Science

Ottilie Schönewald

Deeply involved in several women’s and Jewish organizations, Ottilie Schönewald was an activist who became a politician to advance her causes. She worked with the League of Jewish Women and helped Jews emigrate from Nazi Germany. After Schönewald and her family fled in 1939, she continued her social work during and after the war.

Dominique Schnapper

Dominique Schnapper is a French sociologist who has devoted an important part of her work to an analysis of French Jews and Judaism, in particular in connection with the French model of citizenship, nation, and the republic.

Eva Salber

Using the lessons she learned as a doctor in South Africa, Eva Salber worked with poor populations in Massachusetts and North Carolina to improve public health and empower community leaders. Salber also published three books that sharing her intimate knowledge of the various communities she helped.

Sallyann Amdur Sack

Sallyann Amdur Sack, an American genealogist and psychologist, founded many innovations in contemporary Jewish genealogy. She graduated from Harvard University (Phi Beta Kappa) and received her doctorate from George Washington University and was a clinical psychologist until the early 2020s.

Vera Cooper Rubin

Through her groundbreaking research, astronomer Vera Cooper Rubin forever changed our fundamental view of the cosmos, from a universe dominated by starlight to one dominated by dark matter. Among her many accomplishments, she received the Presidential National Medal of Science in 1993 and mentored many astronomers, saying she would always be “available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers.”

Dame Miriam Rothschild

Dame Miriam Rothschild was a renowned British natural scientist who published over 300 scientific papers throughout her lifetime, making groundbreaking contributions to the fields of entomology, zoology, marine biology, and wildlife conservationism. In 1985 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and credited for her work in the histology, morphology, and taxonomy of fleas.

Bethsabée Rothschild

Bethsabée (Hebrew: Batsheva) de Rothschild, the scion of a well-known philanthropic family, helped support numerous activities in the United States and Israel, especially dance, music, and science.She created the Batsheva and Bat-Dor dance companies and was awarded the Israel Prize in 1989 for her special contribution to Israeli society.

Esther Rosencrantz

An accomplished doctor and tuberculosis researcher in her own right, Esther Rosencrantz is remembered most for an intense interest in Sir William Osler, her mentor, whom she researched.

Hadassah Rosensaft

Dr. Hadassah Bimko Rosensaft played an instrumental role in saving the lives of fellow concentration camp inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau and then at Bergen-Belsen. Rosensaft was later involved in the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Ora Mendelsohn Rosen

Despite her tragically short career, Ora Mendelsohn Rosen was a brilliant research physician and leading investigator of how hormones control the growth of cells. One of the few female members of the National Academy of Sciences at the time, Rosen’s biochemistry work fundamentally shaped our understanding of diabetes and cancer.

Sophia Moses Robison

Sophia Moses Robison discovered her passion for social advocacy in college. Active in the National Council of Jewish Women throughout her life, Robison was also a published researcher and studied the economic impact of arriving refugees after World War II for the federal government. Her explorations into youth delinquency demonstrated the class and social biases in the reporting of delinquency.

Reproductive Technology, New (NRT)

New reproductive technology has provided the solution for problems of infertility for hundreds of thousands of couples. For halakhically observant Jews, especially in the pro-natal state of Israel and in general in the post-Holocaust era, this technology has been a blessing but has also created a multitude of halakhic problems.

Rahel Bluwstein

The "founding mother" of modern Hebrew poetry by women, Rahel Bluwstein achieved in death the status of a national cultural icon. Rahel’s affiliation with the avant-garde group of Second Aliyah pioneers to pre-state Palestine, her dedication to Zionist ideals, and her agonizing death made her a beloved pioneering figure in Israel.

Bracha Ramot

Bracha Ramot, a specialist in internal medicine and hematology, made major contributions to the development of hematology in Israel and to research on the genetic differences of Jewish ethnic communities in Israel. Ramot was awarded the Israel Prize for Medical Sciences in 2001.

Sophie Rabinoff

Sophie Rabinoff used the skills she honed as a doctor in Palestine to improve health care in some of the worst slums in New York. Her innovative work helped to establish the fields of public health and preventive medicine in both the United States and Palestine.

Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner

An outstanding bacteriologist and a leading figure in the feminist movement of women scientists in Germany in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner was a pioneer among women scientists, an exception among the first generation of women scientists in her combination of career and family.

Union of Hebrew Women for Equal Rights in Erez Israel

Nehamah Pukhachewsky

Nehamah Pukhachewsky’s writings advocated for Jewish women with a feminist confidence that resonates with readers to this day. Pukhachewsky immigrated from Lithuania to Palestine in 1889, actively participating in agriculture and women’s rights movements along with writing articles for Hebrew journals. She is remembered as one of the first modern Hebrew women prose writers.

Qumran

Whether or not women were a part of the Essenes’ Qumran settlement, they do appear in Qumran literature. Women in the halakhic writing are only discussed when there are explicit rulings about women’s issues. Halakhic literature shows that women were excluded from all facets of public life and generally were subject to strict halakhic rulings.

Psychology in the United States

Although Jewish women in psychology generally deemphasized their Jewish identities in favor of identifying their work with scientific objectivity and universal human paradigms, they have been well represented in the field as theorists, researchers, and pioneers. They have made their most important contributions in two areas—clinical psychology and the social psychology of intergroup relations, especially as it involves groups marginalized in our society.

Hortense Powdermaker

Hortense Powdermaker explored the balance of involvement and detachment necessary for participant-observer fieldwork in cultural anthropology, stressing the ability to “step in and out of society.” Her secular Jewish identity was apparently a factor in learning this skill, exemplified in an academic career that included thirty years of college teaching and the writing of five major books based on widely diverse fieldwork studies.

Judith Graham Pool

Judith Graham Pool was a physiologist whose scientific discoveries revolutionized the treatment of hemophilia. Pool isolated factor VIII and created a concentrate made from blood plasma that could be frozen, stored, and used by hemophiliacs in their own homes.

Poland: Interwar

A minority habitually ignored by scholars, Polish-Jewish women played important roles in the changing cultural and political framework of the interwar years.

Virginia Morris Pollak

During World War II, sculptor Virginia Morris Pollak used her deep understanding of clay, plaster, and metal to revolutionize reconstructive surgery for wounded servicemen. This earned her a presidential citation, and she was later appointed to JFK’s Commission for the Employment of the Handicapped. Pollak also co-founded her own sculpture studio and chaired the Norfolk Fine Arts Commission, beautifying her hometown with an outdoor sculpture museum at the Botanic Garden.

Nurse and Patients at National Jewish Hospital

Seraphine Eppstein Pisko

Like many middle-class Jewish women at the turn of the twentieth century, Seraphine Eppstein Pisko used her experience in volunteer work to move into the realm of the professional workplace. As executive secretary and vice president of the National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives in Denver, Pisko was one of the first women to lead a national Jewish institution.

Ursula Philip

Ursula Philip was a German geneticist whose work was interrupted by the Nazis’ rise to power but achieved prominence after fleeing to Great Britain.