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Libraries

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Feminist Books Save Lives

Sara Weinstein

Across the country, efforts to ban books have been increasing in number and effectiveness, hitting school and public libraries especially hard. These are the places that made me who I am, so it's been an emotional experience, to say the least, to see books taken off the shelves.  

Topics: Libraries
Collage of Judy Blume on dark blue checkered background

Opposing Book Bans with Judy Blume

Sonia Freedman

Having the option to read Blume’s book about growing up as a girl did not necessarily change my view on womanhood, but taking away a comforting story that offers reassurance about a girls’ preteen years is disappointing and ridiculous.

Gertrud Bing

Art historian Gertrud Bing was a key figure at the Warburg Institute, a research library focused on the afterlife of antiquity in the art of the Renaissance. Beginning as personal assistant to the Institute’s founder, Aby Warburg, and ultimately becoming its director, Bing helped develop and disseminate iconology, a methodology that investigates the social, historical, and cultural meanings of themes and subjects in artworks and that transformed twentieth-century art history.

Henriette Avram, 1919 - 2006

She is remembered as a dynamic, inspiring leader, full of energy, writing and speaking internationally … making friends wherever she went.

"Thank G-D for creating me according to your will"

Melissa Scholten-Gutierrez

Three years ago I had the opportunity to visit the rare books room at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) library. I saw many interesting things, but one that would change my life forever.

An Open Book

Jewish Book Carnival: November 2011

Leah Berkenwald

This month, the folks at the Jewish Women's Archive and its blog Jewesses with Attitude are honored to host the November Jewish Book Carnival.

Topics: Libraries, Writing
Registration for the 1954 TABS Conference with B'nai B'rith Girls at Freedom House

Joan Krizack wins Champion of Freedom Award for the Documenting Diversity Project

Ellen K. Rothman

In 1998, Northeastern University announced that it had received a two-year federal grant to “identify, locate, secure, and make accessible the most important and at-risk historical records of Boston’s African American, Chinese, gay and lesbian, and Latino communities.” Later that year, I met Joan Krizack, Northeastern’s University Archivist and Head of Special Collections, who had conceived the “Documenting Diversity Project.”  I could see immediately that this diminutive woman (who has been a member of the Jewish Women’s Archive Technical Advisory Committee since 2006) had a “tiger by the tail” and was not about to let it go.

Lesléa Newman Publishes Groundbreaking Children’s Book "Heather Has Two Mommies"

December 16, 1989

Lesléa Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies is the first children’s book about a family with two moms.

Esther Hautzig, 1930 - 2009

She encouraged people of all ages, especially young people, to keep a journal and record their stories. She believed that all stories were unique to the individuals writing them and each life story important in its own way.

Judith Krug, 1940 - 2009

The First Amendment lost a champion with the April 11 death of the director of ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom, who fought censorship for 40 years with courage, intelligence, and wit. A look back at the career of a library legend.

Frances Feldman, 1912 - 2008

Frances Feldman's life and work are a testimony to the highest standards of social work scholarship. They reflect compassion, systematic understanding, and relentless curiosity. A pioneering spirit, personally and intellectually, she changed the world she lived in and left indelible memories with all who knew her.

Eva Hindus, 1913 - 2008

She was a natural-born writer, she wrote long hand-written letters ... I can't begin to summarize the contents of the hundreds of letters that passed between Eva and me over more than 45 years of friendship ... Eva's letters were graceful, evocative retelling of events, powerful confessions of emotion and desires, and commentaries on my own struggles with writing.

Sally Cherniavsky Fox, 1929 - 2006

Sally Fox's passion was to gather and share the history of women through visual images. Sometimes this meant finding images of women doing conventional work, but often it meant seeking images of women doing the unexpected…. Her goal was to challenge conventional notions of how women lived their lives in the past.

Fay Rosenthal Brachman, 1921 - 2007

When Fay had an idea that something needed doing, she didn't complain. She jumped in and did it. She energized people. She didn't plan to do things big, she just planned to do things better, and they grew.

Fanny Goldstein, librarian and founder of Jewish Book Week, is born

May 15, 1895
Goldstein was the first female Judaica librarian and the first woman to direct a branch library in Massachusetts.

Sophie A. Udin

Sophie A. Udin fought for women's rights and equal pay, but she is best known for helping found the first libraries in Israel and creating important American archives about Zionism, helping preserve vital documents and making them accessible.

Selma Stern-Taeubler

Originally a historian and researcher in Heidelberg and Berlin, Selma Stern-Taeubler settled at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinatti after fleeing Nazi Germany. She became the first archivist of the American Jewish Archives at the college and later wrote books of fiction and nonfiction. Despite her contributions to Jewish history, American-Jewish academe has largely undervalued Stern-Taeubler’s work, which continued until her death in 1981.

Barbara Miller Solomon

Barbara Miller Solomon was not only an educator but a pioneer in the field of women's history. Named the first female dean of Harvard College in 1970, she laid the groundwork for the formal establishment women’s studies there. Her scholarship on the history of immigration and women's history remains influential today.

Jennie Franklin Purvin

Jennie Franklin Purvin was one of a few Jewish women to become prominent in both civic and Jewish communal work in Progressive Era Chicago. Of her many efforts to improve the city, Purvin’s most visible and long-lasting accomplishment is the beachfronts on Lake Michigan for swimming and recreation.

Gladys Davidson Weinberg

Gladys Davidson Weinberg’s pioneering archaeological work on ancient and medieval glass and its manufacture in the Mediterranean world sheds light on the trade and technology of preindustrial societies.

Käte Wallach

Käte Wallach was a German lawyer who, due to her being Jewish, was unable to practice law in her country. After migrating to the United States in 1935, Wallach re-enrolled in law school, during which she was enthralled by library science and became a prominent scholar in both fields.

Eva Gabriele Reichmann

Born in Silesia, Eva Gabriele Reichmann studied economics in Germany and, after fleeing the Nazis, in London. A prolific writer, especially after her retirement in 1959, Reichmann focused mainly on Judaism and the social history of German Jewry. She was awarded several medals for her contributions to democracy, freedom, and tolerance and died at the age of 101.

Daniella Rabinovich

Following decades of intensive work in management of Israeli music institutions, Daniella Rabinovich became a leading figure in the field in Tel Aviv in the 1980s and 1990s, serving as director of the Tel Aviv Conservatory.

Rikudah Potash

Crowned “the Poetess of Jerusalem” by Sholem Asch, Rikudah Potash wrote in Yiddish about the landscape of her beloved city and its diverse ethnic communities. She brought to Yiddish readers the rarely seen Middle Eastern Jewish woman. Potash’s Jerusalem, both the heavenly and the earthly, was a capacious universe that she inhabited, body and soul, for thirty years.

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