Teachers

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Hannah Marks Solomons

Hannah Marks Solomons was an influential San Francisco educator and civic worker, as well as the wife of a leading member of the Jewish community.

Soloveitchik, Rabbi Joseph Dov

Joseph Dov Soloveitchik shaped Jewish practice and public opinion through the era of second-wave feminism. Despite his sometimes progressive actions, Soloveitchik maintained that women and men had separate religious and familial roles. These positions from the leader of the Modern Orthodox community cemented resistance to Orthodox feminists’ demands to increase their participation in Jewish rituals.

Bertha Solomon

As one of the first women’s rights activists in South Africa, Bertha Solomon used her positions as one of the first practicing women advocates in South Africa and as a member of parliament to work to expand the rights of all South African women. Throughout her long career in government, Solomon acted as a parliamentary watchdog over women’s rights, committed to ensuring women’s suffrage and marital rights.

Chava Slucka-Kesten

Chava Slucka-Kesten started teaching in Warsaw before World War II and continued her career through the war in Moscow. After the war she became an author and sustained her political involvement. Writing from the perspective of a politically engaged woman, Slucka-Kesten offers a unique glimpse into pre- and post-war Jewish life in Poland’s cities and villages, as well as into the early years of the State of Israel.

Michal Smoira-Cohn

One of Israel’s best-known musicologists, Michal Smoira-Cohn was involved in innumerable musical features and events and was a leading figure in Israel’s cultural life.

Virginia Snitow

Virginia Levitt Snitow was a multifaceted woman who was a teacher, political activist, pre-Second Wave feminist, poet, writer and founder of US/Israel Women to Women. Ahead of her time in the fight for both civil and women’s rights, Snitow was unafraid to take unpopular stances when fighting for others.

Judith Tannenbaum Shuval

Judith Shuval is one of the main scholars in the field of the sociology of health in Israel. Her research on migration and health, inequality in health, self-care in health, the doctor-patient relationship, and the processes of professional socialization has been based in concrete life in Israel and has broader implications for such topics cross-culturally.

Viola Brothers Shore

Viola Brothers Shore was an accomplished writer, poet, and screenwriter during the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to writing for numerous publications, she wrote silent movie titles and original stories for many films and won awards for her may mystery stories.

Wilma Shore

Wilma Shore was a writer and teacher most active between the 1940s and the 1960s. She lived at various times in Los Angeles and New York City, settling finally in New York City. Involved with left-wing political activity, she and her husband were blacklisted during the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings.

Anna G. Sherman

Anna G. Sherman was one of the unsung heroes of the Hebraist movement in the United States. She taught Hebrew classes at the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary for nearly forty years, inspiring hundreds of students, mostly adult women, to connect to their Judaism through the study of Hebrew.

Vicki Shiran

Vicki Shiran was an Egyptian-born Israeli social activist dedicated to feminism, anti-occupation activism, and fighting discrimination against Mizrahim in Israel, all of which she viewed as interconnected. In 1999 she helped found Ahoti, For Women in Israel, which promoted the labor rights of lower-class women in Israel, and in 1981 she led a fierce fight against the Israel Broadcasting Authority for its exclusion of Mizrahim in its telling of the history of the Israeli state.

Sarah Shner-Nishmit

Polish author and historian Sarah Shner-Nishmit traveled constantly to evade capture during World War II, working at a labor camp and joining a partisan group. Shner made aliyah in 1947 and subsequently began her writing career, which included children’s books and historical research. She also helped found Kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getta’ot, where she lived until her death.

Gabriela Shalev

Gabriela Shalev, one of the outstanding Israeli academicians in the field of law, has instructed innumerable students in the intricacies of contract law, on which she has published and lectured in the light of her own analyses and theories.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi

Israel Prize Laureate Professor Alice Shalvi was a leading Israeli feminist activist and scholar. Founder of the Israel Women’s Network and the Ben Gurion University English Department and longtime principal of the iconic religious feminist high school Pelech, Professor Shalvi was instrumental in advancing gender issues in Israeli education, society and politics.

Sylvia Bernstein Seaman

“I’m still capable of marching. I marched sixty years ago. I just hope my granddaughter doesn’t have to march into the next century.” Sylvia Bernstein Seaman was a pioneering feminist of the twentieth century who broke the silence around breast cancer through her frank writing.

Lore Segal

A respected writer whose work has been informed by her experiences as a child refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Lore Segal has published five books of autobiographical fiction for adults as well as several books for children and translations. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 and named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.

Anna Jacobson Schwartz

Anna Jacobson Schwartz was credited as one of the world’s greatest monetary scholars for her work at the National Bureau of Economic Research and her incisive scholarship on economic history. She was an educator at various institutions as well as a highly published and awarded researcher. Schwartz received numerous honorary degrees and has held leadership roles in several organizations, including the International Atlantic Economic Society.

Grace Schulman

During her decades-long career as both poet and professor, Dr. Grace Schulman has received numerous awards, including the Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, and she has written extensively on her friend and mentor poet, Marianne Moore.

Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro helped pioneer the feminist art movement, both through her own pushing of creative boundaries and by creating opportunities for other women artists. Starting in 1970, Schapiro raised women’s consciousness through her writing, painting, printmaking, teaching and sculpture. She lectured extensively on feminist issues to professional conferences, university audiences, art classes and women’s groups.

Angiola Sartorio

Angiola Sartorio was a prolific dancer, teacher, and choreographer who subverted fascism in her artistic choices. Sartorio had a company and school, and her company was widely well-received in Italy until it performed for Hitler in Vienna and she had to flee to the United States.

Pnina Salzman

Renowned classical pianist Pnina Salzman was the first Israeli pianist to conquer concert stages in Europe and Asia in the early 1940s, before the establishment of the State of Israel. She also enriched the local music scene with her premieres of Israeli composers, who wrote for her knowing that their work would receive superb interpretation. She won the Israel Prize for her musical achievements.

Else Rahel Samulon-Guttmann

Else Samulon-Guttmann showed her exceptional intelligence early in life, studying law at Berlin university and earning a PhD from Heidelberg University. Appointed a judge in 1929, she lost her position with the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Samulon-Guttmann stayed in Germany for her mother and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.

Doris Rosenthal

Doris Rosenthal was a daring explorer, a dedicated educator, and a painter of colorful and expressive yet unromanticized work representing the everyday life of Mexican Indians at a time when anti-Mexican sentiment in the United States was rife.

Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman

Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman was a Soviet-Yiddish educator, journalist, writer, and memoirist. Her books concentrate on personalities and events in the Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Birobidzhan, providing insightful portrayals of Soviet Yiddish cultural history, its Soviet state-sponsored development, and its total liquidation.

Sophia Moses Robison

Sophia Moses Robison discovered her passion for social advocacy in college. Active in the National Council of Jewish Women throughout her life, Robison was also a published researcher and studied the economic impact of arriving refugees after World War II for the federal government. Her explorations into youth delinquency demonstrated the class and social biases in the reporting of delinquency.

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