Religion
Marion Hartog
Marion Hartog and her sister Celia published influential poetry and books on Jewish themes, including works that were among the first fictions ever published by Jewish women anywhere in the world. Hartog later created and edited the first Jewish women’s periodical in history, The Jewish Sabbath Journal.
Hasidic Hebrew Fiction: Portrayal of Women
Hundreds of compilations of Hasidic literature, a genre derived from oral traditions, were published in Eastern Europe between the start of the nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II. The image of “woman” varies in Hasidic literature according to the character in the story, its narrator, and its setting in time and place; therefore we can only refer to individual women, each on her own, and not to woman in general or women as a gender.
Hasidic Women in the United States
Hasidism
Haskalah Attitudes Toward Women
Just as the many well-known thinkers of the Enlightenment debated the proper role of women in society, so did the maskilim, the men of intellect who burst upon Ashkenazi Jewish society in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolution known as Haskalah. Dominated by men, the movement critiqued Jewish tradition and encouraged modernity among Jews, but simultaneously met Jewish women’s pursuit of modernity with ambivalence.
Judith Hauptman
The first woman to receive a PhD in Talmud, Judith Hauptman has made significant contributions to the academic study of the origins and development of the works of the “canon” of rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity. A second prominent focus of both Hauptman’s scholarly and other work has been Jewish feminism and the status of women in rabbinic and related literature, particularly exemplified in her best-known work, Rereading the Rabbis: A Woman’s Voice.
Rivka Haut
Hebrew Drama: Representation of Women
Hebrew Teachers Colleges in the United States
Jewish education in the United States was always the preserve of women on the “front lines” and in the classroom. In the early days of these programs, men “ran the show,” but beginning in the mid-twenteith century, women began to take on increasing roles as faculty members and administrators. In the early twenty-first century, women ascended to leadership positions in these institutions.
Hebrew Women in Egypt: Bible
Hebrew women in Egypt are critical figures in the Bible, especially concerning their maternal and physically nurturing roles. Hebrew midwives help male babies escape the infanticide commanded by the Pharaoh, and another woman helps save baby Moses’ life. These stories show how women were able to undermine the Pharaonic authority and ensure the survival of the Hebrew people in general.
Hebrew Women in Egypt: Midrash and Aggadah
The Rabbis famously maintain that the Israelites were redeemed from Egypt by merit of the righteous women of that generation, who strove mightily to continue to bring forth children, regardless of the grueling servitude and despite Pharaoh’s decree that the male children be killed.
Hebrew Women in the Wilderness: Midrash and Aggadah
The Rabbis portray the women of the generation that wandered in the wilderness as righteous, not caught up in the sins that swept the men of Israel.
Adele Bluthenthal Heiman
Hattie Leah Henenberg
Hattie Leah Henenberg was a pioneering female jurist in Texas. In 1925, she became a member of the first all-female state Supreme Court.
Bertha Beitman Herzog
Bertha Beitman Herzog was an active participant in local and national women’s associations in Cleveland, Ohio. From 1928 to 1930, Herzog served as the first woman president of the Jewish Welfare Federation (later the Jewish Community Federation) in Cleveland, and she received the Charles Eisenmann Award for outstanding community service in 1941.
Higher Education Administration in the United States
Gertrude Hirschler
A celebrated translator of deft skill and a woman of great principle, Gertrude Hirschler refused to translate, edit, or publish any book that did not mesh with her ideals or beliefs. Hirschler’s literary contributions are highly regarded in the areas of Jewish history, the Holocaust, religious literature, and Zionism.
Fanny Binswanger Hoffman
Leah Horowitz
Delphine Horvilleur
Huldah, the Prophet: Midrash and Aggadah
Huldah is one of the seven women prophets. The rabbis explain that she was a descendant of Rahab and Joshua, and that she prophesied along with Jeremiah in the time of King Josiah.
Huldah: Bible
Sara Hurwitz
Sara Hurwitz was the first Orthodox woman to be publicly ordained and serve in an Orthodox synagogue, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. She went on to co-found, with Rabbi Avi Weiss, Yeshivat Maharat, the first institution to provide a credentialed pathway for Orthodox women to be ordained and serve as rabbis.
Iggeret Ha-Kodesh
The Iggeret ha-Kodesh is a Kabbalistic work with contested authorship, written in the second half of the twelfth century. The work is a kabbalistic interpretation of sexual relations and its sacred spirituality between a married couple.
