Politics and Government

"Textbook on How to Cook and Bake" by Hinde Amchanitzki, circa 1901

Cookbooks in the United States

American Jewish cookbooks capture the range of Jewish religious and cultural expression in the United States. Women took advantage of the versatility and variety of cookbooks to add their voices to the growing and developing Jewish culture in the United States.

Conversas

After the establishment of the Inquisition in 1478, observance of crypto-Judaism became dangerous and more difficult. Women were at the center of Judaizing efforts, since the home was the only remaining institution in which one could observe Jewish law. Crypto-Jewish women most frequently observed the Sabbath and dietary laws.

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.

Communism in the United States

From the 1920s into the 1950s, the Communist Party USA was the most dynamic sector of the American left, and Jewish women—especially Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their American-born daughters—were a major force within the party and its affiliated organizations. Their numbers included community organizers, labor activists, students, artists and intellectuals. When the communist movement faded in the 1950s, these women carried radical traditions into new movements for social justice and international cooperation.

Jewish Migrations to the United States in the Late Twentieth Century

The three primary groups of Jewish immigrants to the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century were from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and Iran. In each group, women played key roles in helping their communities adapt to life in the United States.

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.

Colonial Entrepreneurs: A Quartet of Jewish Women

Esther Pinheiro, Esther Brown, Rachel Luis, and Simja De Torres were widows, each held property, and each was at one time or another a merchant. Although they have been overlooked by history, written records that document their activities demonstrate the lives of well-off colonial Jewish women.

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.

Rose Gollup Cohen

In her short life, Rose Gollup Cohen was a unionized factory worker and a domestic servant, was helped through an illness by Lillian Wald, became educated, and wrote short stories. Her moving 1918 autobiography Out of the Shadow offers a vivid account of her life as an immigrant Jewish woman in the sweatshops of New York.

Felice Cohn

Felice Cohn was one of Nevada’s first women lawyers in the early twentieth century, an author of suffragist legislation in Nevada, and one of the first women allowed to argue before the United States Supreme Court.

Natalie Cohen

Natalie Cohen was a twentieth-century athlete, umpire, journalist, and civil servant who earned the Presidential Sports Award from President Gerald Ford.

Jessica Cohen

Jessie Cohen served as editor of the Jewish Review and Observer for most of her life, maintaining an important resource for Jews in the city of Cleveland. She ran the Jewish Review and Observer for decades, finally retiring due to ill health, and remained editor emeritus until her death in 1945.

Naomi W. Cohen

One of the first women scholars in the new field of Jewish studies, Naomi W. Cohen earned a reputation as one of the foremost historians of American Jewry. A graduate of Columbia University, Cohen worked as a professor at several institutions and wrote many books, two of which were honored with the National Jewish Book Award.

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.

Audrey Cohen

Audrey Cohen was the founder and president of Audrey Cohen College in New York City, which emphasized a purpose-oriented understanding of education. In 1964 she founded the earliest iteration of Audrey Cohen College, Women’s Talent Corps, which combined study with on-the-job training and greatly benefited low-income women.

Civil War in the United States

During the Civil War, Jewish women performed a range of classic responsibilities brought on by wartime exigencies. Their efforts tended to generate little in the way of documentation, and thus historians studying the involvement of Jewish women in the Civil War and the impact of the war on Jewish women have a sparse body of primary sources upon which to draw.

Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls

The Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls was established in May 1897 to provide housing, occupational training, and community to mostly poor and immigrant young women in New York City.

Club Movement in the United States

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Jewish women shifted from benevolent work to social and personal reform, often through aiding immigrants and young, vulnerable women. They facilitated educational opportunities to learn about Jewish history and ethics, which in turn helped inform their aid work. These efforts created a space specifically for women in American Jewish society.

Hannah Chizhik

Hannah Chizhik was an advocate for women’s emancipation and she was committed to the women workers movement. She became an expert in vegetable farming, agricultural work, and domestic labor for the groups of women pioneers. In 1926 she established a women’s smallholding in Tel Aviv, which became an important center for pioneer youth.

Phyllis Chesler

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is a feminist, best-selling author, and scholar whose career spans more than five decades and 20 books. An early and radical second wave feminist, she has focused on topics such as feminism, women’s rights globally and domestically, Islamic gender apartheid, academic freedom, Judaism, anti-Semitism, and freedom of speech.

A unit of Israeli women soldiers marching in the “Yom Hamedina” parade in Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street, 1948.

CHEN: Women's Corps of the Israel Defense Forces

The Israel Defense Forces’ Women’s Corps (“CHEN”—Hel Nashim) was founded on May 16, 1948, following discussions as to whether women should be integrated into men’s units or separate battalions of women should be formed.

Kim Chernin

From poetry to the probing of women’s eating disorders, from autobiography to the story of a voice, from commentary on sexual identity to Israel and Palestine, Kim Chernin’s writing, “writing consultation,” and pastoral counseling practices all arose from the “spiritual politics” and deep examination of self and society that she considered the essence of her Jewishness.

Rose Chernin

Ambivalent about Judaism, passionately Marxist, charismatic, and courageous, Rose Chernin devoted a great deal of her life to securing the rights of disenfranchised citizens: the unemployed of the Depression, farm workers without a union, Black home buyers thwarted by redlining, and other foreign-born leftists, like herself, who faced deportation in the 1950s.