Politics and Government
Elinor Caplan
Elinor Caplan is a Canadian Liberal Party politician who spent a quarter-century in elected office. She was the first Jewish woman to serve as cabinet minister at the provincial and federal levels. Caplan served as a Member of Toronto’s Provincial Parliament for twelve years and in 1997 she was elected to federal parliament.
Shoshana S. Cardin
Judy Feld Carr
Cedar Knolls School for Girls
Central Organizations of Jews in Germany (1933-1943)
During the Nazi regime, the political participation of the League of Jewish Women in the affairs of the Jewish self-help organization the Reichsvertretung was initially unwelcomed by male leaders, despite the fact that women attended its meetings. Following the dissolution of the League in 1938, four of its members created their own network in order to present a united front for Jewish women’s interests and continued to participate in important functions of the Reichsvertretung.
Chai Feldblum
Chai Feldblum is a distinguished lawyer and legal scholar known especially for her work advocating for the rights of disabled and LGBTQIA people. She was the lead drafter of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, as well as many other important bills affirming the rights of marginalized Americans. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed her to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Charlotte Chaney
Peggy Charren
Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children’s Television (ACT), took on the burgeoning television industry of the 1970s and won. She received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 for her work on behalf of quality television programming for children.
CHEN: Women's Corps of the Israel Defense Forces
Zoya Cherkassky
Zoya Cherkassky (b. 1976 in Kyiv, Ukraine) is a prominent Israeli artist. She works in a range of media and styles, synthesizing traditional painting techniques with vernacular tools and moving freely between allusions to the European canon and contemporary art. Her work is marked by humor, irony, and satire and at times has been controversial.
Kim Chernin
From poetry to the probing of women’s eating disorders, from autobiography to the story of a voice, from commentary on sexual identity to Israel and Palestine, Kim Chernin’s writing, “writing consultation,” and pastoral counseling practices all arose from the “spiritual politics” and deep examination of self and society that she considered the essence of her Jewishness.
Rose Chernin
Ambivalent about Judaism, passionately Marxist, charismatic, and courageous, Rose Chernin devoted a great deal of her life to securing the rights of disenfranchised citizens: the unemployed of the Depression, farm workers without a union, Black home buyers thwarted by redlining, and other foreign-born leftists, like herself, who faced deportation in the 1950s.
Phyllis Chesler
Hannah Chizhik
Hannah Chizhik was an advocate for women’s emancipation and she was committed to the women workers movement. She became an expert in vegetable farming, agricultural work, and domestic labor for the groups of women pioneers. In 1926 she established a women’s smallholding in Tel Aviv, which became an important center for pioneer youth.
Civil War in the United States
During the Civil War, Jewish women performed a range of classic responsibilities brought on by wartime exigencies. Their efforts tended to generate little in the way of documentation, and thus historians studying the involvement of Jewish women in the Civil War and the impact of the war on Jewish women have a sparse body of primary sources upon which to draw.
Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls
The Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls was established in May 1897 to provide housing, occupational training, and community to mostly poor and immigrant young women in New York City.
Club Movement in the United States
Regine Freund Cohane
Audrey Cohen
Audrey Cohen was the founder and president of Audrey Cohen College in New York City, which emphasized a purpose-oriented understanding of education. In 1964 she founded the earliest iteration of Audrey Cohen College, Women’s Talent Corps, which combined study with on-the-job training and greatly benefited low-income women.
Geulah Cohen
A perennial firebrand of the Israeli Right, Geulah Cohen was a major fixture in Israeli politics from the pre-state era through to the twenty-first century. She was a Lehi-affiliated member of the Jewish Underground in British Mandatory Palestine, served in five Knessets from 1974 to 1992, and was one of the first prominent female Israeli politicians of Mizrahi origin.
Jessica Cohen
Jessie Cohen served as editor of the Jewish Review and Observer for most of her life, maintaining an important resource for Jews in the city of Cleveland. She ran the Jewish Review and Observer for decades, finally retiring due to ill health, and remained editor emeritus until her death in 1945.