Activism

Winner of numerous championship victories, including the triple crown, Helen Hull Jacobs was a force to be reckoned with on the tennis court in the 1920s and 1930s. Her love for the court was only rivaled by her passion for writing, to which she dedicated the second half of her life, writing over 21 books, many about tennis.

A transformational leader, Shoshana Pakciarz helped build nonprofit social service and arts organizations across the Boston area. As executive director of Project Bread, she expanded the Walk for Hunger into a major annual fundraiser with over 40,000 participants, raising millions to fight hunger. A longtime board president of the Boston Jewish Film Festival, she helped it grow into a beloved and internationally recognized cultural institution.

Bianca Eshel-Gershuni (1932-2020) was a pioneering Israeli sculptor and jewelry designer known for challenging artistic conventions and redefining the boundaries between craft and fine art. In contrast to the dominant minimalist, conceptual, and abstract tendencies of her time, her work proposed an aesthetic of abundance—a profusion of materiality, color, narrativity, and personal expression—paving the way for generations of artists exploring gender, kitsch, and popular culture.

Rising to prominence as a journalist in Weimar-era Berlin, Gabriele Tergit, née Elise Hirschmann (1893–1982), was an important chronicler of German-Jewish life. In her journalistic writings and novels, Tergit wrote biting social satires, sweeping panoramic novels, and lucid, hard-hitting commentaries on current events. A liberal whose writings reveal her strong commitments to social justice, women’s rights, and humanism, Tergit was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and settled permanently in London in 1938.

Selina Solomons was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century activist and writer, best known for her leadership role in the 1911 suffrage campaign that granted California women the right to vote. Solomons belonged to a prominent Jewish American family and spent her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She employed multiple genres in advocacy of women’s rights, including speeches, poetry, drama, short fiction, and a manual-cum-suffrage history titled How We Won the Vote in California. 

Miriam Shtarkman-Verlinsky was a trailblazer for women in the legal field in Israel, with a lifelong dedication to Zionism and women’s rights. Shtarkman-Verlinsky  was the second women to become a judge in the newly established state and the first to become a Chief Magistrate. 

Zionist and women's rights activist Adina Kahansky emigrated from Lithuania to Argentina in 1894 and arrived in Erez Israel in 1902. One of the first two women in the Yishuv elected to a local council, he settled in Rishon le-Zion, joined women's organizations, and published in the Hebrew press advocating for women’s rights, the implementation of the Hebrew language, and a Jewish state.