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As soon as I mentioned Birthright, my sister seemed to know exactly where our conversation was headed. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, too,” she said, reminding me that despite being my younger sister she always seems to be one step ahead of me.
A political operative who served as deputy director of issues and research for George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Sara Teitelbaum Ehrman had an inadvertent brush with history when she drove Hillary Rodham to Arkansas while urging her not to marry Bill Clinton.
I understand where Chuck Schumer’s public stance comes from. He and his supporters are afraid of the “anti-Israel bias” at the UN, and they believe that anything passed by the organization is inherently anti-Zionist. Sadly, Senator Schumer and many other Jews have a misconstrued notion of what it means to be pro-Israel.
Katie Gluckmann was a driving force behind the Zionist movement in South Africa and worked within a sexist system to ensure women remained partners in the Zionist movement there.
Best known in her native Canada for mobilizing aid for soldiers and veterans, Lillian Bilsky Freiman was also instrumental in raising funds for the new State of Israel.
In a 1916 letter, Henrietta Szold (the founder of Hadassah) defied Jewish tradition and challenged rituals that exclude women by asserting her right to say Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for mourners).
Defiant to the end, Gusta Dawidson Draenger wrote Justina’s Diary, her account of the partisan struggles against the Nazis, on toilet paper in a Gestapo prison and inspired others to persevere when all hope seemed lost.
As one of the chief nutritionists and dieticians of Palestine and the emerging State of Israel, Sarah Bavly had to improvise workable plans for everything from offering school lunches to feeding boatloads of refugees.
Shulamit Bat-Dori defied widely held notions about the inappropriateness of theater in the kibbutz, creating popular and acclaimed plays for the masses.
Interweaving her personal experiences with nature imagery and Jewish legends, Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim became one of Israel’s most celebrated Yiddish poets.
A founding member of Kevuzat Deganyah Aleph, Miriam Ostrovsky Baratz forced the Yishuv to confront its sexist assumptions, first as one of the rare female agricultural laborers and then as her kibbutz’s first wife and mother.
In hopes of creating a place where neither her religion nor her gender would make her a second-class citizen, Sara Azaryahu dedicated herself to founding a Jewish state, but was disappointed by the sexism that remained in her society.
Anda Pinkerfeld Amir helped shape two branches of Hebrew literature as an innovative, modernist Israeli poet and as a writer of children’s books that tackled difficult subjects like war and death.
Tosia Altman volunteered as a courier and weapons smuggler, risking her life through some of the worst conflicts of the Jewish uprising during the Holocaust.
