Doris Bauman Gold was motivated by her long participation in Jewish organizational life to found Biblio Press, dedicated to educating Jewish women about their own history and accomplishments.

Doris Bauman Gold was born on November 21, 1919, in New York City, the daughter of Saul Bauman, a tailor and businessman from Felstyn in Austro-Hungarian Galicia, and Gertrude Reiss Bauman, a native New Yorker and designer of infant wear. Doris, who had one older brother, Seymour, married Bernard Gold in 1952. Originally a baker, Bernard Gold retired from a career in banking. They had two sons: Albert, a geneticist, and Michael, an electronics consultant.

After earning a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College in 1946, where she received the English Department Prize in Poetry, Gold completed an M.A. in English at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1955. She also undertook postgraduate work at the City University of New York Graduate Center in women’s studies, as well as graduate work in business administration and astronomy education. Her employment experience included directing programs for Jewish teenagers; teaching English, writing, and astronomy at the high school, adult education, and college levels; and working in fund-raising for the women’s division of the New York Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and in public relations for the Associated YM-YWHAs of New York. From 1963 to 1972, she edited The Young Judaean Magazine for the Hadassah Youth Commission and wrote Stories for Jewish Juniors (1967). Gold served as a volunteer in a number of Jewish and feminist organizations. She was a member of the advisory board of Lilith magazine from 1976 to 1982.

Gold began studying Jewish women’s volunteer activities in the late 1960s. Her 1970 article, “Jewish Women’s Groups: Separate—But Equal?” is reprinted in Jacob Marcus’s The Jewish Woman: A Documentary History (1981). As a result of her article “Women and Volunteerism” in Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran’s Woman in Sexist Society (1971), Gold was invited to join the Volunteerism Task Force of the National Organization of Women (NOW), where she became a spokesperson on women and volunteer service (1973–1976). Her experience with NOW strengthened her commitment to educating Jewish women about their own heritage. Gold founded Biblio Press in 1979 particularly to inform Jewish professionals, such as social workers, and Jewish volunteers who served Jewish institutions about the backgrounds, experiences, and needs of Jewish women. Publications of the Press have included Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year (Tenth Anniversary Edition, by Penina V. Adelman, 1996), a popular guide to women’s rituals, and Written Out of History: Our Jewish Foremothers (Second Edition, by Sondra Henry and Emily Taitz, 1996).

A recipient of the Susan B. Anthony Award from the New York City National Organization for Women in 1992, Gold also authored Opposition to Volunteerism: An Annotated Bibliography (1979) and Honey in the Lion: Collected Poems (1979) and coedited, with Lisa Stein, From the Wise Women of Israel: Folklore & Memoirs (1993). Through Biblio Press, Gold published more than 27 general audience books that address and illuminate the culture, history, experiences, and spiritual yearnings of Jewish women. In 2001 Gold donated the Biblio Press Collection (1978–2000) to the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, located on the Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute. This collection holds correspondence to and from Biblio Press’s creator Doris Gold, book reviews, book listings and publicity, articles about Biblio Press and Gold, and book covers designed by Gold and others.

Doris Gold died in New York City on July 5, 2011.