Education

Margalit Oved—dancer, choreographer, singer, actress, musician—is the epitome of a performance artist. Her work blended elements from the Yemen of her childhood, the Israel of her adolescence, and the Los Angeles of her adulthood. She left an indelible mark on twentieth-century Jewish culture through her inventive and modern interpretations of ancient biblical tales.

Grace Paley wrote highly acclaimed short stories, poetry, and reflections on contemporary politics and culture. A rare example of a writer deeply engaged with the world, Grace Paley made an impact as much through her activism as her writing.

Orthodox views on the roles women may play in their communities’ religious, educational, and social life have reflected the range of attitudes that religious group has harbored toward American society. Generally, those Orthodox Jews who have resisted American culture have not countenanced the active participation of women within the synagogue. For other Orthodox Jews, the opening of synagogue life to greater women’s participation, within what they see as the expansive boundaries of halakhah, is but another dimension of their accommodating approach to their encounter with America. 

Pauline Newman played an essential role in galvanizing the early twentieth-century tenant, labor, socialist, and working-class suffrage movements. The first woman ever appointed general organizer by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Newman continued to work for the ILGWU for more than seventy years—first as an organizer, then as a labor journalist, a health educator, and a liaison between the union and government officials.

Founded in 1913 as the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods and officially renamed Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ) in 1993, the WRJ has for more than a century galvanized hundreds of thousands of Jewish women to support and advance Reform Judaism, the Jewish people, and Jewish values in their home communities, around the country, and around the world.

The Moroccan Jewish community was the largest Jewish community in North Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The status of Moroccan Jewish women was affected by a variety of factors, including a patriarchal order and social changes brought about by economic development, urbanization, and contact with European countries.

Kadya Molodowsky was a major figure in the Yiddish literary scene in Warsaw (from the 1920s through 1935) and in New York (from 1935 until her death in 1975). She published extensively in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, and founded and edited two journals. Recurrent themes in her work include the lives of Jewish women and girls Jewish tradition in the face of modernity, Israel, and the Holocaust.

Annie Nathan Meyer promoted women’s higher education and founded Barnard College, New York’s first liberal arts college for women. She also chronicled women’s work, dramatized women’s status in plays, novels, and short stories, and raised funds for Jewish and black students to attend Barnard.

Following successive careers as a New York City politician president and director of a major Jewish organization, Ruth Messinger has become nothing less than an icon of American Jewish progressive leadership. She became Manhattan borough president in 1990. After losing the 1997 mayor’s election to Rudolph Giuliani, she became the president and CEO of the American Jewish World Service, a position she held from 1998 to 2017.

Distinguished historian Paula Hyman was engaged deeply in Jewish feminism and wrote extensively on the history of Jewish women in an effort to integrate their experience into the Jewish historical narrative. A role model for many, she challenged sacrosanct beliefs and stereotypes with vigor and knowledge and left behind a myriad of scholarly contributions and a profound vision for Jewish women.

Frances Horwich was loved by parents and children alike for her educational television show, Ding Dong School, which taught millions of children how to finger paint, grow plants, and do craft projects with household objects such as pipe cleaners and paper plates. She ended up writing 27 Ding Dong School books and two books for parents, as well as winning several awards over her career.

“The chief editor, fund raiser, cheerleader and occasional staff photographer” is the way the Chronicle of Higher Education described Florence Howe’s work at the Feminist Press. She made the publishing company her life’s work, and her contributions to the field of women’s studies as scholar, editor, and publisher are unparalleled.

Hunter College of the City University of New York was founded as a public, tuition-free secondary and teacher-training school for women that admitted students solely on the basis of academic merit, at a time when many institutions of higher education were implementing policies of selective admissions designed specifically to deflect disadvantaged students.

One of Great Britain’s most famous classical pianists, Dame Myra Hess had the idea of setting up lunchtime concerts at London’s National Gallery during the Second World War. The success of those concerts made Hess an international star, and the honor of Dame of the British Empire was conferred upon her in 1941.

The first woman, according to the biblical creation story in Genesis 2–3, Eve is perhaps the best-known female figure in the Hebrew Bible, although she never appears after the opening chapters of Genesis. Most of the negative traits associated with her, including sin, seduction, and subservience, are part of Jewish and Christian post-biblical interpretations and are not present in the Bible itself. A close look at the Eve narrative in its ancient Israelite context shows Eve to be a partner with Adam as they begin their agrarian life outside of Eden.