Feminism

Henriette Goldschmidt

At a time when women were banned from universities, Henriette Benas Goldschmidt championed women’s education as a crucial building block of a healthy society. She co-founded the General Association of German Women in 1865 and served on the association’s board until 1906, advocating women’s education for the betterment of society. In 1911 she created her crowning achievement, the Leipzig College for Women, Germany’s first women’s college.

Doris Bauman Gold

Doris Bauman Gold was motivated by her long participation in Jewish organizational life to found Biblio Press, dedicated to educating Jewish women about their own history and accomplishments. Through Biblio Press, Gold published more than 27 general audience books that address and illuminate the culture, history, experiences, and spiritual yearnings of Jewish women.

Germany: 1750-1945

The Jewish Reform movement did not liberate women from their subordinate religious status, and the nineteenth-century bourgeois German family ideal with its rigid gender roles soon eclipsed the fluid structure of premodern Jewish families. Jewish women were expected to transmit German bourgeois values while also shaping their children’s Jewish identity.

Laura Geller

One of the first American women rabbis, Laura Geller has repeatedly challenged exclusions and shown that women’s leadership could bring a different, more meaningful, experience of Judaism. As a leader at the University of Southern California Hillel, the American Jewish Congress, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, and ChaiVillageLA, Geller showed the emerging possibilities of women’s leadership.

Henriette Fürth

Despite facing ongoing anti-Semitism, journalist Henriette Katzenstein Fürth remained a passionate and vocal German patriot throughout her life. She began publishing articles on social criticism while raising eight children, eventually writing 200 articles and 30 monographs, earning both an income and a reputation for insightful journalism. She served on the Frankfurt municipal council and in 1932 she was honored by the city of Frankfurt for her 70th birthday.

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan was the author of a pathbreaking feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, which sold millions of copies and helped to provoke a feminist movement in the United States. She was an activist and writer who hoped to improve women’s lives by co-founding the National Organization for Women and other women’s political groups. Her many books focused on women’s rights, the women’s movement, and aging.

Ida Weis Friend

Ida Weis Friend worked to improve the lives of those in her Southern Jewish community on many levels. Her leadership in Jewish organizations, such as Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women, and her political activism, such as her time as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and Commission on Interracial Cooperation, earned her many honors and accolades.

Ellen Frankel

A pioneering feminist leader in business and the arts, Ellen Frankel served as the first woman CEO of the Jewish Publication Society. She is the author of several books including The Classic Tales: Four Thousand Years of Jewish Lore (1989) and The Five Books of Miriam (1996), a retelling and woman’s commentary on the Five Books of Moses, and has written several librettos,.

Käte Frankenthal

A stubborn nonconformist from an early age, Käte Frankenthal was a physician and politician active in Germany’s Social Democratic Party. While running her own successful private practice, she was active in sex reform legislation and played a prominent role in the Federation of Women Physicians.

Henrietta Franklin

Henrietta Franklin (née Montagu) was a leading British educationist and suffragist and a supporter the Liberal Judaism movement, pioneered by her sister Lily Montagu.

Eugénie Foa

Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) was, to our knowledge, the first Jewish woman to support herself professionally as a writer. Based in Paris, she wrote in French and was active in circles of French women writers who advocated for greater recognition. She wrote novels and newspaper articles on a variety of topics, including stories about Jews but also on fashion and the lives of saints. She is best remembered for her children’s books.

Shulamith Firestone

Shulamith Firestone was one of the founders of radical feminism in the United States. At age 25, she published The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which brought together the dialectical materialism of Marx and the psychoanalytic insights of Freud in an effort to develop an analysis of women’s oppression that was inclusive of the dimensions of class and race.

Doris Fleischman

Doris Fleischman made history as the first American married woman issued a passport under her own name. Her prolific writing career and public feminism brought her national recognition.

Filmmakers, Israeli

Israeli filmmaking is a national cultural expression, and female Israeli directors have become major contributors to that expression. In their films, these directors deal with personal relationships and family conflicts, religious and professional issues, and the effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants.

Feminism in the United States

Jewish women participated in and propelled all aspects of the women's rights movement, from suffrage in the nineteenth century to women's liberation in the twentieth. Despite occasional instances of antisemitism in the general feminist movement, Jewish women were passionate advocates of feminist goals.

Feminist Theology

Jewish feminist theology focuses on central Jewish categories, themes, and modes of expression—for example, God, prayer, Torah, and halakhah—and asks who created them and whose interests they reflect. It raises meta-questions about Jewish tradition.

Ariel Sharon and Michal Modai, December 10, 2001

Feminism in Contemporary Israel

The first Israeli radical women’s movement was established in 1972. The 1973 Yom Kippur War then created an awareness of the meaning of the gendered role division between men and women, and soon after the war, a choir of voices, organizations, and movements began to fight for feminist causes. In the twenty-first century, the feminist landscape expanded, but the feminist field remained highly divided.

Sara Rivka Feder-Keyfitz

A childhood friend of Golda Meir, Sara Feder-Keyfitz grew up to be a significant Zionist and feminist leader in her own right. From 1951 to 1955, she served as the national president of Pioneer Women

Ruth Fainlight

Writer and poet Ruth Fainlight’s work interweaves feminism and elements of Judaism, often using biblical imagery and reflecting on her own Jewish identity and the Holocaust.

Marcia Falk

Marcia Falk is a poet, translator, and liturgist whose knowledge of the Bible and of Hebrew and English literature informs the feminist spiritual vision of her work. She is widely considered one of the foremothers of, and foremost contributors to, the Jewish feminist movement.

Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs

The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs, or ELF, was a women's group inspired by the humanistic spirit of poet Emma Lazarus. The clubs worked through education and outreach to promote a progressive, secular Jewish heritage, as well as causes such as women's rights and the elimination of antisemitism and racism.

Andrea Dworkin

A lightning rod for controversy, American feminist Andrea Dworkin denounced violence against women, advocated women’s self-defense, and drafted groundbreaking legislation claiming that pornography violated women’s civil rights. In 1974, Dworkin and Ricki Abrams co-wrote Woman Hating in which they charged that pornography incited violence towards women and that consensual sex subjugated women.

Ruth Dreifuss

Ruth Dreifuss was the first Jewish member of the Federal Government of Switzerland and the first female President of the country. When she became President of the Confederation in 1999, she was the first Jew and the first woman to hold the office.

Dorothy Dinnerstein

Dorothy Dinnerstein earned her place as a major feminist thinker with her groundbreaking 1976 book The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. In her later work, she shifted her focus to ecology and nuclear disarmament.

Barbara Dobkin

Barbara Berman Dobkin is the pre-eminent Jewish feminist philanthropist of the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Her vision, dedication, and philanthropic generosity have transformed the landscape of Jewish women’s organizations and funding in both North America and Israel.

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