Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca

Born in Latvia before immigrating to Baltimore as a child, Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca was one of America’s most remarkable women’s labor leaders. An outstanding union organizer and a captivating speaker, Bellanca understood the problems of the working class—people of all genders, ages, and backgrounds—and sought to improve conditions for workers.

Ruth Ben Israel

Ruth Ben Israel was an Israeli legal scholar who specialized in labor law, social equality, and women’s legal rights. While a member of Tel Aviv University’s law faculty from 1986 until her retirement in 2005, Ben Israel wrote more than fifteen influential books on labor law and served as a legal advisor to multiple Knesset Committees related to labor and women’s rights.

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda

Hemdah Ben-Yehuda collaborated with her husband to revive ancient Hebrew and make it a truly functional living language. She helped coin new Hebrew words, created salons for Jewish thinkers, and wrote articles for the newspaper she and her husband ran. Beyond her own writings, she helped edit and compile the seventeen-volume Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.

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.

Rita Schwerner Bender

When her husband was murdered during Freedom Summer in 1964 in Mississippi, Rita Levant Schwerner Bender used the ensuing media attention to focus the public’s awareness on the importance of civil rights.

Margarete Berent

Margarete Berent was the first female lawyer to practice in Prussia and the second female lawyer ever licensed in Germany. In 1925 she opened her own law firm in Berlin and, after fleeing Nazi Germany, opened her own firm in the United States. Not only was she the first female lawyer and the head of her own law firm, but she was also an ardent feminist and active in promoting opportunities for women.

Beatrice Berler

Beatrice Berler was an award-winning translator of Spanish-language novels and history and a renowned community activist. She worked in women’s fashion for over twenty years before returning to school at the age of forty-five, eventually becoming nationally recognized as a literacy activist.

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.

Aline Bernstein

Aline Bernstein was one of the first theatrical designers in New York to make sets and costumes entirely from scratch and craft moving sets. She designed sets for the Theatre Guild and various independent producers, winning numerous awards for her work, including a Tony for costume design for Regina in 1949. She later founded the Costume Museum and began writing fiction.

Amy Bernstein

As leader of one of the largest Reconstructionist synagogues in the country, Rabbi Amy Bernstein has worked to create the welcoming community for others that she had longed for at an earlier age.

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.

Angelica Berrie

A lifelong philanthropist, Angelica Berrie has helped transform the world by funding causes ranging from religious tolerance to nanotechnology.

Betty Berzon

Two years after psychologist Betty Berzon came out as a lesbian in 1971, she won the fight to have the American Psychiatric Association declassify homosexuality as a mental illness.

Eva Besnyö

Photographer and photojournalist Eva Besnyö was born in Budapest in 1910. In the 1930s Besnyö moved to Berlin, where she quickly became successful with numerous exhibitions and commissions and spent time with politically engaged intellectuals and artists. Following the war, Besnyö was active in the Dolle-Mina feminist movement and was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Award for her life’s work.

Adele Bildersee

A feminist before her time, Adele Bildersee was an advocate for women in education. She graduated with the first class of the then all-women’s Hunter College in 1903 and went on to help found Brooklyn College, serving as both its dean of students and its director of admissions.

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.

Ginevra Blanis

Ginevra Blanis was a late sixteenth-century silk manufacturer of the Florentine ghetto and Siena. She left her mark as a founder of the young community with her philanthropy and in the public communication of what she considered Jewish values in the provisions of her will.

Hanne Blank

Both as a historian and as a fiction writer, Hanne Blank has questioned how we relate to our bodies and our sexuality, from gender norms to fat-shaming.

Joani Blank

Sex-positive activist Joani Blank created one of the first woman-friendly sex stores in America, Good Vibrations, as well as sex toys like the Butterfly vibrator.

Gay Block

Gay Block’s photography allowed her to explore surprising facets of her subjects, from girls at summer camp to Holocaust survivors to her own mother.

Members of the General Jewish Labor Bund at a demonstration, 1917.

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.

Heather Booth

Heather Booth helped transform the American political landscape from her early involvement in both civil rights and abortion rights through her campaign for marriage equality.

Kate Bornstein

Kate Bornstein is a pathbreaking transgender lesbian activist, theorist, and performance artist. She is known for tackling social ills and personal pain with joyful optimism.

Barbara Boxer

Elected to the Senate in 1993, Barbara Boxer earned a reputation as a powerful voice for liberal causes by leading the charge on issues like sexual harassment, the Iraq War, and marriage equality. Boxer served on the Senate committees for science and technology and the environment, among others, and retired in 2017.

Alice Goldmark Brandeis

A longtime activist for women’s equality and labor rights, Alice Brandeis also promoted progressive causes through the work of her husband, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Her efforts on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti, radical presidential candidate Robert La Follette, and the Jewish activist Bergson Group stirred controversy.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Activism