Anna Jacobson Schwartz was credited as one of the world’s greatest monetary scholars for her work at the National Bureau of Economic Research and her incisive scholarship on economic history. She was an educator at various institutions as well as a highly published and awarded researcher. Schwartz received numerous honorary degrees and has held leadership roles in several organizations, including the International Atlantic Economic Society.
Dominique Schnapper is a French sociologist who has devoted an important part of her work to an analysis of French Jews and Judaism, in particular in connection with the French model of citizenship, nation, and the republic.
Approximately 350,000 Jewish women moved to Israel from the Former Soviet Union after 1989. Among the key issues they faced were occupational downgrading, sexuality and family life, sexual harassment, marital distress, and single-parent families.
The first woman on the financial desk of a big-city newspaper and the first woman to break into the world of writing about finance, Sylvia Field Porter was a pioneering economist, columnist, and best-selling author. For over half a century, she educated the American consumer about money matters, empowering women to achieve economic independence.
Jessica Blanche Peixotto defied convention and her family to become a respected authority in the field of economics. Through her education, professorship, and departmental leadership at the University of California at Berkeley, she broke down barriers for women in education.
Sylvia Ostry, born in Winnipeg, Canada, was a distinguished economist, academic, and government leader. She taught at universities across Canada, served in numerous government posts, and authored over eighty publications, mostly on policy analysis.
Mizrahi feminism goes beyond the typical western scope of feminism to include the history and issues that concern women in the Middle East in Israel and in Arab and Muslim countries. An intersectional feminism, it is particularly sensitive to issues of race, class division, immigration, and ethnic discrimination.
Rosa Luxemburg was a socialist revolutionary known for her critical perspective. Born in Poland, Luxemburg had become an important figure in the world socialist movement by 1913. She argued against Lenin’s hierarchal conception of party organization, and against revisionism. Luxemburg was internationalist in orientation and unflinchingly dedicated to a radical democratic vision.
Esther Lowenthal’s long career teaching economics at Smith explored subjects from government spending and taxation to the theories of socialist economists.
Sara Landau was an accomplished twentieth-century economist who paired her scholarship with inexhaustible volunteerism in local and national organizations. Throughout her career in academia and service, Landau exemplified a category of economically independent middle-class Jewish women in America who both developed their own careers and devoted their energy to volunteer efforts, especially on behalf of their fellow Jews.
Tractate Kinnim (“nest” or “birds in a nest”), the last tractate in Order Kodashim (Holy Things), deals with the smallest type of sacrifice, a pair of turtledoves or young pigeons—one nest, hence the title.
Beginning in 1929, the religious kibbutz (Kibbutz Ha-Dati) movement represented the confluence of progressive ideals of equality and collectivism and traditional customs of Judaism. As a result, women in the movement lived at a crossroads.
Although the kibbutz was intended as an equalitarian, democratic utopia, attempts to achieve gender equality have been limited by traditional masculinities and male-controlled spheres and gender inequalities have persisted.
American Jewish women have made important contributions to historical scholarship, especially in the arenas of social history of the United States and Europe, women’s history, and Jewish history. Jewish women, sensitive to the situations of minority groups, became pioneers in these fields as they developed from the 1970s on.
Across the medieval Jewish world, rabbis used takkanot (rabbinic decrees) to address urgent needs in family life among their Jewish communities. These takkanot are key historical sources for understanding the changing roles of women in the medieval Jewish world.
The Cairo Genizah (950-1250) contained a vast array of documents pertaining to women’s lives in the medieval Islamic world. Letters, wills, business arrangements, marriage documents, court cases and rabbinic responsa shed light on the lives of the poor and the wealthy, the married and divorced or widowed.
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.
Dianne Feinstein, former mayor of San Francisco and United States senior senator from California since 1992, was a political pioneer and a long-time U.S. senator. Throughout her career, Feinstein earned a reputation as a leader, reformer, and principal member of the Democratic Party.
Ruth Dreifuss was the first Jewish member of the Federal Government of Switzerland and the first female President of the country. When she became President of the Confederation in 1999, she was the first Jew and the first woman to hold the office.
Ruth Cohen, Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1954 until 1972, was the first Jewish principal of an Oxbridge College, a distinguished agricultural economist, and, after her retirement from college life, a dedicated local councillor.
Women were among the earliest settles in the Dutch and English Caribbean. Early Caribbean Jewish women, despite living in patriarchal societies, still managed to engage in public pursuits. As Caribbean Jewish communities became increasingly racially blended over time, women of color became some of the most definitive architects of distinctly Creole Caribbean Jewry.
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.
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.
A determined advocate who earned the nickname “Stonewall” for her trade talks with Japan, Charlene Barshefsky was the primary negotiator who laid out terms for China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. She was also a powerful proponent of free trade in the Clinton administration, helping negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
