Politics and Government

Rebecca Young

Rebecca Young’s focus on prisoners’ rights led her to create programs to improve the juvenile justice system and monitor and report prisoner abuse.

Marillyn Tallman

Marillyn Tallman helped Jews make new lives for themselves during some of the most monumental conflicts of the twentieth century.

Hanna Weinberg

Called the Harriet Tubman of the Jewish domestic violence movement, Hanna Ruderman Weinberg both helped individuals escape their abusers and consulted on national domestic violence organizations.

Gertrude Webb

Gertrude Webb’s compassion for struggling students led her to found programs for teaching both children and adults with learning disabilities.

Miriam Waltzer

As the first woman elected to the New Orleans Criminal District Court, Miriam Waltzer fought for the civil rights of minorities, children, and women.

Judy Somberg

Judy Somberg’s work with the Sister Cities Project in El Salvador helped locals return to their villages after the military takeover in 1987 and freed eleven people who had been “disappeared.”

Betsy Shure Gross

Betsy Shure Gross’s love of nature and open spaces led her to restore a local treasure: the last surviving linear park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead.

Madalyn Schenk

Madalyn Shenk drove significant political change both in Louisiana and in the nation as a whole.

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit risked her own safety to become one of the first female refuseniks to protest for the right to leave Soviet Russia.

Susan Maze-Rothstein

Susan Maze-Rothstein’s childhood experiences of injustice led her to help create a more just world for her children and her students.

Shannie Goldstein

Shannie Goldstein used her creativity to outsmart the KGB, bringing information to and from refuseniks in the Soviet Union.

Roz Garber

Roz Garber evaded the KGB to bring hope to refuseniks in the USSR.

Barbara Gaffin

Barbara Gaffin brought international attention to the desperate circumstances of Ethiopian Jews and helped whole communities flee to Israel.

Elana Brownstein

Representing a new generation of women activists, Elana Brownstein advocated for countless causes, ranging from body image to AIDS orphans, while still in high school.

Joanne Alter

When she challenged Chicago politicians to put a woman’s name on the ballot, Joanne Alter never expected the name would be her own.

Ruth Abrams

The first woman to serve on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Ruth Abrams upheld the rights of women and minorities throughout her career.

We know little about the Canadian pioneer woman known as Mrs. Zelickson. She came to Canada in 1891 and settled in Southern Saskatchewan in the Jewish pioneer colony of Hirsch. In the year 1925, she responded to an on-going discussion in the magazine Nor'-West Farmer on the topic of what a woman was worth. Her response combined a healthy dose of humor and self-assuredness.

Sarah Thal

Sarah's husband had brothers living in Milwaukee who sent home glowing reports of the conditions in America. Intrigued, Sarah and Solomon immigrated to America in 1882.

Flora Langerman Spiegelberg

Willi along with his five other brothers had already established a thriving mercantile business in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Spiegelbergs were so financially successful that their wives and children were able to live luxuriously. For instance, by 1880, Willi and Flora, had the first house in Santa Fe with running water and gas appliances.

Anna Marks

Anna Rich Marks was born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1847. Raised in poverty and haunted by the constant threat of pogroms, she left Poland and traveled to England where she met and married Wolff Marks in 1862, at age fifteen. The couple ventured to America, eventually settling in Eureka City, a rich mining area sixty miles south of Salt Lake City. Anna Marks made her fortune in real estate. She owned controlling interests in two mines near Eureka and was known to have invested money in diamonds as well. Anna Marks died of a heart attack in Eureka City on April 19, 1912.

Betty Spiegelberg

Levi Spiegelberg followed his brother Solomon to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1848. Together they formed the partnership of Spiegelberg Brothers, an extremely successful merchant enterprise. Like many pioneer Jewish men, Levi wished to marry within his faith. Those who could afford the expense, often returned to Europe to find a Jewish bride. Betty married Levi in 1848. She arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the early 1860's after taking the railroad to the end of the Missouri and then traveling up the steep Santa Fe Tail by ox train.

Anna F. Solomon

Anna worked side by side with her husband. She ran Solomonville's store and the local hotel, all while raising their six children in a refined and cultured home in the midst of the desert southwest. Anna died in San Diego, California, in her late eighties on May 4, 1933.

Fanny Jaffe Sharlip

Fanny Sharlip was born in the small town of Borosna, Russia. In her memoirs written in 1947, she characterizes herself as a child "always hungry for knowledge. I asked too many questions. I was told over and over again that it was not healthy to know too much. I could not be harnessed by telling me that children don't have to know. That only made me more curious." Fanny loved school and was an excellent student. "I was very happy as only a child my age could be; I lived and breathed school.

Rachel Calof

Rachel first landed in New York. From there, she and Abraham journeyed to join his family already living on homesteads in North Dakota. They arrived in Devil's Lake in 1894. Rachel's memoir highlights her growing regard for her husband and her own struggle in adapting to the difficult conditions in which found herself. The early years were especially difficult—no privacy, extreme financial hardship, minimum fuel and food to get through the harsh winters.

Fanny Brooks

Fanny Bruck was born in 1837, in the small village of Schweidnitz, Germany, one of six children. Fanny was well educated and graduated with high honors. She was only 16 years old when she met Julius Brooks, a young man who had been lured to America by stories of the Gold Rush in 1847 and who had returned after five years to visit his family. They married in Breslau, Germany, on August 18th, 1853, and journeyed to America.