Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Bella Abzug

A leader of the women’s movement, Bella Abzug fought to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and other vital legislation for the rights of women as a member of the House of Representatives. Towards the end of her career, she focused on global issues of women’s rights and human rights, ensuring that those issues were continually addressed by the United Nations.

Evelyn Torton Beck

Evelyn (Evi) Torton Beck is a multi-faceted scholar, analyst, activist, feminist, dancer, Jew, and lesbian who has enriched each discipline she engaged. She wrote the iconic Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, as well as articles on Franz Kafka, Frieda Kahlo, and the transformative power of the sacred circle dance. Under Beck’s leadership, the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, became world-renowned.

Amy Bernstein

As leader of one of the largest Reconstructionist synagogues in the country, Rabbi Amy Bernstein has worked to create the welcoming community for others that she had longed for at an earlier age.

Betty Berzon

Two years after psychologist Betty Berzon came out as a lesbian in 1971, she won the fight to have the American Psychiatric Association declassify homosexuality as a mental illness.

Hanne Blank

Both as a historian and as a fiction writer, Hanne Blank has questioned how we relate to our bodies and our sexuality, from gender norms to fat-shaming.

Heather Booth

Heather Booth helped transform the American political landscape from her early involvement in both civil rights and abortion rights through her campaign for marriage equality.

Kate Bornstein

Kate Bornstein is a pathbreaking transgender lesbian activist, theorist, and performance artist. She is known for tackling social ills and personal pain with joyful optimism.

Marla Brettschneider

As a political philosopher, Marla Brettschneider examined issues of feminist, queer, class-based, and Jewish political theory and activism.

Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends

Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal emerged in the overlap of late twentieth-century feminism and the Jewish and connected Jewish feminist writers, activists, and artists with each other, and with various public forums, for more than two decades. As a project made by, for, and about Jewish feminists, it became a space of creative collaboration, and a place to showcase late twentieth-century Jewish feminist cultural projection.

Deborah Brin

Deborah Brin, one of the first openly gay rabbis, led the first prayer service for Women of the Wall at the Conference for the Empowerment of Jewish Women in 1988.

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and the Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler’s work treats gender, hate speech, the precarity of life, the precarity of one’s position as a Jewish thinker in light of Israeli policy towards Palestinians, alternative kinship structures, non-violence, vulnerability, and other, equally complex and important aspects of human existence.

Claude Cahun

Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun lived their life in a spirit of rebellion and defiance. From their precocious teenage years, defying conventional ideals of beauty and femininity with their shaven head and male attire, to their direct resistance of German occupying forces, they active worked against the suppression of liberty and freedom—a life of resistance.

Chai Feldblum

Chai Feldblum is a distinguished lawyer and legal scholar known especially for her work advocating for the rights of disabled and LGBTQIA people. She was the lead drafter of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as many other important bills affirming the rights of marginalized Americans. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Charlotte Charlaque

Charlotte Charlaque was a transgender trailblazer, actress, and translator in Weimer Berlin and post-Shoah New York City.

Tamara Cohen

Tamara Cohen’s work with the Jewish Women’s Archive and Ma’yan: the Jewish Women’s Project helped popularize lesser-known heroines of Jewish history and new feminist rituals such as making Miriam’s Cup part of the Passover Seder.

Adrienne Cooper

A versatile performer, scholar, administrator, and activist who worked in the fields of Yiddish culture, Jewish music, social justice, and feminism, Adrienne Cooper inspired international audiences with her compelling performances and nurtured a generation of musicians, academics, and advocates.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Hailed as the “Scream Queen” for her 1978 film debut in Halloween and her work in other slasher films, Jamie Lee Curtis defied expectations through her roles in A Fish Called Wanda and The Heidi Chronicles.

Barbara Dobkin

Barbara Berman Dobkin is the pre-eminent Jewish feminist philanthropist of the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Her vision, dedication, and philanthropic generosity have transformed the landscape of Jewish women’s organizations and funding in both North America and Israel.

Dalia Dorner

Israeli Supreme Court Justice Dalia Dorner was known for citing non-legal sources in her decisions to illustrate the just society she aspired to live in. With landmark cases impacting gender equality, the right to education for all, and the right to live in dignity, Justice Dorner’s legal and social legacy is deeply rooted in human rights.

photograph of a woman in a vest speaking at a microphone in a bookstore

Elana Dykewomon

Elana Dykewomon was a poet, novelist, editor, theorist, lesbian, and cultural worker. Her lesbian and Jewish identities and commitments informed and shaped her award-winning novels and other writings, and she made significant theoretical contributions to lesbian separatism and fat liberation.

Lisa Edwards

As a lesbian rabbi serving an LGBT congregation during a period that has spanned the AIDS crisis and the legalization of gay marriage, Rabbi Lisa Edwards has spent decades working to make the Jewish community a more welcoming place for gays, lesbians, and transgender Jews.

Denise Eger

In 2015, Denise Eger became the first openly gay president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization for Reform rabbis.

Leslie Feinberg

Leslie Feinberg was a self-described “anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist.” She worked at the nexus of trans, feminist, lesbian, critical race, Jewish, and class politics. A speaker and author, Feinberg was a gifted activist and political organizer.

Käte Frankenthal

A stubborn nonconformist from an early age, Käte Frankenthal was a physician and politician active in Germany’s Social Democratic Party. While running her own successful private practice, she was active in sex reform legislation and played a prominent role in the Federation of Women Physicians.

Henriette Fürth

Despite facing ongoing anti-Semitism, journalist Henriette Katzenstein Fürth remained a passionate and vocal German patriot throughout her life. She began publishing articles on social criticism while raising eight children, eventually writing 200 articles and 30 monographs, earning both an income and a reputation for insightful journalism. She served on the Frankfurt municipal council and in 1932 she was honored by the city of Frankfurt for her 70th birthday.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Activism: LGBTQIA Rights