Education

Luisa Futoransky

Poet, novelist, music scholar, and journalist, Luisa Futoransky has led a life characterized by travel and the arts: she has published over two dozen books (poetry and narrative fiction), many of which have been translated into English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, Japanese, and German, and other languages. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991, the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres in 1990, the Centre National des Lettres Fellowship in 1993 and 2010, and was the Regent’s Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley in 1997.

Carrie Bamberger Frank Fuld

The daughter of German Jewish immigrant parents, Carrie Bamberger Frank Fuld was a philanthropist who, in partnership with her brother, department store magnate Louis Bamberger, founded the internationally acclaimed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Fuld was also involved in many Jewish philanthropic causes throughout her life.

Norma Fields Furst

Higher education was not merely a family priority for Norma Fields Furst; it also became her professional focus. Furst used her positions of authority at different colleges and universities to garner support for civil rights and gender equality within academia.

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal brought her passion for art and history to her leadership of Hadassah. Among other leadership positions, she served as the national president from 1956 to 1960.

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.

Myra Ava Freeman

The first Jew to be appointed lieutenant governor of a Canadian province and the first woman to hold the office in Nova Scotia, Myra Freeman was born in St. John, New Brunswick. Serving as Lieutenant Governor from 2000 until 2006, Freeman made her mandate the redefinition and democratization of the largely ceremonial office. In 2003 she was named First Honorary Captain (Navy) of Maritime Forces Atlantic, Her Majesty’s Canadian Forces.

Recha Freier

German-born Recha Freier founded Youth Aliyah in 1933, which assisted in sending Jewish European teenagers to Palestine prior to World War II to be trained as agricultural pioneers on kibbutzim. Although she was responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of Jewish youth, Freier’s efforts were not officially acknowledged until 1975, when she was eighty-three years old.

Else Frenkel-Brunswik

Else Frenkel-Brunswik was a social psychologist who is best known as a coauthor of The Authoritarian Personality.

Anna Freud

Anna Freud’s life was a constant search for useful social applications of psychoanalysis. Through her studies of children, she shaped the fields of both child psychology and developmental psychology.

Ray Frank

While her career was short-lived, Ray Frank remains significant as the first Jewish woman to preach from a pulpit in the United States. Her speeches often encouraged communal cooperation and tried to heal congregational disputes, and she notably gave an address at the first Jewish Women’s Congress in 1893.

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,.

Selma Fraiberg

Selma Fraiberg was a psychoanalyst, author, and pioneer in the field of infant psychiatry. Her classic parenting book The Magic Years was the result of her years of research in the field of social work and her experiences as a stay-at-home mother.

Vera Fonaroff

Vera Fonaroff was an extraordinary violinist and member of the all-female Olive Mead Quartet. Fonaroff immigrated to America from Kiev at age seven and debuted as a soloist with the Metropolitan Opera House Orchestra at age nine. She toured the world performing with the Olive Mead Quartet and as a soloist and eventually became the director of the violin at the New York Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School).

Sarah Feiga Meinkin Foner

Born into a family that encouraged her love of Jewish learning, Sarah Foner asked to learn Hebrew when she was only five years old and published her first novel in her twenties. During her lengthy writing career, Foner’s publications often reflected her interest in Jewish and women’s issues and centered notably independent female characters.

Jennie Maas Flexner

Jennie Maas Flexner was the head of the circulation department at the Louisville Public Library and later the readers’ advisor at the New York Public Library. Her sympathy for self-taught and adult learners drove her to create innovative reading lists for adults embarking on a new life or second career.

Ruth First

Ruth First was a prolific writer and her penetrating investigative journalism exposed many of the harsh conditions under which the majority of South Africans lived. As various restrictions prevented her from continuing her work as a journalist Ruth First became more and more involved with the underground movement that was changing its tactics from protest to sabotage.

Edith Fisch

With great courage and dogged determination, Edith Lond Fisch became a lawyer, legal writer, and law professor despite severe physical limitations, educational prejudices, and sexual discrimination. Edith Fisch wrote an important book on evidence which became regularly cited by judges and used in law schools throughout New York.

Janette Fishenfeld

Janette Fishenfeld was a Brazilian author, columnist, and Zionist. In her works, she portrayed a nuanced, complex view of the Brazilian Jewish community and advocated for the Zionist cause.

Ruth E. Fizdale

Ruth E. Fizdale is credited with making modern social work a profession. Fizdale helped transform social work from a charitable volunteer activity to a paid profession, through her development of a fee-for-service, nonprofit counseling firm.

Irene Fine

Faced with a mandatory internship for her PhD but nowhere she could teach courses on Jewish women, Irene Fine created the innovative Woman’s Institute for Continuing Jewish Education in 1977. The Institute offered courses and published books of women’s prayers. Beyond her work leading the Institute, Fine wrote two of her own books and edited an anthology.

Naomi Feinbrun-Dothan

Naomi Feinbrun-Dothan helped pioneer the scientific analysis of native Israeli flora and establish the study of botany and genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Elaine Feinstein

Elaine Feinstein was the preeminent Jewish woman literary author in late 20th- and early 21st-century England and a leading European Jewish writer. An award-winning poet, novelist, and translator, her works explore Jewish women’s identities as writer, wife, friend, and mother; assimilation; antisemitism; the Holocaust and its transgenerational impact; Soviet Russian poets; European Jewish life in the 20th century; Israel and Zionism; and the meanings of a literary life.

Sandra Feldman

Sandra Feldman dedicated her career to protecting the rights of educators as the first woman president of both New York City’s Union Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Jessica Feingold

Jessica Feingold devoted more than forty-five years of her life to carrying out the goals of the Jewish Theological Seminary. She edited fifty books that originated at the institution, while also serving in many different administrative positions.

Ruth Lewis Farkas

Ruth Lewis Farkas’ remarkable and varied career ranged from creating a retail chain that survived the Great Depression, to teaching sociology, to running international education initiatives. Her impressive and full life spanned many occupations: educator, sociologist, businesswoman, philanthropist, inventor, wife, and mother.