Education: Jewish Education
Sisterhoods of Personal Service in the United States
Sisterhoods of Personal Service coordinated the philanthropic work of synagogue sisterhoods across New York City and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assisting a considerable number of immigrants through a variety of financial, vocational, educational, and social programs.
Sociodemography
Over the last several decades, Jewish women attained significant achievement in the socio-economic sphere and played a leading role in maintaining Jewish continuity. In general, Jewish women are educated and participate in the labor force at higher rates than their non-Jewish counterparts.
Soloveitchik, Rabbi Joseph Dov
Joseph Dov Soloveitchik shaped Jewish practice and public opinion through the era of second-wave feminism. Despite his sometimes progressive actions, Soloveitchik maintained that women and men had separate religious and familial roles. These positions from the leader of the Modern Orthodox community cemented resistance to Orthodox feminists’ demands to increase their participation in Jewish rituals.
Dora Spiegel
Dora Spiegel served in many fields, including education, the organization of league sisterhoods, and publications stimulating women’s loyalty to the synagogue and the Jewish home. She helped found the Women’s Institute of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, influencing the lives of countless Jewish women and children.
Stern College for Women
Founded in 1954, Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University is the longest-standing college in America for women under Jewish auspices. It has attracted young women from both Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish homes interested both in secular university training and high-level Jewish studies.
Summer Camping in the United States
The Jewish summer camp movement shaped ethnic-American identity and Jewish childhood throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. A means to fight anti-Semitism by showcasing patriotism and developing the camper’s physical fitness, it was also a safe space to explore, question and craft religious traditions and rituals, novel ideas about girlhood, and the possibilities of womanhood.
Teaching Profession in the United States
Jewish women in the United States became professional teachers to an extent unprecedently in Jewish history. Through Jewish educational organizations, Jewish schools, and public schools, female Jewish teachers have played an important role in shaping the North American teaching profession.
Savina Teubal
Torah Study
Monica Unikel
Mónica Unikel-Fasja is a chronicler of Jewish immigrant stories. She created a dozen guided walking tours in Mexico City and revitalized the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue as a bastion of Jewish culture, designating it a treasure trove of history fully accessible to the general public.
Trude Weiss-Rosmarin
Trude Weiss-Rosmarin made great advances for women’s involvement in Jewish life through the schools she created and her editorship of the Jewish Spectator. A dynamic speaker backed by broad-ranging Jewish scholarship and a prodigious memory, she was a popular lecturer at synagogues and Jewish centers across the United States and a foremost critic of American Jewish life and institutions.
Vele Rabinowitz Zabludowsky
Vele Rabinowitz Zabludovsky was a transnational Yiddish and Hebrew teacher who dedicated her life’s work to teaching and the preservation of Yiddish culture and language. She spent over fifty years teaching Yiddish language and culture in Mexico.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is a highly regarded Torah scholar and author. Her complex interpretive lens is both contemporary, in drawing from literary sources, philosophy, and psychoanalytic theory, and very traditional, in reading the Bible through the lens of classic commentaries and rabbinic midrash.
