Encyclopedia Categories | Jewish Women's Archive

Miriam Schapiro

Miriam Schapiro helped pioneer the feminist art movement, both through her own pushing of creative boundaries and by creating opportunities for other women artists. Starting in 1970, Schapiro raised women’s consciousness through her writing, painting, printmaking, teaching and sculpture. She lectured extensively on feminist issues to professional conferences, university audiences, art classes and women’s groups.

Therese Schlesinger-Eckstein

Therese Schlesinger’s life was characterized by her lifelong passion for learning and her endeavor to improve the plight of working-class women. She was a dedicated feminist who was inspired by the ideals of socialism, struggling to combine both of these political passions within the Austrian Social Democratic Party.

Susan Weidman Schneider

Author and editor Susan Weidman Schneider has agitated for feminist progress in the Jewish community, as an activist and then as a founder and editor-in-chief of Lilith magazine. She has helped galvanize change with her writings on Jewish women’s leadership; domestic abuse; Orthodoxy and feminism; ordination of women; LGBTQ issues; the treatment of converts to Judaism, and more.

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.

Ottilie Schönewald

Deeply involved in several women’s and Jewish organizations, Ottilie Schönewald was an activist who became a politician to advance her causes. She worked with the League of Jewish Women and helped Jews emigrate from Nazi Germany. After Schönewald and her family fled in 1939, she continued her social work during and after the war.

Felice Nierenberg Schwartz

Recognizing the hurdles that can stop women from achieving, Felice Nierenberg Schwartz founded Catalyst, an organization to help women with children enter the workforce, created a national network of resource centers and programs to enable women to work part time, and advocated for working mothers in her widely published writing.

Rosika Schwimmer

Rosika Schwimmer earned a reputation as a leading proponent of women’s rights in Hungary before the age of 30. She remained devoted to the causes of feminism and pacificism throughout her life, despite the many obstacles that challenged her commitment to the goals of world peace and equality.

Sally Gross standing in the middle of a sidewalk, with the caption "Every day it's a new story"

Jewish Women in Screendance

Jewish women made overwhelming contributions to the creation of the field of Screendance. Maya Deren, Amy Greenfield, Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, and others have created a legacy of socially conscious dance for the screen that collectively exhibits and performs principles of Jewish ritual and practice. Many of these artists share a focus on social justice and a collective approach to what might be called a feminist Jewish art form.

Barbara Seaman

Muckraking journalist Barbara Seaman survived a tumultuous childhood in New York City to become a bestselling author, a prominent second wave feminist, and, as a founder of the women’s health movement, an architect of informed consent. A lifelong scourge to the pharmaceutical industry, Seaman exposed the dangers of the high-dose birth control pill, hormone replacement therapy, and male doctors’ hubris.

A pink-patterned cover with the title and author, and two illustrations of women's faces. The first features a woman with gray hair in a bun, plain glasses, and gold earrings. The second shows a woman with blonde hair in a curly bob, glasses with colorful wing-shaped frames, hoop earrings, and a cigarette.

Sylvia Bernstein Seaman

“I’m still capable of marching. I marched sixty years ago. I just hope my granddaughter doesn’t have to march into the next century.” Sylvia Bernstein Seaman was a pioneering feminist of the twentieth century who broke the silence around breast cancer through her frank writing.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi

Israel Prize Laureate Professor Alice Shalvi was a leading Israeli feminist activist and scholar. Founder of the Israel Women’s Network and the Ben Gurion University English Department and longtime principal of the iconic religious feminist high school Pelech, Professor Shalvi was instrumental in advancing gender issues in Israeli education, society and politics.

Lynn Sherr

Believing that the stories of strong women needed to be remembered and honored, reporter Lynn Sherr covered women’s issues as a journalist and brought the story of Susan B. Anthony to a new generation.

Vicki Shiran

Vicki Shiran was an Egyptian-born Israeli social activist dedicated to feminism, anti-occupation activism, and fighting discrimination against Mizrahim in Israel, all of which she viewed as interconnected. In 1999 she helped found Ahoti, For Women in Israel, which promoted the labor rights of lower-class women in Israel, and in 1981 she led a fierce fight against the Israel Broadcasting Authority for its exclusion of Mizrahim in its telling of the history of the Israeli state.

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.

Sarah Silverman

Sarah Silverman is an American stand-up comedian, writer, and actor known for her sharp, detached stage persona and boundary-pushing material that often deals with themes of Jewish identity.

Kate Simon

Kate Simon wrote numerous books, including a series of guidebooks for Meridian Books. It was her raw, honest account of her life in her three-volume memoir, however, that was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “a classic of autobiography.”

Jo Sinclair

Jo Sinclair was an American-Jewish novelist whose works explored the repercussions of oppression in many forms: self-denial and self-destruction, antisemitism and Jewish self-hatred, repression of women’s sexual energy and sexual orientation, racism and the internalization of prejudice, poverty, and other forms of marginalization. Her work looked to self-knowledge as a means of emerging from one’s internalized ghetto.

Virginia Snitow

Virginia Levitt Snitow was a multifaceted woman who was a teacher, political activist, pre-Second Wave feminist, poet, writer and founder of US/Israel Women to Women. Ahead of her time in the fight for both civil and women’s rights, Snitow was unafraid to take unpopular stances when fighting for others.

Joan Snyder

Joan Snyder is an accomplished painter whose works are strongly associated with the 1970s feminist movement and deal with topics such as nature and fertility, AIDS, the exploitation of women and children, and her own Jewish heritage and the Holocaust. Her paintings have received awards and are included in the permanent collections of many museums.

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.

Sociology in the United States

Jews have made a disproportionate contribution to the field of sociology, despite discrimination and exclusion. Because sociologists are not identified by religion, it is difficult to know which American women sociologists are Jewish. Therefore, the first challenge in understanding the contribution and experience of American Jewish women sociologists is to identify them.

Judith Solis-Cohen

Judith Solis-Cohen had a prolific literary career that covered a wide range of topics, from clothing to education to women’s suffrage. She was also active in Philadelphia’s Jewish intellectual circles and introduced Jewish literature to the blind.

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit’s experiences of sexism became the inspiration for both her 2014 book Men Explain Things to Me and the popular term “mansplaining.”

Rivka Solomon

Despite Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Rivka Solomon has used her skills as a writer and activist to bring attention to women’s stories of courage.

Joey Soloway

Activist, director, and creator of groundbreaking and critically acclaimed series such as Transparent, I Love Dick, and others (and writer for series such as Six Feet Under and United States of Tara), Joey Soloway (previously known as Jill) is also a social activist, considered one of the strongest advocates for women, queer, and nonbinary identities in Hollywood. Soloway identifies as nonbinary, and Judaism, feminism, and modern Jewish culture are resonant themes in their work.

Sharing Stories
Inspiring Change

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Activism: Feminism