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Adele Gutman Nathan

Adele Gutman Nathan was a prolific writer, theater director, and creator of historical pageants and commemorative events. She wrote fourteen children’s books, in addition to newspaper and magazines articles. Nathan directed theater in Baltimore and New York and staged events from the 1933 and 1939 World’s Fairs to the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Maud Nathan

After her daughter’s death, Maud Nathan battled grief by throwing herself into social justice work, transforming herself from a society wife into an influential social reformer. She devoted her life to leading organizations that worked to expose poor working conditions for women and children and was a tireless advocate for women’s suffrage.

National Council of Jewish Women

In its early years, the National Council of Jewish Women concentrated on combating assimilation by educating Jewish women about Judaism. In contemporary times, the Council continues to play an important role as a bridge between traditional motherhood and political activity, between the Jewish community and other women’s organizations, between Judaism and politics, and between diverse segments of the Jewish community itself.

National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods

Founded in 1913 as the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods and officially renamed Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ) in 1993, the WRJ has for more than a century galvanized hundreds of thousands of Jewish women to support and advance Reform Judaism, the Jewish people, and Jewish values in their home communities, around the country, and around the world.

Elsie Margaret Binger Naumburg

Elsie Margaret Binger Naumburg was a researcher of South American avifauna and a gazetteer with the American Geographical Society. She put her research on hold during World War II to aid refugee and unemployed musicians.

Shoshana Netanyahu

Shoshana Netanyahu served as a judge on the Magistrates Court in Haifa from 1969 until 1974 and as a District Court judge in the city from 1974 to 1981. In 1981 she was promoted to the Supreme Court, from which she retired in 1993.

Modern Netherlands

Like Jewish women everywhere, Dutch Jewish women struggled with issues of assimilation, emancipation, and equality as both Jews and women. This article summarizes the conditions and challenges facing Jewish women in the Netherlands and the paths to progress and change they sought—education, work, activism, and literature, among others—from the nineteenth century to the present, including after the particular decimation of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust.

Julia Neuberger

Baroness Julia Neuberger holds an unusual double distinction as both a rabbi and a member of the House of Lords.

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson belongs to a generation of Manhattan-based painters and sculptors whose careers coincided with the development of modernism in America. Nevelson created sculptures that audiences could both experience and see. Several of her pieces are now owned by the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, and MOMA.

Jewish Women in New Zealand

Although New Zealand’s Jewish community is small, “Kiwi” Jewish women have punched well above their weight and account for a significant number of the country’s “historic firsts” and remarkable achievements.

Estelle Newman

Estelle Reiss Newman innovated new programs for aiding the blind, from providing retirement homes for the aged blind to helping younger disabled people navigate independent lives in their communities.

Pauline Newman

Pauline Newman played an essential role in galvanizing the early twentieth-century tenant, labor, socialist, and working-class suffrage movements. The first woman ever appointed general organizer by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), Newman continued to work for the ILGWU for more than seventy years—first as an organizer, then as a labor journalist, a health educator, and a liaison between the union and government officials.

Blanche Cohen Nirenstein

Descending from a family active in Jewish communal life, Blanche Cohen Nirenstein further developed her leadership abilities in a wide range of social science activities. Nirenstein found a myriad of ways to help Jewish widows and needy children, from founding a kosher summer camp to supporting Holocaust survivors.

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit

Galina Nizhnikov Veremkroit risked her own safety to become one of the first female refuseniks to protest for the right to leave Soviet Russia.

Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Israel, 1948-2000

While the earliest women’s NGOs in Israel focused on contributing their share to nation-building, today’s organizations advocate and practice feminism. Over the past few decades, they have grown in number, modified their strategies, and raised new issues, yet hurdles continue to undermine their influence.

Miriam Novitch

Miriam Novitch was a member of the French Resistance during World War II and, after, an advocate for education on the Jewish resistance and the experiences of Holocaust survivors. She was one of the founders of the Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum (also known as the Ghetto Fighter’s House, or GFH) and served as the curator for its art collection for many years.

Anna Kaplan in the First Graduating Class of Hadassah School of Nursing, 1921

Nursing as a Female Profession in Palestine (1918-1948)

Nursing was a well-respected profession for Jewish women in Palestine, until doctors and nurses clashed about the proper level of education for nurses in the 1930s. Despite the challenges women faced in the medical field, they contributed greatly during times of war and violence before the founding of Israel.

Nursing in the United States

Early in the twentieth century, trained nursing was not considered a suitable profession for a young Jewish woman. Jewish quotas on admission to nursing school were maintained well into the twentieth century, and nursing education continued be characterized by Christian underpinnings as late as the 1950s, stunting the prominence of Jewish nurses.

Achy Obejas

Writer, translator, and activist Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1956 and moved to the United States with her parents six years later. She is known for stories with characters and themes related to gender, queer sexuality, Cuban-ness, and Jewishness, as well as migration, displacement, and diaspora.

Meyera Oberndorf

Meyera Oberndorf blazed trails in Virginia politics as the first woman and first Jewish mayor of Virginia Beach, the largest city in the Commonwealth. From 1988 to 2008, she stood up to a long-ingrained good old boy network and led the city through difficult issues including racial unrest, all while staying closely connected to her citizens as “the people’s mayor.”

Dalia Ofer

Dalia Ofer is an Israeli historian whose work mainly focuses on women’s experiences in the Holocaust and collective memory of the Holocaust in Israeli society. Ofer has published a multitude of books and articles on these topics during her career, and she has held positions at many prestigious universities around the world including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Old Yishuv, People Praying at the Western Wall

Old Yishuv: Palestine at the End of the Ottoman Period

Women of the Old Yishuv saw their immigration to the Holy Land as serving spiritual sanctification at the expense of material suffering. Jewish women lived restricted lives as the result of child marriage, high infant mortality rates, and being confined to the domestic sphere in the Old Yishuv.

Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen was an American-Jewish author, professor, feminist, and social activist whose powerful fiction about the lives of the working poor, women, and minorities have shaped the development of the American literary cannon. Tillie Olsen’s own struggles to combine writing with working and raising a family spurred her to recover the writing of other silenced women writers, revolutionizing the study of women’s literature.

Julie Wise Oreck

Both before Hurricane Katrina and during the long process of rebuilding New Orleans, Julie Wise Oreck has struck a balance between leading national Jewish institutions and focusing on organizations closer to home.

Margalit Ornstein

Choreographer and dance teacher Margalit Ornstein is perceived as the “founding mother” of Israeli dance and a pioneer of modern dance in Erez Israel. In 1922, she founded the first Israeli dance school in Tel Aviv and helped create two important dance theaters in the 1920s.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Politics and Government