Writing

Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger

Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger was the daughter, wife, mother, or grandmother of four publishers of the New York Times and herself served as a trustee of the paper. She also helped strengthen the schools and parks of New York.

Manya Gordon Strunsky

Manya Gordon Strunsky was a socialist activist and a respected writer on political and social issues. Strunsky was also instrumental in bringing Jewish immigrants from czarist Russia to America and helping them to become settled.

Suburbanization in the United States

Jews migrated in large numbers to newly constructed suburbs after World War II and the end of restrictive covenants that had excluded them. During the day, suburbs were largely female spaces where married Jewish women cared for their children and private homes, while volunteering for Jewish and civic activities. Jewish daughters raised in suburbs enjoyed middle-class comforts but also experienced pressures to conform to American gentile ideals of beauty.

Florine Stettheimer

Florine Stettheimer's paintings are lively, diarylike accounts of her life and acute examinations of upper-class ways in New York between the wars. Her decorative style offered an alternative to prevailing modes of contemporary modernist painting. Through her work, she criticized the high-mindedness of modern art and the course of modern life.

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.

Eva Michaelis Stern

Eva Michaelis Stern was co-founder and director of the fundraising arm of the Youth Aliyah in Germany, and later the director of the Youth Aliyah office in London. Over the course of WWII, she helped more than 1000 children from countries all over Europe immigrate to Palestine.

Estelle Sternberger

Believing in a future where all people had a voice and women’s work was valued, Estelle Sternberger found a myriad of ways to reshape public opinion, from hosting a political radio show to leading an organization for peace.

Elizabeth Stern

Elizabeth Stern was an American-Jewish writer, essayist, and journalist. She achieved success within a number of realms and balanced a number of competing roles: fiction writer, journalist, social worker, wife, mother, and an American woman leading a secular life who examined the importance of cultural heritage.

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.

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.

Edith Mendel Stern

A prolific writer as well as an activist in the mental health field, Edith Stern authored four novels and many guides for laypeople on the subjects of mental illness, aging, and differently abled children.

Mollie Steimer

Mollie Steimer earned nationwide attention for her refusal to compromise her anarchist beliefs during the widely publicized 1918 trial in which she was sentenced to prison under the Sedition Act. Later deported to Russia and then to Germany, Steimer continued her anarchist activities throughout her life.

Alicia Steimberg

Fiction writer Alicia Steimberg (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1933-2012) garnered important literary prizes. Her work as a translator was awarded by the Konex Foundation and she served the government as Director of Books of the Secretariat of Culture.

Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark was a Scottish-Jewish novelist, short story writer, literary critic, poet, editor, and essayist. While many critics marginalize Spark as a “Catholic writer,” it is clear that the wit, intelligence and subversiveness of her fiction are driven not by an unchanging morality but by a radical singularity.

Alice Hyneman Sotheran

Alice Hyneman Sotheran, author, lecturer, and reviewer for a variety of magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote about women’s work and women’s issues.

Judith Solis-Cohen

Judith Solis-Cohen had a prolific literary career that covered a wide range of topics, from clothing to education to women’s suffrage. She was also active in Philadelphia’s Jewish intellectual circles and introduced Jewish literature to the blind.

Mollie Slott

During a 56-year tenure with the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News Syndicate, Mollie Slott guided the daily operation of a nationwide news distribution service that, in addition to the comics, included columns of advice, sports, politics, and serialized fiction.

Chava Slucka-Kesten

Chava Slucka-Kesten started teaching in Warsaw before World War II and continued her career through the war in Moscow. After the war she became an author and sustained her political involvement. Writing from the perspective of a politically engaged woman, Slucka-Kesten offers a unique glimpse into pre- and post-war Jewish life in Poland’s cities and villages, as well as into the early years of the State of Israel.

Virginia Snitow

Virginia Levitt Snitow was a multifaceted woman who was a teacher, political activist, pre-Second Wave feminist, poet, writer and founder of US/Israel Women to Women. Ahead of her time in the fight for both civil and women’s rights, Snitow was unafraid to take unpopular stances when fighting for others.

Tess Slesinger

Novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Tess Slesinger was born in New York on July 16, 1905. She published several works, including: The Unpossessedand Time: The Present. Slesinger died of cancer at age thirty-nine before the premiere of one of her final works, the acclaimed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Simone Signoret

Simone Signoret's five-decade career of more than sixty films, her Leftist politics, and her unassailable talent in creating not only memorable but iconic female heroes at every stage of her career, give her an important place in twentieth-century cultural history.

Helene Simon

Greatly influenced by the socialist ideology of the Fabian Society in London, Helene Simon was as a pioneer in the theory and practice of social policy and welfare in Germany. Simon was a major advocate for structural changes in Germany’s welfare system, especially for the benefit of women and children.

Dora Shulner

Dora Shulner was a Yiddish writer who vividly evoked for her readers life in the Pale of Settlement before, during, and after the Russian Revolution and Civil War. She candidly portrayed women in their most intimate relationships with men, revealing the complexity of their disappointments and aspirations.

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.