Politics and Government
Leah Bergstein
Leah Bergstein was the first of the choreographers in Palestine who, at the beginning of the 1930s, created festival dances at kibbutzim that depicted life in pre-state Israel and on agricultural settlements. The unique festival pageants she created, often with poet-composer Mattityahu Shelem, contributed to the development of rural Israeli festivals and holiday celebrations and the creation of the first Israeli dances.
Libbie Suchoff Berkson
Libbie Suchoff Berkson was beloved by generations of campers as Aunt Libbie, director of Camp Modin for girls. She helped to establish the Jewish summer camp and ran it for decades, even while living in Israel and working on several other projects, such as a kindergarten and a teahouse.
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.
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.
Clementine Bern-Zernik
A lawyer by training, Vienna-born Clementine Bern-Zernik produced broadcasts for the US Office of War Information in London during the war, served as the director of a Displaced Persons Camp in post-war Germany, and spent the last 50 years of her life as a UN liaison to the New York Public Library. Throughout her life she maintained a strong Austrian identity and was a founding member of the Austrian-American Federation.
Anne Fleischman Bernays
Anne Fleischman Bernays is an American editor, novelist, and nonfiction writer. Her literary work is notable for its exploration of Jewish experiences of America, the pressure of assimilation, and the then-taboo subject of sexual harassment.
Dorothy Lehman Bernhard
Rebecca Thurman Bernstein
Rebecca Thurman Bernstein was lauded by local and national organizations for her efforts to improve health care, literacy, and Jewish life in Portland, Maine. Bernstein was proud of her Jewish heritage and worked for many Jewish causes, but her interests were not limited to or by her Jewishness.
Theresa Bernstein
Painter, printmaker, teacher, poet, celebrated raconteur, and art activist, Theresa Bernstein was an enduring fixture in the art worlds of New York and the summer colony at Gloucester, Massachusetts, for ninety years. Her paintings and prints are now in museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution.
Meta Pollak Bettman
Meta Pollak Bettman was an untiring volunteer in Jewish and civic causes in the early twentieth century.
Elisheva Bichovsky
After making Aliyah in 1925, Elisheva Bichovsky (born in Russia as Elizaveta Zhirkova), helped shape the Yishuv’s literary scene as one of Palestine’s first Hebrew poets. Her 1926 Kos Ketannah and 1929 Simta’ot were, respectively, the first poetry collection and first novel written by a woman to be published in Palestine.
Yehudith Birk
In 1977, biochemist Yehudith Birk became the first woman to serve as a dean at the Hebrew University. An internationally renowned scientist for her studies of legume seed proteins and proteinase inhibitors, she won the 1998 Israel Prize for agricultural research.
Birth Control Movement in the United States: 1912-1960
Sara Blakely
Matilda and Bernice Blaustein
Miranda Bloch
Adele Bloch-Bauer
Anita Block
Dina Blond
As chairwoman of the Bundist women’s organization Yidisher Arbeter Froy, Dina Blond was one of the most prominent representatives of the Jewish labor party in interwar Poland. At the same time, she was also one of the best-known Yiddish translators of her day.
Florence Meyer Blumenthal
Florence Meyer Blumenthal, an extraordinary philanthropist and arts patron, organized her own arts foundation in Paris, and donated millions of dollars to established institutions and public charities in America and France. Blumenthal’s foundation funded hundreds of promising artists and allowed them to focus on pursuing their craft.
Ruth Bondy
Ruth Bondy was an author, a journalist, and a gifted translator. Born in Prague to a large Zionist family, the majority of whose members perished in the Holocaust, Bondy survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz-Birkenau and arrived in Israel in late 1948. She soon became a journalist, and eventually began to write biographies and translate from Czech to Hebrew.
Heather Booth
Madeleine Borg
Madeleine Borg, a juvenile rights advocate, is known for reframing juvenile rehabilitation efforts in both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. Borg founded the American Big Sisters movement in 1912 and went on to establish the Council Home for Jewish Girls.
Anna Pavitt Boudin
A dentist by career, Anna Pavitt Boudin is remembered for her prominent role in the American’s Women ORT. While maintaining her own private dental practice, Boudin became the founding president of Women’s American ORT, an organization that grew to be one of the largest Jewish women’s organizations in the United States.
Jane Bowles
Admired for her darkly comic wit by writers like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and John Ashbery, writer Jane Bowles became the center of an avant-garde circle in Morocco with her husband, writer Paul Bowles. Her works have garnered critical acclaim long after her death.