Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Feminist Jewish Ritual: The United States

Ritual behavior is one of the fundamental pillars of Judaism, and of all religions, whose concern is precisely with ultimate meaning and purpose. Since the 1970s, Jewish feminists have gained access to male-identified rituals, developed a wide variety of new rituals, and feminized core male rituals.

Feminist Theology

Jewish feminist theology focuses on central Jewish categories, themes, and modes of expression—for example, God, prayer, Torah, and halakhah—and asks who created them and whose interests they reflect. It raises meta-questions about Jewish tradition.

Joan Feynman

Astrophysicist Joan Feynman shaped our understanding of solar winds, auroras, and sunspots, and her battle to open scientific bastions to women transformed the field for those who followed.

Filmmakers, Israeli

Israeli filmmaking is a national cultural expression, and female Israeli directors have become major contributors to that expression. In their films, these directors deal with personal relationships and family conflicts, religious and professional issues, and the effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants.

Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone was one of the founders of radical feminism in the United States. At age 25, she published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which brought together the dialectical materialism of Marx and the psychoanalytic insights of Freud in an effort to develop an analysis of women’s oppression that was inclusive of the dimensions of class and race.

Audrey Flack

The only female member of the founding group of photorealists, New York-born painter and sculptor Audrey Flack is especially recognized for the feminine content in her art. Her feminist sensibilities manifest in both her pioneering paintings, which often consider stereotypes of womanhood, and her sculptures, frequently depicting goddesses and other strong female figures. Flack’s work appears in prominent collections around the world.

Doris Fleischman

Doris Fleischman made history as the first American married woman issued a passport under her own name. Her prolific writing career and public feminism brought her national recognition.

Eugénie Foa

Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) was, to our knowledge, the first Jewish woman to support herself professionally as a writer. Based in Paris, she wrote in French and was active in circles of French women writers who advocated for greater recognition. She wrote novels and newspaper articles on a variety of topics, including stories about Jews but also on fashion and the lives of saints. She is best remembered for her children’s books.

Ellen Frankel

A pioneering feminist leader in business and the arts, Ellen Frankel served as the first woman CEO of the Jewish Publication Society. She is the author of several books including The Classic Tales: Four Thousand Years of Jewish Lore (1989) and The Five Books of Miriam (1996), a retelling and woman’s commentary on the Five Books of Moses, and has written several librettos,.

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.

Henrietta Franklin

Henrietta Franklin (née Montagu) was a leading British educationist and suffragist and a supporter the Liberal Judaism movement, pioneered by her sister Lily Montagu.

Marcia Freedman

Marcia Judith Prince Freedman was an American-Israeli feminist writer, Knesset member, and advocate for women's rights who played a pivotal role in establishing Israel's feminist movement. Her activism included founding consciousness-raising groups, advocating for equal pay and reproductive rights, and challenging sexist religious laws. She also became politically involved in the United States, pushing for a new perspective on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan was the author of a pathbreaking feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, which sold millions of copies and helped to provoke a feminist movement in the United States. She was an activist and writer who hoped to improve women’s lives by co-founding the National Organization for Women and other women’s political groups. Her many books focused on women’s rights, the women’s movement, and aging.

Marti Friedlander

London-born Marti Friedlander migrated to New Zealand in 1958. She became one of the country’s most outstanding and influential photographers in portraiture, photo-journalism, photo-books, and “street” photography. Her photographs still live vigorous public lives in exhibitions, books, and periodicals published after her death.

Debbie Friedman

Debbie Friedman’s music transformed prayers for Jews across the movements.

Jaclyn Friedman

Jaclyn Friedman voiced new possibilities for sex-positive feminism and a rejection of rape culture as editor of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape.

Ida Weis Friend

Ida Weis Friend worked to improve the lives of those in her Southern Jewish community on many levels. Her leadership in Jewish organizations, such as Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women, and her political activism, such as her time as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and Commission on Interracial Cooperation, earned her many honors and accolades.

Esther Friesner

Fantasy author Esther Friesner uses humor and imagination in her writing to question the tropes and clichés about women in general and feminists in particular.

Sonia Pressman Fuentes

Sonia Pressman Fuentes, the first female attorney in the office of the general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, helped extend the Civil Rights Act’s protections of equal opportunity to all people regardless of gender.

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.

Vicki Gabriner

As a radical activist for civil rights, feminism, and an end to the Vietnam War, Vicki Gabriner risked her life to transform the country at a time of tremendous upheaval.

Laura Geller

One of the first American women rabbis, Laura Geller has repeatedly challenged exclusions and shown that women’s leadership could bring a different, more meaningful, experience of Judaism. As a leader at the University of Southern California Hillel, the American Jewish Congress, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, and ChaiVillageLA, Geller showed the emerging possibilities of women’s leadership.

Mary Gendler

Mary Loeb Gendler has helped shape social justice movements in indirect but effective ways, from crafting new rituals for Jewish feminists to helping Tibetan exiles leverage the tools of nonviolent protest.

Berta Gerchunoff

Berta Wainstein de Gerchunoff was an Argentine socialist, feminist, and later Zionist leader. As President of the Argentine branch of WIZO, she led an exponential growth of women’s Zionist commitments all over Latin America.

Germany: 1750-1945

The Jewish Reform movement did not liberate women from their subordinate religious status, and the nineteenth-century bourgeois German family ideal with its rigid gender roles soon eclipsed the fluid structure of premodern Jewish families. Jewish women were expected to transmit German bourgeois values while also shaping their children’s Jewish identity.

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Activism: Feminism