Schools

March 11, 2011

10 Things You Should Know About Fannia Cohn

Leah Berkenwald

Her life offers evidence of the possibilities and limitations of women’s activism in the American labor movement.”

Topics: Community Organizing, Labor Rights, Unions, Education, Schools, Immigration, Organizations and Institutions

March 10, 2011

10 Things You Should Know About Lillian Wald

Leah Berkenwald

Lillian Wald was born in Cincinnati, OH in 1867. Like many German Jews, her parents had emigrated from Europe soon after the revolutions of 1848. Her father, an optical goods dealer, moved his family to Rochester, NY in 1878. The Walds valued culture as well as formal education. Lillian remembered her parents’ home as a place overflowing with books. She went to a school in Rochester that taught in French as well as English.

Topics: Civil Rights, Schools, Civil Service, Immigration, Organizations and Institutions, Medicine, Non-Fiction

Rosalie Silberman Abella speaks on "Identity, Diversity, and Human Rights" at Harvard

March 1, 2010

At Harvard, Canada Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella shared her family's Holocaust story and how it informs her view of human rights.

Mattie Levi Rotenberg, 1897 - 1989

One Erev Pesach my grandmother demonstrated physics at the University of Toronto for three hours, went to the radio studio to tape a live broadcast, taped two more broadcasts for the upcoming days of Yom Tov, and came home to make seder.

Unit 3, Lesson 3 - Growing tensions II: Affirmative Action

Assess Jewish attitudes towards Affirmative Action as an example of how individuals and communities try to manage competing priorities.

Unit 3, Lesson 2 - Growing tensions I: Black-Jewish Relations

Analyze how underlying rifts in the relationship between African Americans and Jews brought these groups into more overt conflict in the late 1960s, with a focus on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school crisis and a poetry slam activity.

Heather Booth and Fannie Lou Hamer, 1964

Unit 2, Lesson 4 - Community Organizing I: Freedom Summer

Explore the role of community organizing, Jewish values, and moral conviction in the lives of young civil rights activists as you imagine yourself a participant in Mississippi Freedom Summer.

February 4, 2010

Happy Birthday, Hebrew School

Susan Sklaroff

Today marks the 172nd anniversary of the First Hebrew Sunday School in the United States, founded in 1838 in Philadelphia. You can read about it at JWA's This Week in History. It was an audacious undertaking which required the special talents of an unusual woman.

Topics: Jewish Education, Schools

Henrietta Szold

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.

Lillian Wald

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."

June 12, 2009

Mazel Tov, Martha Minow, New Dean of Harvard Law!

Jordan Namerow

Great news! Yesterday, Martha Minow, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard, was appointed dean of Harvard Law School. A long-time friend, supporter, and founding board member of the Jewish Women's Archive, and member of the Law School faculty since 1981, Minow is a distinguished legal scholar with interests ranging from international human rights to equality and inequality; from religion and pluralism to managing mass tort litigation; from family law and education law to the privatization of military, schooling, and other governmental activities. She is also a widely admired teacher who chaired the Law School's curricular reform efforts of recent years and was recognized with the School's Sacks-Freund Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005.

Topics: Schools, Teachers, Law

Jessie Sampter Quotation on Himank BRO Sign, Nubra Valley, India

Death of author, educator, and Zionist pioneer Jessie Sampter

November 11, 1938

Zionist educator Jessie Sampter built Hadassah's educational programs and mentored generations of Zionist leaders.

Rebekah Kohut honored for fifty years of communal activism

November 21, 1935

Rebekah Kohut was honored in 1935 for 50 years of community work by figures including Frances Perkins and Fiorello La Guardia.

Judith R. Shapiro inaugurated president of Barnard College

October 27, 1994

Judith R. Shapiro, a cultural anthropologist known for research on gender differences, was inaugurated president of Barnard College in 1994.

Judith Rosenbaum on Annie Nathan Meyer Founding Barnard thumbnail

Opening of Barnard College

October 7, 1889

Activist Annie Nathan Meyer's lobbying helped open Barnard College to women students in New York in 1889.

Founding of Women's American ORT

October 12, 1927

In a Brooklyn kitchen on October 12, 1927, Anna Boudin, Mrs. Jacob Panken and Florence Dolowitz organized the first meeting of the Women’s American ORT.

Thumbnail of Rachel King on the Birth of Flora Langerman Spiegelberg, 2015

Birth of "Grand lady of the southwest frontier" in New York City

September 10, 1857

Flora Langerman Spiegelberg became a leading figure on the New Mexico frontier after moving to Santa Fe as a young bride.

Death of early music pioneer Wanda Landowska

August 16, 1959

Born in Warsaw in 1879, Wanda Landowska graduated from the Warsaw Conservatory at fourteen and moved to Paris in 1900 to teach and perform.

Drisha Institute graduates its first female Talmud scholars

August 18, 1996

On August 18, 1996, Devorah Zlochower, Leora Bednarsh, and Laura Steiner completed a three-year Talmud program at New York's Drisha Institute.

The Women’s Mizrachi Federation in America, Detroit Meeting, circa 1960s

Mizrachi Women Meet Independently for First Time

June 19, 1939

Freda Resnikoff founded what became AMIT, now the largest religious Zionist organization in the US, starting in 1910.

Birth of Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, editor and commentator on American Jewish life

June 17, 1908

Trude Weiss-Rosmarin became a major commentator on American Jewish life after opening the School of the Jewish Woman.

Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls opens

May 22, 1899

The Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls opened in New York in 1899, sheltering and training young women for self-support.

Public health pioneer Margaret Arnstein appointed dean of Yale School of Nursing

March 13, 1967

Margaret Arnstein, raised amid social welfare work, became a leading nursing and public health figure after Smith College.

Senda Berenson officiates at first collegiate women's basketball game

March 22, 1893

Senda Berenson, the "Mother of Women's Basketball," officiated the first women's basketball game in 1893.

Jewish Training School Sewing Class, Chicago, 1892

Vocational Training Schools in the United States

In the years prior to World War I, few institutions enchanted the members of American Jewry’s philanthropic community as much as the vocational training school. Combining education with charity and moral uplift with sociology, these school generally focused on teaching domestic skills. Despite their popularity, they were criticized for their lack of religious education and strictly gendered structure.