Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

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.

Three rows of girls wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts, posing with their teacher in front of a building

Sport in Israel: Yishuv to the Early 21st Century

Women have been involved in sports in Israel since the Yishuv period, participating as teams, as individuals, and as coaches. Though more women are now participating in competitive sports, the field still reflects a masculine culture of power struggle and a desire to defeat the enemy. More recent political efforts in Israel have attempted to achieve women's equality in athletics.

Sports in Germany: 1898-1938

Women’s participation in Jewish gymnastics clubs increased significantly during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Jewish sports movement grew during the 1920s, allowing women to participate in cross-country running, swimming, and tennis. After German sports clubs annulled Jewish membership in 1933, women poured into these Jewish sports groups.

Sports in the United States

Historians of American sport and of American Jewish history have generally neglected the study of sports by and for Jewish American women. As sport increasingly played a significant role in American society in the twentieth century, it also became part of Jewish women’s experiences in American life.

Mollie Steimer

Mollie Steimer earned nationwide attention for her refusal to compromise her anarchist beliefs during the widely publicized 1918 trial in which she was sentenced to prison under the Sedition Act. Later deported to Russia and then to Germany, Steimer continued her anarchist activities throughout her life.

Hannah Stein

Hannah Stein’s life was devoted to advocating for the rights of disadvantaged women and their children. She served for 14 years as the executive director of the National Council of Jewish Women and worked in cooperation with other advocacy groups such as the National Council of Negro Women and the United Church Women to establish the Women in Community Service (WICS) coalition.

Lisa Stein

Lisa Stein navigated aircraft in the Cold War and Desert Storm and served as an openly Jewish American officer in Saudi Arabia.

Gloria Steinem

Gloria Steinem was a leader of second-wave feminism and the co-founder of Ms. Magazine, the first feminist periodical with a national readership. As a journalist and spokesperson, she mobilized a generation of women to advance the cause of women’s liberation. Steinem has worked tirelessly all her life as an advocate for change.

Pauline Perlmutter Steinem

Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, like her granddaughter Gloria Steinem, was an ardent activist for women’s rights, especially suffrage. She was also involved in Jewish activism, serving many local Jewish organizations and devoting a considerable amount of her income to send Jews to Israel just before World War II began.

Judith Steiner-Freud

As a Holocaust survivor, Judith Steiner-Freud fulfilled her faithful and influential mission. From the 1940s to the 2010s, she devoted herself to the calling of transforming nursing into an academic profession, raising the status of Israeli nurses, and promoting the welfare of Israeli society and other diverse population groups.

Jewish Gender Stereotypes in the United States

Stereotypes of Jews have existed from their arrival in the New World to the present. Jews were portrayed as greedy, unscrupulous, and unrefined. However, Jews also created stereotypes about one another based on class, gender, and religion. Specifically, the Ghetto Girl, Jewish Mother, JAP, and others reflected tensions between genders about the place of Jews in the economy and culture.

Bessie Cleveland Stern

Bessie Cleveland Stern is most recognized for her work as statistician for the Maryland Board of Education. She collected and interpreted data about the Maryland school system from 1921 through 1948, and school officials turned to her for information to support appropriations measures and proposed changes in state laws relating to the schools.

Edith Rosenwald Stern

Edith Rosewald Stern used her family’s wealth for her community’s good. In New Orleans, she helped fund schools to offer her children and their peers a progressive education. Stern also fought to clean up voting rights in the city, organizing voter registration, auditing voter rolls, and bringing voting machines into high schools to educate future voters.

Elizabeth Stern

Elizabeth Stern was an American-Jewish writer, essayist, and journalist. She achieved success within a number of realms and balanced a number of competing roles: fiction writer, journalist, social worker, wife, mother, and an American woman leading a secular life who examined the importance of cultural heritage.

Eva Michaelis Stern

Eva Michaelis Stern was co-founder and director of the fundraising arm of the Youth Aliyah in Germany, and later the director of the Youth Aliyah office in London. Over the course of WWII, she helped more than 1000 children from countries all over Europe immigrate to Palestine.

Frances Stern

Frances Stern’s experience as a second-generation American Jew dedicated to social reform and in contact with several prominent women engaged in social work led her to a career in scientific nutrition, applied dietetics, and home economics. Stern founded the Food Clinic of the Boston Dispensary, a center for dispensing practical advice on food and meal preparation for outpatients and their families that also served as a center for research on the relationships among health, nutrition, class, and ethnicity.

black and white phograph of a woman with a head covering looking stoically at the camera

Sara Stern-Katan

Sara Stern-Katan (1919–2001) was a Holocaust survivor, leader, and politician who played a central role in Religious Zionist movements in Poland, Germany, and the State of Israel.

Donna Sternberg

A passionate supporter of Israel with decades of experience in fundraising for others, Donna Sternberg helped raise almost half a million dollars in aid to help her own community recover from Hurricane Katrina.

Estelle Sternberger

Believing in a future where all people had a voice and women’s work was valued, Estelle Sternberger found a myriad of ways to reshape public opinion, from hosting a political radio show to leading an organization for peace.

Rose Pastor Stokes

Rose Pastor Stokes was called the “Cinderella of the sweatshops” when, as a young reporter, she met and married millionaire James Graham Phelps Stokes. Stokes became increasingly radical, adopting antiwar and pro-abortion stands, becoming a union organizer, and joining the Communist Party.

Sara Stone

Sara Stone helped New Orleans weather hard times from the Great Depression through Hurricane Katrina.

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.

Rahel Straus

Rahel Goitein Straus, a pioneering woman medical doctor trained in Germany, was a model “New Jewish Woman” of the early-20th century. Successfully combining a career as a physician with marriage and motherhood, she committed herself to Jewish and feminist causes and organizations throughout her life, while also embracing Zionist ideals.

Sarah Lavanburg Straus

With the support of philanthropist Baroness Clara de Hirsch, Sarah Lavanburg Straus helped to establish two homes for immigrant girls in New York City early in the twentieth century.

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Politics and Government