Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Lorna Lippmann

Lorna Lippmann (1921-2004) was an Australian researcher and educator who devoted much of her life to the promotion of Aboriginal rights. She was an activist, academic researcher, author, government advisor, and community relations practitioner. Aboriginal leaders praised her pioneering contributions.

Sally Mack

Sally Mack raised her children with a belief in nonviolent activism, and they in turn led her to join their protest of nuclear weapons.

Jeanne and Morty Manford, New York City, 1972

Jeanne Manford

In 1973 Jeanne Manford’s fierce love for her gay son in the face of national condemnation of homosexuality led her to create a support network for other families, Parents of Gays, later known as PFLAG.

Adah Isaacs Menken

In her short but remarkable life, actress Adah Isaacs Menken became legendary for her scandalous defiance of convention. One of the most glamorous celebrities of the 1860s, Menken also cultivated a literary following. She wrote poetry and developed relationships with Walt Whitman and Charles Dickens, among others.

Goapele

Determined to have fuller control over her burgeoning music career, R&B singer Goapele Mohlabane formed her own independent music label, Skyblaze Recordings, in 2001.

Robin Morgan

Poet, activist, journalist, and feminist leader Robin Morgan has dedicated her life to addressing women’s oppression globally and fighting for systemic social, economic, and political change. She has published more than twenty books, including poetry, essays, fiction and non-fiction work; her writings, especially her Sisterhood anthologies, remain central feminist canon and foundational texts and references for feminist thought.

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.

Bertha Pappenheim

Bertha Pappenheim was the founder of the Jewish feminist movement in Germany. In 1904, she founded the League of Jewish Women. Pappenheim believed that male-led Jewish social service societies underestimated the value of women’s work and insisted on a woman’s movement that was equal to and entirely independent of men’s organizations.

Peace Movement in the United States

Throughout the twentieth century, Jewish women played a major role in American peace organizations and movements. Jewish women have also been in prominent roles advocating for peace between Israel and Palestine, both in the Knesset and with private organizations.

Peace Movements in Israel

Though Israel has been involved in a state of protracted conflict and in a cycle of wars since well before its establishment in 1948, a massive peace movement emerged only in 1978. Throughout the years, the various Israeli peace movements and organizations have focused on anti-militarism and electoral politics, as well as on broader cultural shifts within Israeli society.

Pauline Podbrey

Pauline Podbrey was a committed Communist and anti-Apartheid activist. A Lithuanian child migrant to South Africa, she moved away from her Jewish roots and endured exile as a result of her mixed-race marriage, only to become disillusioned with Communism.

Lilly Rivlin

Lilly Rivlin is a documentary filmmaker whose films are centered around feminism, the Arab-Israeli peace process, Jewishness, and her family relationships. Rivlin’s films The Tribe (1984), Miriam’s Daughters Now (1986), and Gimme a Kiss (2000), all of which explore Jewishness and family, are among her best.

Sonja Schlesin

Sonja Schlesin was one of Gandhi's most trusted and important associates during the period when he was a young lawyer in South Africa. She rose from becoming his secretary in 1906 to playing a major role in the large nonviolent demonstrations and protest marches of 1913, which he organized on behalf of the immigrant Indian community.

Rose Schneiderman

For nearly half a century, Rose Schneiderman worked tirelessly to improve wages, hours, and safety standards for American working women. She saw those things as “bread,” the very basic human rights to which working women were entitled. But she also worked for such “roses” as schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks for trade union women, because she believed that working women deserved much more than a grim subsistence.

Evelyne Serfaty

Evelyne Serfaty was one of the most active women in the Moroccan Communist Party. Through her activities with the party, she militated for Moroccan independence from French and Spanish colonial rule. She was kidnapped and tortured for her brother’s political activities in the early 1970s under Morocco’s post-independence authoritarian state.

Stav Shaffir

Stav Shaffir was a fierce critic of economic inequality even before becoming the youngest woman ever elected to the Israeli Knesset at age 27.

Clara Lemlich in a Shirtwaist, circa 1910

Clara Lemlich Shavelson

Clara Lemlich Shavelson pushed union leaders to recognize the importance of women in the labor movement and sparked the famous Uprising of the 20,000 garment workers strike in 1909. She continued her activism throughout her life, organizing around women’s suffrage and leading food boycotts and rent strikes.

Alix Kates Shulman

Alix Kates Shulman is a radical feminist writer and activist and a leader in the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s through 1980s. She is best known as the author of “The Marriage Agreement” (1970) and the best-selling Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), which was heralded as the “first important novel of the Women’s Liberation movement.” She was honored with a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism in 2018.

Socialism in the United States

Disproportionate numbers of Jewish immigrant women in America were associated with socialism in the first decades of the twentieth century. Their ideological commitment was expressed mainly in activism in left-leaning garment workers' unions. Their radicalism grew out of the same sources as male radicalism (changes experienced in late 19th century Europe and America, including proletarianization and secularization), but Jewish working women's radical consciousness and collective action emerged in the face of additional and different obstacles.

Triangle Factory Fire in the Oklahoma State Capital, March 26, 1911

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

On March 25, 1911, a fire erupted at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York, resulting in 146 deaths and many injuries, most of them young, recently immigrated Jewish women. To the Jewish community, the unprecedented scope of the tragedy and its horrors were evocative of the pogroms that had been to date the greatest disaster to befall Jewry in modern times.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Activism: Protests