Teachers

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Marion Eugénie Bauer

Marion Eugenie Bauer was a modernist and experimental composer whose musical scholarship advocated for women’s voices to be heard and revived interest in female composers. As a teacher, writer, and composer, she was actively involved in many music and composition organizations, frequently as the only woman in a leadership position. 

Dorothy Walter Baruch

Psychologist Dorothy Walter Baruch championed the health development of children as an educator, author, psychologist, and as a community leader. Her psychodynamic approach to child development focused on the relationship between physical, emotional, and intellectual development and on rechanneling children’s feelings through play and art therapy.

Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim

Born in Wilkomir, Lithuania, in 1925, the much-awarded Rivka Basman began writing poetry at an early age. She composed poetry during the Holocaust, and continued to publish books of lyrical poetry long after. Only late in life did she directly address her experiences during the Holocaust.

Matilde Bassani Finzi

Matilde Bassani Finzi was an active Italian anti-fascist who relentlessly fought the injustices of Mussolini and the Nazis. She continuously worked towards the ideals in which she believed: freedom, democracy, and equality for women.

Asnat Barazani

Asnat Barazani was a highly educated and respected Torah scholar in late 16th and early 17th century Kurdistan. After her father’s death, he passed leadership of his Yeshiva in Mosul to Asnat’s husband, but she essentially ran it, taking rabbinic students under her supervision.

Astrith Baltsan

Astrith Baltsan is a decorated Israeli classical musician. Baltsan pursued new approaches to appealing to larger audiences by incorporating classical, pop, and jazz music, as well as poetry, literature, film, video clips, and dance into a coherent narrative, utilizing both her impressive stage presence and her gifts as a pianist, writer, and story-teller.

Golde Bamber

Golde Bamber envisioned and institutionalized new educational structures to serve Jewish immigrant communities in Boston in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She served as director of the Hebrew Industrial School for Girls for forty years. Bamber’s pioneering work influenced settlement house, vocational, Jewish, and nursery school education in Boston and beyond.

Florence Bamberger

Educational administrator, professor, and author Florence Bamberger devoted her life and career to developing and implementing her progressive views on teaching. Her commitment to supervisory models of pedagogy continues to influence schools of education today.

Baghdadi Jewish Women in India

Baghdadi Jews arrived in India in the late eighteenth century and ultimately formed important diaspora communities in Bombay and Calcutta. Many notable Baghdadi Indian women were involved in philanthropy, Jewish and Zionist organizations, education, and film acting.

Elisabeth Badinter

Elisabeth Badinter is one of France’s most prominent and controversial philosophers. Among her most important contributions figure her numerous writings about feminism and gender relations, which emphasize the importance of “equality through resemblance,” as well as her historical works on the Enlightenment.

Edith Jacobi Baerwald

Edith Jacobi Baerwald devoted her energy to philanthropic organizations, but she also loved connecting directly with the people she helped through her volunteer work at settlement houses. She considered volunteer work a social obligation and poured her time and tireless energy into numerous projects.

Sara Azaryahu

From her youth, the two issues Sara Azaryahu cared about most were women’s rights and Zionism. Dedicating her life to both causes, Azaryahu was active in the advancement of Hebrew girl’s schools all over Palestine and was a key player in the fight for equal rights for women in the Yishuv.

Charlotte Auerbach

After leaving Nazi Germany in 1933, Charlotte Auerbach settled at the University of Edinburgh, where she was a beloved professor and a groundbreaking researcher. Her discovery about the effect of mustard gas on gene mutation received worldwide acclaim and she became renowned for her profound knowledge of classical genetics, especially of mutation.

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.

Assimilation in the United States: Twentieth Century

Jewish women assimilating into a changing American society across the twentieth century navigated often conflicting gender roles. As they strove to achieve upward social mobility, they adapted Jewish assumptions of what women, especially married women, should do to accommodate American norms for middle class women. Their collective accomplishments registered in political activism, organizational creativity, strong support for feminism, religious innovation, and educational achievement in the face of antisemitism, stereotypes, and denigration.

Liliane Atlan

Liliane Atlan (1932-2011) was a post-World War II French Jewish writer whose stylistically innovative plays, poetry, and narratives represent themes rooted in Jewish tradition. In a literary world shattered by the reality of the death camps, Atlan questions Messianic faith, patriarchal values, and humanistic philosophy.

Dora Askowith

Dora Askowith, author, historian, and college educator, believed that a knowledge of Jewish women’s history would serve as a catalyst for organization, activism, and moral leadership. She taught women at Hunter College for a total of forty-five years and wrote that she was anxious to teach college students Jewish history because they were “poorly versed in the history of their own faith.”

Argentina: Sephardic Women

Argentina’s Sephardic community included Jews from all over the Sephardi diaspora. Immigrant women often worked alongside their fathers or husbands in general stores, as well as doing household chores and raising children. As Sephardic communities became more established, women’s educational opportunities expanded, and women played important roles in philanthropy and Zionism.

Yehudit Arnon

After surviving the Holocaust and immigrating to Palestine, Yehudit Arnon played an influential role in shaping modern dance in Israel. In 1948 Arnon and her husband helped to smuggle more than 100 orphaned children to Palestine and settled in Kibbutz Ga'aton, where she founded the  Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company. 

Margaret Gene Arnstein

Margaret Gene Arnstein was a principal architect of the American nursing profession. Her belief that nurses should be involved in health policy and research helped transform her profession. Renowned for her work in public health, Arnstein also advanced nursing education and research.

Edna Arbel

While Edna Arbel was a justice on Israel’s Supreme Court from 2004 to 2014, her career has been influential for decades. She served variously as a District Attorney, a Judge, and as State Prosecutor, and her courageous determination to combat both governmental corruption and rising violence not only placed her in the public limelight but at times also aroused considerable hostility.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus changed how the world looks at photographs and how photographs look at the world. Arbus sought out unconventional subjects such as Coney Island freak shows and gay bars, launching her solo career with a first photo essay for Esquire. For many years she remained a cult figure, and it was not until the 1980s that her work came to be generally accepted.

Hannah Arendt

Brilliant and controversial, Hannah Arendt was a German-trained political theorist whose books exerted a major impact on political theory in North America and Europe. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) made her an intellectual celebrity in the early years of the Cold War. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Princeton University.

Argentina: Jewish Education

Over the course of the twentieth century, Jewish educational opportunities expanded for girls and teaching as an occupation became a possibility for Jewish women in Argentina. The 1920s saw the first female teachers in Jewish schools, and by the end of the 1950s, seventy percent of teachers were locally-trained women.

Eleanor Antin

A seminal figure in the history of performance art, Eleanor Antin is one of the most prolific artists of the last three decades, moving freely in many forms of media, including live and installation art, independent film, photography, video, drawing, painting, and writing. In her work, Antin has explored audience expectations and assumptions about race, gender, and societal roles.

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