Science

Birth Control Movement in the United States: 1912-1960

In the 1910s, Margaret Sanger began the family planning movement in the United States. While Sanger was not Jewish, Jews had an enormous impact on her activism, and her activism indelibly shaped the lives of Jewish women in America.

Miriam Bernstein-Cohen

Miriam Bernstein-Cohen was an influential actor, director, poet, and translator in Europe and Israel. She was a versatile actor, appearing successfully both in comedies and in serious plays with the Ohel, Matateh, and Haifa Municipal Theater companies. In addition to her theater work, she wrote books and essays on theater and literature throughout her life.

Jessie Bernard

Sociologist Jessie Bernard’s feminist epiphany came at age 67 in 1969, but her earlier work anticipated feminist theory by discussing the differences between men’s and women’s experiences and arguing that quantitative studies did not accurately represent women’s stories.

Timeline Showing the Major Organizations of Jews in Germany, 1893-1943

Cora Berliner

Cora Berliner was an economist and social scientist who held leadership positions in several major Jewish organizations in Germany between 1910 and 1942. These organizations included the Association of Jewish Youth Organizations in Germany, the Reich Representation of German Jews, and the League of Jewish Women.

New England Hospital for Women and Children

Fanny Berlin

A courageous, motivated pioneer in medicine, in the late 1800s Fanny Berlin became one of the first Jewish women to practice surgery in the United States and the respected chief surgeon of a major hospital.

Raissa L’vovna Berg

Raissa Berg worked was an eminent geneticist until Soviet Russian policies forced her out of her job. Nevertheless, she continued her research at home, eventually discovering “correlative Pleiades” in plants, and later contributed significantly to the reestablishment of the scientific field of genetics in Russia during her brief reinstatement. After emigrating to the United States, Berg remained active until her death in 2006.

Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi

Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi was the second First Lady of Israel, wife to President Yizhak Ben-Zvi. Before and after Ben-Zvi’s tenure, she was active in the labor movement in Palestine and Israel and in the independence movement, as well as a prolific writer and recorder of her experiences in Erez Israel.

Rebecca Reuben's Hebrew Class at the Huzurpaga High School for Indian Girls, circa 1913

Bene Israel

The Bene Israel is one of three Jewish communities in India. Bene Israel women were the producers and preservers of Bene Israel culture in India, and many were very influential leaders in their communities, academia, and religious life.

Therese Benedek

Therese Benedek was among the pioneers of psychoanalysis, first in Germany and then in the United States. She developed expertise in psychosomatic medicine, sexual dysfunction, and family dynamics, but she is best known for her work on the psychosexual development of women.

Rachel Sassoon Beer

Rachel Sassoon Beer was the first woman to edit a national newspaper when she simultaneously owned and edited both The Observer and The Sunday Times in England in the 1890s.

Sarah Bavly

Dutch-born Sarah Bavly was a pioneer nutritionist in the Yishuv who laid the groundwork for Israel's nutritional infrastructure and educational programming, directing Hadassah's hospital nutrition departments and school lunch programs and establishing the State's first College of Nutrition.

Dorothy Walter Baruch

Psychologist Dorothy Walter Baruch championed the health development of children as an educator, author, psychologist, and as a community leader. Her psychodynamic approach to child development focused on the relationship between physical, emotional, and intellectual development and on rechanneling children’s feelings through play and art therapy.

Sadi Muriel Baron

A pioneering neurologist and psychiatrist, Sadi Muriel Baron managed to interweave teaching, working with poor urban families, and running a successful private practice. Baron was also the mother of Dr. Renée Richards, who became one of the most famous American transgender personalities after her transition in 1976.

Miriam Baratz

Miriam Baratz was a founding member of Deganyah Aleph, the first socialist Zionist farming commune in pre-state Israel. She advocated for communal childcare and education, and for a cooperative and egalitarian economic structure. The gender paradigm she helped establish at Deganyah set a precedent of egalitarianism for the entire kibbutz movement.

Clarice Baright

Clarice Baright was one of the first women admitted to the American Bar Association and the second woman to become a magistrate in New York City. Despite many barriers, she had a distinguished career and was the first woman to try a case before an army court-martial.

Elisheva Barak-Ussoskin

After earning her law degree in 1977, Elisheva Barak-Ussoskin quickly advanced through several positions before becoming a judge in the National Labor Court of Israel in 1995. Her rulings had a critical influence on the development of labor law and labor relations in Israel.

Hertha Ayrton

Hertha Ayrton was a distinguished British scientist who was the first woman to receive the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society for a scientific work that was exclusively her own. She was committed to suffrage activism and ensuring proper recognition of women’s scientific work.

Ba'alot Teshuvah: Jewish Women Who Become Orthodox

During the past half century or so, some Jewish women resisted trends toward secularism and feminist ideology and became strictly Orthodox. Despite feminist ideology that views the strict observance of religion as repressive, research since the 1980s has consistently found that the women find fulfillment in the traditional roles of wife and mother, relish the warmth of Orthodox communities, and feel intellectually stimulated by new learning.

Australia: 1788 to the Present

The first Jewish women, like the first Jewish men, arrived in Australia on the very first day of European settlement in 1788. Those convict pioneers were followed by free settlers who made Jewish communal and congregational life viable and helped to develop the vast continent. Jewish women have made significant contributions to Australia's national story.

Charlotte Auerbach

After leaving Nazi Germany in 1933, Charlotte Auerbach settled at the University of Edinburgh, where she was a beloved professor and a groundbreaking researcher. Her discovery about the effect of mustard gas on gene mutation received worldwide acclaim and she became renowned for her profound knowledge of classical genetics, especially of mutation.

Ruth Arnon

Immunologist Ruth Arnon and her team made unprecedented breakthroughs when they developed the first synthetic antigen and the first drug approved for treating multiple sclerosis, Copaxone. Arnon also invented a synthetic, nasally administered flu vaccine and has published over four hundred articles, chapters, and books on immunology and biochemistry.

Margaret Gene Arnstein

Margaret Gene Arnstein was a principal architect of the American nursing profession. Her belief that nurses should be involved in health policy and research helped transform her profession. Renowned for her work in public health, Arnstein also advanced nursing education and research.

Hannah Arendt

Brilliant and controversial, Hannah Arendt was a German-trained political theorist whose books exerted a major impact on political theory in North America and Europe. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) made her an intellectual celebrity in the early years of the Cold War. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Princeton University.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

Ruth Nanda Anshen, twentieth-century philosopher, lecturer, and author, was an “intellectual instigator” for such writers of genius and eminent thinkers as physicist Albert Einstein, scientist Jonas Salk, and others. Anshen created connections between the great thinkers of different fields, offering them opportunities to explain their work to each other and the general public.

Naomi Amir

Naomi Kassan Amir was a pioneer in pediatric neurology, bringing her training from the United States to what was a brand-new field in Israel. Known for her holistic approach, Amir saw children not just in terms of their disabilities but in the context of their family and their community.