Media

Nina Morais Cohen

Nina Morais Cohen organized the Jewish women’s community of Minneapolis, where she was a force for women’s suffrage, community service, and scholarship.

Rosalie Cohen Introducing Eleanor Roosevelt at the Launching of New Orleans Israel Bonds Organization, 1951

A lifelong Zionist, Rosalie Cohen worked to promote Jewish culture and education both on a national level and locally in New Orleans. Cohen’s talents as a leader and organizer, as well as her gracious southern manners, were key assets in overcoming the obstacles she faced as a Zionist in a southern city and as a woman in a predominantly male Jewish national arena.

Barbara Cohen

When Barbara Cohen died, she left behind an exceptional body of children’s literature. Cohen was adventurous, seldom repeating herself, always trying new ideas, settings and themes. In her books, she confronted taboo subjects of assimilation, racism, and cancer with both sensitivity and remarkable honesty.

A white plaque with blue lettering in Hebrew and English. The English reads "1929-2013. The 'Cameri' Theater Actress Zaharira Charifai lived in this house."

Zaharirah Charifai

Zaharirah Charifai was an influential Israeli actress who became nationally known in the role of Grusha in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and from then on performed in dozens of plays at the Cameri and the Haifa Municipal Theater. In addition to stage acting, Charifai appeared in three successful solo performances, on the radio, and in several films.

Peggy Charren

Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children’s Television (ACT), took on the burgeoning television industry of the 1970s and won. She received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 for her work on behalf of quality television programming for children.

Aviva Cantor

Journalist and lecturer Aviva Cantor is the author of the theoretical work Jewish Women, Jewish Men: The Legacy of Patriarchy in Jewish Life, a passionately analytical synthesis of feminism, Judaism, Zionism, Socialism, animal rights and environmentalism, as well as of the landmark The Egalitarian Hagada. Cantor was founding editor of the Jewish Liberation Journal. She also originated the idea and was a founder and editor of Lilith, the independent Jewish feminist magazine.

Tullia Calabi-Zevi

Born in Milan, Tullia Calabi-Zevi began working as a journalist during World War II and wrote prolifically for a number of publications over the next few decades. In her later life she held many public leadership positions, including several in organizations specifically concerning Jewish life in Italy.

Joyce Brothers

Joyce Brothers was the second person and only woman to win the top prize on the popular television show The $64,000 Question. She became a popular psychologist and talk show host. Brothers conformed to normative understandings of 1950s womanhood but, unlike others, she gave advice about taboo topics such as sexuality and menopause.

Ruth Hagy Brod

Ruth Hagy Brod was a versatile and peripatetic career woman who worked for nearly fifty years as a journalist, publicist, literary agent, television host, and government antipoverty official.

Suzanne Brøgger

Suzanne Brøgger is a Danish journalist, cultural critic, author, and essayist. With more than twenty books to her name, Brøgger has received widespread acclaim for her novels, essays, anthologies, poems, and plays.

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.

Fanny Brice

One of America’s great clowns, Fanny Brice built her career on a Yiddish accent and a flair for zany parody. Brice earned a reputation as a vaudeville star before creating some of her best-loved comedic personae for radio.

Ruth Brondy looking off camera, wearing a colorful scarf

Ruth Bondy

Ruth Bondy was an author, a journalist, and a gifted translator. Born in Prague to a large Zionist family, the majority of whose members perished in the Holocaust, Bondy survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau and arrived in Israel in late 1948. She soon became a journalist, and eventually began to write biographies and translate from Czech to Hebrew.

Joan Blondell

A beautiful and accomplished stage and screen actress, Joan Blondell was known for playing character roles as a wisecracking, working-class girl. Blondell toured all over the world, performed on Broadway, and eventually ended up in Hollywood doing movie and television work. In 1972 she wrote a novel, Center Door Fancy, based on her own life and career.

Cover of French-Jewish journal L'Univers Israélite de France (volume 9, published in 1853)

Julienne Bloch

Julienne Bloch was a writer and educator who used her career to strengthen the Jewish community in nineteenth-century France by pushing back against the assimilation and secularization of her fellow French Jews, especially Jewish women.

Anita Block

As editor of the women’s page of the New York Call, one of America’s first socialist newspapers, Anita Block ensured the section covered subjects of real social and political interest to women. After the paper closed, Block continued to write about the intersections of radical thought, theater, and women’s interests.

Miriam Bernstein-Cohen

Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was an influential actor, director, poet, and translator in Europe and Israel. She was a versatile actor, appearing successfully both in comedies and in serious plays with the Ohel, Matateh, and Haifa Municipal Theater companies. In addition to her theater work, she wrote books and essays on theater and literature throughout her life.

Sabina Berman

Sabina Berman is a Mexican-Jewish playwright, screenwriter, film director, author, poet, and journalist. Considered Mexico’s most successful and critically acclaimed playwright alive, her plays have been staged internationally and her novels have been translated into eleven languages and published in over 33 countries.

"Professor Romeo" Front Cover by Anne Flieschman Bernays

Anne Fleischman Bernays

Anne Fleischman Bernays is an American editor, novelist, and nonfiction writer. Her literary work is notable for its exploration of Jewish experiences of America, the pressure of assimilation, and the then-taboo subject of sexual harassment.

Gail Berman

Gail Berman made history as part of the youngest team of producers in Broadway history, before becoming a television executive known for her genius in picking hit shows and turning failing networks around. Berman produced shows such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Malcolm in the Middle.

Gertrude Berg

Between 1929 and 1956, The Goldbergs was a familiar presence in radio, television, film, and other popular media. Created by and starring Gertrude Berg, the program documented the trials and tribulations of a Jewish family in the Bronx, with wife and mother Molly Goldberg entertaining millions with her malapropisms and meddling ways. In 1950, Berg came to the defense of her co-star, Philip Loeb; her decision not to fire him when he was blacklisted for alleged Communist activities cut short The Goldbergs’ tenure on television, and by extension, Berg’s career.

Helen Bentwich

Helen Bentwich was an active community organizer, activist, and local politician. She and her husband, Norman, aided in helping people escape Nazi persecution and split their time between Palestine and England for many years.

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda collaborated with her husband to revive ancient Hebrew and make it a truly functional living language. She helped coin new Hebrew words, created salons for Jewish thinkers, and wrote articles for the newspaper she and her husband ran. Beyond her own writings, she helped edit and compile the seventeen-volume Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.

Rachel Sassoon Beer

Rachel Sassoon Beer was the first woman to edit a national newspaper when she simultaneously owned and edited both The Observer and The Sunday Times in England in the 1890s.

Hannah Barnett-Trager

Hannah Barnett-Trager’s involvement in the literary world began when she helped found and then worked as a librarian at the Jewish Free Reading Room in London. She published her first article in 1919 and went on to write books for both children and adults. Trager’s writing discussed Jewish culture and politics, often drawing from her own experiences.