Education

Katya Delakova

Katya Delakova was a pioneer of Jewish dance, blending folk traditions, Hasidic worship, modern dance, and improvisation. Her integration of various dance philosophies from around the world allowed her to create and teach her own philosophy, titled “The Art of Moving.”

Florence Levin Denmark

Florence Levin Denmark helped found the field of women’s psychology and built crucial support for it in academic circles.

Babette Deutsch

Babette Deutsch, born and raised in New York City, was a gifted poet, novelist, translator, and educator. In her work, she interwove elements of vastly different cultures and times, from the Bible and Shakespeare to Russian and Japanese literature. She often used her work to explore Jewish themes and culture.

Vera Dean

While her book, Builders of Emerging Nations (1961) discusses the important qualities necessary to be a leader in the political arena, Vera Dean’s life was a testament to her own leadership abilities. Dean helped shape American foreign policy and opinion on international relations, as both an educator and a writer.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz

Lucy S. Dawidowicz was an American-Jewish historian whose influential and controversial works reflect her deep personal and academic commitment to the Jewish people. She spent time in Poland immediately before the Holocaust and time in Germany immediately after it. Dawidowicz’s works, which received numerous awards, concern American and Eastern European Jewry, and the Holocaust.

Natalie Zemon Davis

Natalie Zemon Davis was a pioneering historian of early modern Europe, gender, and religious and cultural life. Focusing primarily on ordinary historical actors and marginal groups, Davis earned a reputation as a scholar who culls the archives to uncover fascinating stories of everyday life.

Annette Daum

A deeply religious feminist, Annette Daum dedicated her life to two causes: interfaith dialogue and feminism. Among other leadership positions, she coordinated interreligious affairs at the Union of American Hebrew congregations, edited the journal Interreligious Currents, and organized various task forces focused on gender equality and Jewish-Christian feminist dialogue.

Carrie Dreyfuss Davidson

Carrie Dreyfuss Davidson became an important voice for women in the Conservative Movement as a founder of United Synagogue’s Women’s League and founding editor of its journal Outlook. Davidson exemplified the often-competing paradigms of Jewish homemaker and accomplished writer and community leader.

Modern Dance Performance in the United States

Jewish immigrants to the New World brought with them their ritual and celebratory Jewish dances, but these traditional forms of Jewish dance waned in the United States. Working-class and poor Jewish immigrants parents sought out culture and education in the arts for their children, often as a vehicle for assimilation. Jewish women were particularly attracted to the field of modern dance.

A dancer in a patterned dress holding a rose in a dance studio with a mirrored wall. Behind her stand four other dancers in pink dresses and white headscarves, holding red rose petals, which are scattered heavily over the floor.

Dance in the Yishuv and Israel

Artists began to try to create a new Hebrew dance in the 1920s. Israeli Expressionist Dance flourished first, followed by American modern dance. Israeli dance became professionalized and centralized, and over the past few decades, efforts to promote local creativity accelerated, ethnic dance companies have flourished, and choreographers have taken increasingly political stances.

Ray Karchmer Daily

Ophthalmologist Ray Karchmer Daily fought for equality and accessibility for women and children in Texas. The first Jewish woman to graduate from a Texas medical school, Daily advocated for equal treatment of female medical students and promoted equitable policies for low-income and disabled students in the Texas school system.

Rose Laub Coser

Sociologist Rose Laub Coser redefined major concepts in role theory—the idea that our actions are largely dictated by our roles in society—and applied them to expectations of women’s roles in the family and the workplace.

Delegates from Havana Hillel at the Southeastern Hillel Conference, 1948

Cuba

With the exception of a few crypto-Jews, the Jewish presence in Cuba began after the Republic of Cuba was established in 1902. The community grew with the arrival of Turkish and Eastern European Jews in the early twentieth century, then shrank again after Fidel Castro’s rise to power, though a small number still remain.

Conservative Judaism in the United States

Women have played a pivotal role in propelling the Conservative Movement to confront essential issues including Jewish education and gender equality. The Movement’s attention to issues such as the religious education of Jewish girls, the status of the agunah (deserted wife), equal participation of women in ritual, the ordination of women, and innovations in liturgy and ritual to speak to women’s experiences has helped to shape the self-definition of Conservative Judaism, and has enabled talented Jewish women to reach new heights in religious leadership.

Claribel Cone

Claribel Cone was well known in her time for being a dignified and highly independent woman with two passions: medical research and collecting art and artifacts. She is immortalized in drawings by French modernists Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and in Gertrude Stein’s essay “Two Women.”

A "Model Seder" at the University of Maryland, 1948

College Students in the United States

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, Jewish women in America achieved parity with their male counterparts on college campuses, but only after many decades of struggle.

portrait of a woman with dark hair wearing a red gown and holding a basket of flowers

Colonial Period in the United States

Jewish women in colonial America led varied lives, with some occupying traditional roles as mothers and wives and others remaining single. Some ran their own businesses and others worked as servants for Jews with more money. Both in and out of the synagogue, women played a crucial role in early American Jewish communities.

Ruth Louisa Cohen

Ruth Cohen, Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1954 until 1972, was the first Jewish principal of an Oxbridge College, a distinguished agricultural economist, and, after her retirement from college life, a dedicated local councillor.

Selma Jeanne Cohen

It was Selma Jeanne Cohen’s mission in life to make dance scholarship a respected field, taking its place with the study of the other arts both in society and, particularly, the university. As a writer, editor, and teacher, she was a leader in transforming dance history, aesthetics, and criticism into respected disciplines. Cohen founded the Society of Dance History Scholars and received the first Dance Magazine Award ever given to a dance historian.

Yardena Cohen

Incorporating biblical themes and Sephardic music into her dances, Yardena Cohen helped create a uniquely Israeli artistic culture. Cohen opened her Haifa dance studio in 1933 and maintained it for some seventy years, stressing creative dance. She continued to teach well into her nineties and in 2010 was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Mildred Cohn

Biochemist Mildred Cohn used new technology to measure organic reactions in living cells. She not only breached new frontiers in atomic chemistry, but also did so by breaking through barriers as a woman and a Jew in a male- and Christian-dominated field

Cards Created for JWA's Commemoration of the Centennial of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Fannia M. Cohn

Fannia M. Cohn was one of the leading Jewish women trade union activists in the United States. Drawing on her Russian Jewish cultural traditions, she pioneered the development of educational programs within the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU).

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

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.

Helen Louise Cohen

Helen Louise Cohen, an educator and author, made the study of drama more accessible and vibrant to countless high school students in the first half of the twentieth century. Although Judaism seemed to play only a small role in her adult life, it is Jewish culture and values that contributed to her regard for education and helped to shape her life’s work.