Science

Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch

Salome Gluecksohn Waelsch combined embryology and genetics to form a new discipline, developmental genetics, a science that investigates the genetic mechanisms of development. For over sixty years, Waelsch made fundamental discoveries in mammalian development and cancer research.

Rosa Zimmern Van Vort

Rosa Zimmern Van Vort was a member of Virginia’s first generation of trained nurses. She devoted her career to the training and education of nurses.

Turkey: Ottoman and Post Ottoman

The Jewish population of Turkey navigated far-reaching changes in the political, social, and geopolitical spheres in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, as the Ottoman Empire pursued reform and collapsed and the Turkish Republic that took its place imposed a process of “Turkification” on its residents. During this period, Jewish women partook in traditional customs relating to religion, family, and the home, while also accessing new opportunities in the public sphere through education and political engagement.

Hannah Thon

Hannah (Helena) Thon was a social worker, journalist and editor, a student of Israel’s ethnic communities, and one of the leading figures in the women’s voluntary social-welfare organizations during the Yishuv (pre-State) period in Israel.

Ethel Tobach

Born in the Ukraine, Ethel Tobach spent most of her life in New York City as a professor, museum curator, and above all, a prolific researcher. She also held several leadership positions in prominent scientific associations, often combining her scientific abilities with her passion for social activism. However, her accomplishments are often overlooked by the psychological community.

Estera Tenenbaum

Dismissed from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1934 for being a Jew, a woman, and a foreigner, Estera Tenenbaum went on to become a distinguished cell and virus scientist. Over the course of her career she held research and teaching positions at Hebrew University and participated in groundbreaking research at the California Institute of Technology.

Helen Tanzer

Helen Tanzer was an educator and translator in the early twentieth century. Contributing to the dissemination of classical and archaeological works, Tanzer well fulfilled the rigorous requirements of scholar and teacher.

Olga Taussky-Todd

A self-proclaimed “torchbearer for matrix theory,” Olga Taussky-Todd made the previously little-known field essential for scientists and mathematicians.

Helen Brooke Taussig

Helen Brooke Taussig was one of the most celebrated physicians of the twentieth century. Through her research and teaching. she was a leader in the development of the medical specialty of pediatric cardiology, pioneering treatment for infants with congenital cardiac defects.

Hannah Mayer Stone

A pioneering physician and advocate of birth control, Hannah Stone defied both New York City police and the federal government in her efforts to make contraception legal and available to American women in the early twentieth century.

Rahel Straus

Rahel Goitein Straus, a pioneering woman medical doctor trained in Germany, was a model “New Jewish Woman” of the early-20th century. Successfully combining a career as a physician with marriage and motherhood, she committed herself to Jewish and feminist causes and organizations throughout her life, while also embracing Zionist ideals.

Bessie Cleveland Stern

Bessie Cleveland Stern is most recognized for her work as statistician for the Maryland Board of Education. She collected and interpreted data about the Maryland school system from 1921 through 1948, and school officials turned to her for information to support appropriations measures and proposed changes in state laws relating to the schools.

Judith Steiner-Freud

As a Holocaust survivor, Judith Steiner-Freud fulfilled her faithful and influential mission. From the 1940s to the 2010s, she devoted herself to the calling of transforming nursing into an academic profession, raising the status of Israeli nurses, and promoting the welfare of Israeli society and other diverse population groups.

Lina Stern and Members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

Lina Solomonovna Stern (Shtern)

Lina Shtern, biochemist and physician, was the first woman professor at the University of Geneva and the first woman named to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Born in Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, she returned to the Soviet Union out of political idealism. A member of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, she was a victim of postwar repressions that targeted both scientists and Jews.

Ruth Sperling

Ruth Sperling is an esteemed Israeli scientist. Her work with her husband included a revolutionary discovery of the 3-D structure of spliceosomes, the cell's "machinery" for chopping up and re-attaching pieces of DNA to create its requisite assortment of functional proteins.

Sabina Spielrein

Sabina Spielrein, a pioneer in the early years of psychoanalysis who made significant contributions to the field, was the first person to propose the thesis about instinctual life, which Freud later adapted. Until recently, Spielrein’s accomplishments and contributions were overlooked and forgotten.

Bertha Kaplan Spector

Born in a Russian shtetl, Bertha Kaplan Spector became a bacteriologist whose authoritative research helped to control an epidemic of amebic dysentery during the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair. Her work contributed to a better understanding of the disease, as well as to new standards of hygiene.

Sociodemography

Over the last several decades, Jewish women attained significant achievement in the socio-economic sphere and played a leading role in maintaining Jewish continuity. In general, Jewish women are educated and participate in the labor force at higher rates than their non-Jewish counterparts.

Rachel Skidelsky

In 1894, at a time when “working mother” was a contradiction in terms for middle-class women, Rachel Skidelsky, a Russian immigrant with a husband and two children under age ten, was a well-known physician in the city of Philadelphia.

Judith Tannenbaum Shuval

Judith Shuval is one of the main scholars in the field of the sociology of health in Israel. Her research on migration and health, inequality in health, self-care in health, the doctor-patient relationship, and the processes of professional socialization has been based in concrete life in Israel and has broader implications for such topics cross-culturally.

Marjorie Shostak

Despite a lack of formal training as an anthropologist, Marjorie Shostak wrote one of the most popular life histories in the field, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, in 1981. A recounting of interviews between Shostak and a woman she met in the Kalahari desert, Nisa has become a touchstone for feminist anthropological studies.

Sarah Shmukler

Sarah Shmukler was a nurse and midwife who emigrated to Palestine from the Russian Empire during the Second Aliyah period. Her short life was characterized by providing medical assistance to migrant workers in Palestine and by close friendships with her fellow pioneers.

Mindel Cherniack Sheps

As a pioneering physician, biostatistician, and demographer, Mindel Cherniack Sheps was acutely aware of the role science could play as a powerful social force. She taught that peace, social justice, and science were inextricably bound; humanism in any field must be based on social equity and knowledge.

Miriam Finn Scott

Miriam Finn Scott, a child diagnostician and educator, believed that the key to child development was educating parents as much as children. She founded the Children’s Garden, a clinic that studied relationships between parents and children and helped parents better support their children’s development. She also published two parenting books that were widely read and translated.

Regina Schoental

Our knowledge of toxic substances in plants, in fungi, and of aromatic and other chemicals that cause cancer owes much to the pioneering work of Regina Schoental.