Business & Economics

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Tatyana Grosman

Tatyana Grosman nurtured an entire generation of printmakers and raised printmaking in the United States to the status of major fine art. Universal Limited Art Editions, which she founded in 1957, published prints by many major American artists, and launched collaborative endeavors between artists and writers. Much of the press’s work was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Glueckel of Hameln

Born into an affluent family in Hamburg, Glückel of Hameln became the business partner of her beloved first husband. She began writing memoirs in 1691, after her husband’s death. These memoirs are incredibly detailed, combining a meticulous record of her life and descriptions of events that occurred in local Jewish communities. Her memoirs are both a singularly important social and historical document and one of the greatest literary achievements of Ashkenazi prose–in Yiddish or Hebrew–at least until the end of the eighteenth century.

Germany: 1750-1945

The Jewish Reform movement did not liberate women from their subordinate religious status, and the nineteenth-century bourgeois German family ideal with its rigid gender roles soon eclipsed the fluid structure of premodern Jewish families. Jewish women were expected to transmit German bourgeois values while also shaping their children’s Jewish identity.

German Immigrant Period in the United States

Among nineteenth-century German Jewish immigrants to the United States, married women often made their own sources of incomes. However, high rates of poverty in large cities motivated women to create benevolent societies. As women participated more in the public sphere, the traditionally strict dichotomy between male and female roles changed in immigrant communities.

Food in the United States

Food and foodways are a critically important area of documenting and deciphering the evolving experience of American Jewish women from the earliest days of immigration to the present. Food is a lens into American Jewish women’s worlds of family, religion, identity, work, political action, entrepreneurship, and more as they have encountered the forces of assimilation, anti-Semitism, systemic racism, sexism, changing consumer economies, and the long women’s movement.

Dulcea of Worms

Dulcea of Worms was the wife of Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, a major rabbinic figure. They were part of the elite leadership class of medieval Germany Jewry. Eleazar’s account of Dulcea’s murder in 1196 is an important source for the activities of medieval Jewish women.

Gail Berman

Gail Berman made history as part of the youngest team of producers in Broadway history, before becoming a television executive known for her genius in picking hit shows and turning failing networks around. Berman produced shows such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Malcolm in the Middle.

Rachel Sassoon Beer

Rachel Sassoon Beer was the first woman to edit a national newspaper when she simultaneously owned and edited both The Observer and The Sunday Times in England in the 1890s.

Australia: 1788 to the Present

The first Jewish women, like the first Jewish men, arrived in Australia on the very first day of European settlement in 1788. Those convict pioneers were followed by free settlers who made Jewish communal and congregational life viable and helped to develop the vast continent. Jewish women have made significant contributions to Australia's national story.

Beatrice Fox Auerbach

People who shopped or worked at G. Fox and Company in Hartford, Connecticut, from the 1930s to the 1960s have fond memories of Beatrice Fox Auerbach and her department store. Auerbach, who became president of G. Fox and Company after her father died, was a talented executive, and the company became the largest privately owned department store in the country.

Polly Adler

Notorious for her connections with gangsters at the height of Prohibition, Polly Adler fought to become “the best goddam madam in all America.” Though frequently arrested, Adler was undeterred from opening fancy brothels and rubbing elbows with the rich and famous in and around New York City.

Benvenida Abravanel

Benvenida Abravanel, both born into and married within the important Abravanel family of Spain and Portugal, was one of the most influential, wealthiest, and charitable Jewish women of early modern Italy. After fleeing the Iberian peninsula, her family settled in Naples, stayed in Venice, and then resettled in Ferrara. Her family life, however, was wracked by strife, including the presence of her husband Samuel’s illegitimate son in the family and a struggle within the family over her husband’s assets after he died.

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