Politics and Government

Writer and poet Karen Gershon escaped the Holocaust by being sent to England on the Kindertransport. Her best-known book, We Came as Children (1966), documented the collective experiences of refugee children and established her literary reputation in England. Her introspective poetry often reflects on her family and the Holocaust.

Bird Stein Gans was among the first generation of women involved in what was then the new field of parent education. She served as president of the Society for the Study of Child Nature for many years, significantly expanding its membership and impact.

Esther Frumkin was the pseudonym of the Jewish educator, writer, and socialist-turned-communist Malkah Lifchitz. Active in the Russian and later Soviet leftist political scene in the early twentieth century, Frumkin was an independent thinker and a unique woman in the Jewish labor movement. However, she drew criticism from both Jewish and Communist leaders and died in a Soviet detention camp in 1943.

Dora Gad (1912-2003) was a prominent Israeli architect and interior designer. In the early decades of Israel's statehood, Gad played a key role in designing projects for the newly established national institutions in Israel. In 1966, she received the Israel Prize in architecture, the first woman to have ever received this prize.

Gisèle Freund was a European intellectual and writer, a sociologist, a historian of photography, a socialist, a Jew, and one of the world’s greatest photographers.From her photographs of a rally in Berlin to her insightful portraits of Evita Perón, Freund captured the early twentieth century. In 1991, she was the first photographer honored with a retrospective at the Musée National d’art Moderne.

Cell biologist and immunologist Charlotte Friend discovered a virus that could transmit leukemia and made major contributions to our understanding of cancer and its causes. She served as director of the Center for Experimental Cell Biology at Mount Sinai Medical School, and later as the president of the New York Academy of Sciences and the American Association for Cancer Research.

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.

Lillian Freiman was unquestionably the most prominent Jewish woman in Canada in the interwar period. Freiman was exemplary for her degree of independent social activism and devotion to an array of Jewish and non-Jewish social causes.

From the French Revolution to the twenty-first century, Jewish women in France have undergone radical legal, political, cultural, and religious transformations. Seizing upon the increasing number of opportunities available to them, both as Jews and as women, Jewish women have left their marks on all areas of French society.