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Women's Rights

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Hasya Sukenik-Feinsod

Hasya Sukenik Feinsod served as director of the Hebrew Kindergarten Teachers College. In 1919 Feinsod was appointed by the Education Committee to serve as superintendent of kindergartens in Jerusalem. She headed the Association of Kindergarten Teachers, and she was the first and only female representative on the Education Committee.

Tova Strasberg-Cohen

During her tenure as a justice on the Israeli Supreme Court, Tova Strasberg-Cohen became known for her groundbreaking decisions regarding civil law and women's equality.

Dorothy Straus

Over the course of her life, Dorothy Straus was active as a lawyer, college lecturer, Democrat, and member of the League of Women Voters and several municipal and state government committees. Straus demonstrated a commitment to efficient, socially active government policies, especially regarding the protection and advancement of women.

Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero was a figurative artist concerned with difference and the representation of the body. Rejecting postwar trends towards Pop art and abstract impressionism, Spero co-founded the AIR (Artists in Residence) Gallery in 1972, the first cooperative gallery of women artists. Spero also created a mosaic for the Lincoln Center subway station called “Artemis, Acrobats, Divas, and Dancers.”

Constance Amberg Sporborg

Constance Amberg Sporborg was a career clubwoman who dedicated her life to the advancement of women’s rights, immigrant settlement, international organizations, and world peace. Working in New York City in the early twentieth century, Sporborg aided both Jews and gentiles.

Rebecca Solomon

Rebecca Solomon’s success as a professional artist was remarkable in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when women artists were the exception rather than the rule. While her artistic style conformed to the most popular art of the time, she used her visual images to critique ethnic, gender, and class prejudice in Victorian England.

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.

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.

Helene Simon

Greatly influenced by the socialist ideology of the Fabian Society in London, Helene Simon was as a pioneer in the theory and practice of social policy and welfare in Germany. Simon was a major advocate for structural changes in Germany’s welfare system, especially for the benefit of women and children.

Rebecca Sieff

Rebecca Sieff, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Manchester, England, played an active role in two central social-historical movements: the struggle for women’s rights and the Zionist movement that eventually led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

Chana Shpitzer

Chana Shpitzer was an important figure in the field of Jewish education for girls in Jerusalem in the early 20th century. Shpitzer was a firm believer in single-sex education and her goal was for her students to develop academically, religiously, and practically. Her school was known for its emphasis on academic achievement, and almost all her students found gainful employment upon graduation.

Toni Sender

Toni Sender’s wide-ranging quest to save the world led her from the union hall to the German Parliament (as a socialist) and finally to the United Nations. She helped found Germany’s Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) and served in the German Parliament from 1924 to 1933. After fleeing to the United States in 1933, she joined the board of the German American Council for the Liberation of Germany from Nazism, and after 1944 she became active with the UN, retiring in 1956.

Adolphine Schwimmer-Vigeveno

Adolphine Schwimmer-Vigeveno was an active member of the Jewish Women’s Council in the Netherlands in the decades before the outbreak of World War II. She served as the general editor of its periodical and later as its president, stimulating solidarity among Jewish women, organizing Jewish social work, and exploring contemporary Jewish issues, including Zionism.

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.

Ottilie Schönewald

Deeply involved in several women’s and Jewish organizations, Ottilie Schönewald was an activist who became a politician to advance her causes. She worked with the League of Jewish Women and helped Jews emigrate from Nazi Germany. After Schönewald and her family fled in 1939, she continued her social work during and after the war.

Therese Loeb Schiff

Therese Loeb Schiff used her wealth to address a wide range of needs in the American Jewish community. She was a paradigm of the intellectual, religious, and cultural activities and also the social service of upper-middle-class German Jewish women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein

Therese Schlesinger’s life was characterized by her lifelong passion for learning and her endeavor to improve the plight of working-class women. She was a dedicated feminist who was inspired by the ideals of socialism, struggling to combine both of these political passions within the Austrian Social Democratic Party.

Rosa Schapire

Rosa Schapire was one of the few women to pursue art history studies at a time when the discipline itself was still in its infancy. Her foray into this male-dominated profession was indicative of her allegiance to feminist aspirations to equal opportunity and adult suffrage.

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.

Nina Ruth Davis Salaman

Nina Salaman was a well-regarded Hebraist, known especially for her translations of medieval Hebrew poetry, at a time when Jewish scholarship in Europe was a male preserve. In addition to her translations, she published historical and critical essays, book reviews, and an anthology of Jewish readings for children, as well as poetry of her own.

Vera Cooper Rubin

Through her groundbreaking research, astronomer Vera Cooper Rubin forever changed our fundamental view of the cosmos, from a universe dominated by starlight to one dominated by dark matter. Among her many accomplishments, she received the Presidential National Medal of Science in 1993 and mentored many astronomers, saying she would always be “available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers.”

Russian Immigrants in Israel

Approximately 350,000 Jewish women moved to Israel from the Former Soviet Union after 1989. Among the key issues they faced were occupational downgrading, sexuality and family life, sexual harassment, marital distress, and single-parent families.

Saviona Rotlevy

Saviona Rotlevy, a judge who served on the Israeli District Court, is renowned for her outstanding contributions to the advancement of children’s rights, as her rulings consistently prioritized the interest of the child.

Constance Rothschild, Lady Battersea

Constance Rothschild Lady Battersea was a link between English and Jewish feminism, as she convinced upper- and middle-class Anglo-Jewish women to join English feminist groups such as the National Union of Women Workers and encouraged them to create Jewish women’s organizations, such as the Union of Jewish Women and the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and women, which allied themselves with the women’s movement.

Lillian Rock

Lillian Rock was a pioneering twentieth-century lawyer, advocate, and organizer who fought for the advancement of women around the world.

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