Social Science

Ruby Daniel

Ruby Daniel’s 1995 book, Ruby of Cochin: An Indian Jewish Woman Remembers, combines recounting of historical events with engaging storytelling. The book endures as a significant contribution to Jewish history and ethnography.

Rose Laub Coser

Sociologist Rose Laub Coser redefined major concepts in role theory—the idea that our actions are largely dictated by our roles in society—and applied them to expectations of women’s roles in the family and the workplace.

Ruth Leah Bunzel

Ruth Leah Bunzel began her career as anthropologist Franz Boas’s secretary, soon becoming an accomplished anthropologist herself. She broke new ground in her research the relationship of artists to their work and on alcoholism in two villages in Guatemala and Mexico.

May Brodbeck

May Brodbeck, whose career in the sciences ran the gamut from teaching high school chemistry to exploring fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of human consciousness, was among the foremost American-born philosophers of science.

Jessie Bernard

Sociologist Jessie Bernard’s feminist epiphany came at age 67 in 1969, but her earlier work anticipated feminist theory by discussing the differences between men’s and women’s experiences and arguing that quantitative studies did not accurately represent women’s stories.

Timeline Showing the Major Organizations of Jews in Germany, 1893-1943

Cora Berliner

Cora Berliner was an economist and social scientist who held leadership positions in several major Jewish organizations in Germany between 1910 and 1942. These organizations included the Association of Jewish Youth Organizations in Germany, the Reich Representation of German Jews, and the League of Jewish Women.

Ba'alot Teshuvah: Jewish Women Who Become Orthodox

During the past half century or so, some Jewish women resisted trends toward secularism and feminist ideology and became strictly Orthodox. Despite feminist ideology that views the strict observance of religion as repressive, research since the 1980s has consistently found that the women find fulfillment in the traditional roles of wife and mother, relish the warmth of Orthodox communities, and feel intellectually stimulated by new learning.

Hannah Arendt

Brilliant and controversial, Hannah Arendt was a German-trained political theorist whose books exerted a major impact on political theory in North America and Europe. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) made her an intellectual celebrity in the early years of the Cold War. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Princeton University.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

Ruth Nanda Anshen, twentieth-century philosopher, lecturer, and author, was an “intellectual instigator” for such writers of genius and eminent thinkers as physicist Albert Einstein, scientist Jonas Salk, and others. Anshen created connections between the great thinkers of different fields, offering them opportunities to explain their work to each other and the general public.

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