Law

Mary Belle Grossman

In 1918, Mary Belle Grossman became one of the first two women admitted to membership in the American Bar Association. After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, she became one of Cleveland’s most successful political activists.

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.

Rosa Ginossar

Rosa Ginossar’s determined lobbying of the British Authority in Palestine won women the right to practice law in Israel.

Susan Brandeis Gilbert

The daughter of Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Susan Brandeis Gilbert became one of the first women attorneys to argue a case before the Supreme Court.

Ruth Gavison

Ruth Gavison was an Israeli human rights expert and law professor. In addition to her academic work as a lecturer and researcher and her work in social organizations, Gavison has also been a member of various committees. Her work has been amply recognized and awarded.

Marta Friedländer-Garelik

Just the third Austrian woman to establish a legal practice, Marta Friedländer-Garelik’s law career was cut short by the 1938 Anschluss. She was able to escape Vienna through passage to Ireland, where she discovered her talent for handicrafts. After immigrating to Texas in 1941, Friedländer-Garelik started her own very successful knitwear factory.

Magdalen Flexner

A distinguished lawyer and foreign service officer, Magdalen Flexner succeeded in crossing gender barriers to assume professional positions traditionally reserved for men. Living in a time of social restriction and limited opportunity for women, she defined herself as an independent woman, unfazed by the mold society dictated.

Edith Fisch

With great courage and dogged determination, Edith Lond Fisch became a lawyer, legal writer, and law professor despite severe physical limitations, educational prejudices, and sexual discrimination. Edith Fisch wrote an important book on evidence which became regularly cited by judges and used in law schools throughout New York.

Blanche Goldman Etra

Blanche Goldman Etra opened doors to independence and education for other women by founding women’s divisions of medical schools and women’s seminars on financial planning. A woman of high intelligence and great energy, characterized by a strong sense of integrity and morality, Etra set out to use her considerable talents for the betterment of the Jewish and general communities.

Equality, Religion and Gender in Israel

Although the principles of equality for women under the Declaration of Independence and the Women’s Equal Rights Law were not endowed with constitutional force, and the 1992 Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty does not expressly include the principle of equality, these laws have been interpreted by the courts as securing the principle of gender equality as a basic principle of the legal system.

Dalia Dorner

Israeli Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner was known for citing non-legal sources in her decisions to illustrate the just society she aspired to live in. With landmark cases impacting gender equality, the right to education for all, and the right to live in dignity, Justice Dorner’s legal and social legacy is deeply rooted in human rights.

Divorce: The Halakhic Perspective

Many scholars claim that Jewish marriage is a matter of contract between two willing parties and as a result they, not the state, can decide to get divorced, in the same way that they decided to marry. However, more critically inclined scholars, and especially feminist scholars, take issue with those who complacently remark on the “progressive, and contractual” ease with which Jewish divorce takes place.

Rita Charmatz Davidson

Rita Charmatz Davidson’s career in the Maryland court system was a series of hard-earned firsts, leading to her 1979 appointment as the first woman on the Maryland Court of Appeals, the highest judicial body in the state.

Lillian Copeland

Lillian Copeland was the epitome of a strong woman with a remarkable career, first as a record-setting Olympic medalist and later as an officer in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

Conversas

After the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478, observance of crypto-Judaism became dangerous and more difficult. Women were at the center of Judaizing efforts, since the home was the only remaining institution in which one could observe Jewish law. Crypto-Jewish women most frequently observed the Sabbath and dietary laws.

Felice Cohn

Felice Cohn was one of Nevada’s first women lawyers in the early twentieth century, an author of suffragist legislation in Nevada, and one of the first women allowed to argue before the United States Supreme Court.

Canada: From Outlaw to Supreme Court Justice, 1738-2005

The positive aspect of the Canadian mosaic has been a strong Jewish community (and other communities) which nurtured traditional ethnic and religious values and benefited from the talent and energy of women and men restrained from participation in the broader society. The negative aspect has included considerable antisemitism and, especially for women, the sometimes stifling narrowness and conservatism of the community which inhibited creative and exceptional people from charting their own individual paths.

Helen Lehman Buttenwieser

As a lawyer, Helen Lehman Buttenwieser fought to protect children in the foster care system. Throughout her life in the law she served as an important role model for many women attorneys.

Emilie M. Bullowa

As a lawyer and activist, Emilie M. Bullowa devoted her life to justice for the disenfranchised. Her colleagues, as well as many judges, respected her attitude as a woman in a field then dominated by men: She took pride in being a lawyer, rather than in being a female lawyer.

Jeanette Goodman Brill

As the first woman magistrate in Brooklyn and the second in New York, Jeanette Goodman Brill believed women had an aptitude and responsibility to judge cases involving women and children.

Birth Control Movement in the United States: 1912-1960

In the 1910s, Margaret Sanger began the family planning movement in the United States. While Sanger was not Jewish, Jews had an enormous impact on her activism, and her activism indelibly shaped the lives of Jewish women in America.

Clementine Bern-Zernik

A lawyer by training, Vienna-born Clementine Bern-Zernik produced broadcasts for the US Office of War Information in London during the war, served as the director of a Displaced Persons Camp in post-war Germany, and spent the last 50 years of her life as a UN liaison to the New York Public Library. Throughout her life she maintained a strong Austrian identity and was a founding member of the Austrian-American Federation.

Rebecca Thurman Bernstein

Rebecca Thurman Bernstein was lauded by local and national organizations for her efforts to improve health care, literacy, and Jewish life in Portland, Maine. Bernstein was proud of her Jewish heritage and worked for many Jewish causes, but her interests were not limited to or by her Jewishness.

Margarete Berent

Margarete Berent was the first female lawyer to practice in Prussia and the second female lawyer ever licensed in Germany. In 1925 she opened her own law firm in Berlin and, after fleeing Nazi Germany, opened her own firm in the United States. Not only was she the first female lawyer and the head of her own law firm, but she was also an ardent feminist and active in promoting opportunities for women.

Miriam Ben-Porat

Although Miriam Ben-Porat is perhaps best known as the first woman to be appointed an Israeli Supreme Court Justice, she also held many positions throughout her life, from state comptroller to professor and author. She was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1976, where she made rulings characterized by both legal and non-legal elements and grounded in the principles of equality and good faith.

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