Browse by Category | Jewish Women's Archive

A woman washes laundry by hand with a tin tub and washboard.

Kibbutz

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.

A smiling woman stands behind a planter box watering flowers

Kibbutz Ha-Dati Movement (1929-1948)

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.

Killer Wife in Jewish Law and Lore

The Talmud states that if a woman is twice or thrice widowed, she is prohibited from remarrying because it is presumed that she is a killer wife and that her next husband will also die. This has been applied in post-Talmudic law, but also negated by some halakhic decisors.

Clare Kinberg

Clare Kinberg’s editing of the Jewish feminist journal Bridges put authors from across the spectrum of the Jewish, feminist, and activist communities in conversation with each other.

Jamaica Kincaid

Born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, Jamaica Kincaid is a Jewish Afro-Caribbean author. She was sent to the United States from her birthplace in Antigua at the age of sixteen and became a writer while living in the United States.

Group photo of kindergarteners, with woman teacher at left

Kindergartens in Palestine: First and Second Aliyah (1882-1914)

Hebrew-language education of the youngest Jewish residents of Palestine was considered key to the continued success of the Zionist movement. The women who taught in these kindergartens, established during the First and Second Aliyah, demonstrated their dedication to the movement and became essential to its success.

Carol Weiss King

Carol Weiss King was one of the outstanding practitioners of immigration law during the period bounded by the Palmer Raids and the McCarthy era. In her thirty-year career, she represented hundreds of foreign-born radicals threatened with deportation in administrative proceedings in the lower courts and in the Supreme Court.

Carole King

Carole King, a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn, gave Aretha Franklin reason to croon “A Natural Woman,” inspired Little Eva to tell a generation about the latest dance craze in “The Loco-Motion,” and let James Taylor warm our hearts with “You’ve Got a Friend.”

Poppy King

After founding her first makeup empire, Poppy Industries, at age eighteen, Poppy King launched her successful Lipstick Queen brand in 2006, earning international praise.

A flock of white doves settle in a tree.

Kinnim (Tractate)

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.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is an American folklorist who is a scholar of Jewish cultures of Eastern Europe, North America, and Israel, museums, heritage, and tourism, as well as a curator of exhibits and documentarian. She is Chief Curator of the core exhibit of the POLIN Museum of Jewish history in Warsaw.

Ruth Kisch-Arendt

Ruth Kisch-Arendt, an Orthodox Jew, became one of Germany’s foremost performers of lieder (nineteenth–century allegorical poems set to music)through the intense period of anti-Semitism leading up to the Holocaust. After World War II, Kisch-Arendt used her talents to highlight great Jewish composers.

Cecilia Klaften

Cecylia Klaften, a pedagogue and a civic activist from Lvov (Galicia/Eastern Lesser Poland), implemented social reform projects and especially promoted the founding of vocational schools for women in interwar Poland. In the 1920s she was one of the founders of the Jewish Women’s Association and the WIZO Jewish Women’s Organization for Pro-Palestinian Work in Lvov. In the 1930s she was politically active for Lvov’s City Council.

Francine Klagsbrun

Author of more than a dozen books and countless articles in national publications and a regular columnist in two Jewish publications, Francine Klagsbrun is a writer of protean interests who has made an impact on both American and American Jewish culture.

Ida Klaus

Ida Klaus was an influential labor lawyer, advocating tirelessly for the rights of workers. She was solicitor of the National Labor Relations Board under Harry Truman, head of the New York Labor Department, and an arbitrator in the Long Island Railroad Strike.

Black and white phtoograph of a woman with white hair wearing a dark dress looking pensively at the camera

Bertha Klausner

Bertha Klausner was an influential literary agent in New York and Los Angeles. One of the earliest female literary agents, she represented major writers and cultural figures throughout the twentieth century.

Margot Klausner

Margot Klausner was co-founder and president of Israel’s major film and television studio and co-manager of the Habima Theater. She was an author, film producer, founder of the Israeli Parapsychology Society, publisher of the monthly magazine Mysterious Worlds: A Journal of Parapsychology, and a popular public speaker on theater, film, and the occult in Israel.

Gerda Weissmann Klein

Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein has used her experiences to educate countless people through her books, television appearances, and motivational speaking. Among numerous other awards for her work, Klein was appointed to the United States Holocaust Commission by President Clinton in 1997, and in 2011 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

Idit Klein

As executive director of Keshet, a non-profit dedicated to creating a welcoming and supportive Jewish community for GLBTQ Jews, Idit Klein built the organization into a national leader in making the Jewish community more inclusive.

Melanie Klein

Melanie Klein was a pioneer in the psychoanalysis of children and inventor of the “play technique.” She contributed important insights regarding the treatment of individuals suffering from psychosis and personality disorders. Born to a Jewish family in Vienna at the turn of the century, she later lived and practiced in Budapest, Berlin, and London.

Zoë Klein

Rabbi Zoe Klein’s fascination with the language and emotion of the biblical books of the prophets led her to craft Drawing in the Dust, a novel imagining the prophet Jeremiah’s private life.

Sharon Kleinbaum

Sharon Kleinbaum’s longtime leadership of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah and her outspoken activism have made her a powerful voice for GLBTQ rights and human rights in America and around the world.

Traute Kleinova

Gertrude “Traute” Kleinová was a Czechoslovakian table tennis player. Noticed at a young age for her athletic ability, she later defeated the reigning world champion in 1935 and went to the World Championships in London. During the war, Kleinová was deported to Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz but she survived and emigrated to the United States.

black and white photograph of an older woman with white hair holding a newspaper

Fanny Klenerman

A lifelong rebel, a trade unionist, and a Trotskyite, Fanny Klenerman is chiefly associated with the Vanguard bookshop, an icon in left-wing circles in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the period 1931 to 1974.

Irena Klepfisz

Irena Klepfisz is a poet whose legacy is key to the history of Jewish, American and lesbian literature. Klepfisz is also a pioneer of the recovery of Jewish and Yiddish women’s writing, to which she has dedicated translations, research, teaching, and activism.

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The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women