I heard rabbinical student, Seth Wax, tell a Hanukkah story none of us had ever heard.

Accepting an award from the Jewish Women’s Archive earlier this year, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a longtime activist, pointed to the Statue of Liberty, just visible in the foggy distance, and quipped, “I love her, even though she’s not Jewish.” Over murmurs of laughter, she spoke of her love for Lady Liberty’s “grace and beauty,” and defined what the monument represents to her: “welcome, freedom, hope.” The same could be said of Pogrebin herself.

On Rosh Hashanah we re-enthrone the Sovereign King in order to perpetuate the ancient world order. But what happens when this particular male-dominant, top down world order is reversed?

More than half a century after the August day in 1944 when Ruth Gruber coaxed reluctant refugees off the bus—told they would be taken to the showers, these concentration camp survivors refused to disembark—I stood on that very spot in upstate New York.

On August 22, 1893, a child was born who would make the world a decidedly wittier place.

You didn’t think Title IX would reach its 40th birthday and go unrecognized here at JWA, did you?

Perhaps what I love most about the Jewish tradition, about the dance of life and its cycles, is that wonderful interplay between tradition and innovation.

We are thrilled to share some exciting news:  our very own, Online Communication Specialist and Blogger-in-Chief, Leah Berkenwald, earned a coveted 2011 Simon Rockower Award for Excellence in Jewish Journalism.  She won first place in Division A (with readership of 15,000 or more) for Excellence in Single Commentary for her piece, “Harry Potter: Four Progressive Lessons for the Jewish Community.” The adjudicators stated that Leah effectively made “connections between the themes of freedom and equality in the most widely read story of her generation to the movement for equal rights for women and resistance to bigotry in a clear, energetic and youthful voice.”