Non-Fiction

Content type
Collection

Eugenie Schwarzwald

Eugenie Schwarzwald was progressive educator who imprinted her charismatic personality on the education, social work, and literary heritage of Vienna during the first half of the twentieth century. She directed the Schwarzwald schools and raised the flag for equal education for girls.

Michèle Sarde

Writer Michèle Sarde’s biographies, novels, and essays cover a wide range of themes and issues, including female literary figures, women’s equality, and the trauma of war persecutions through the lens of both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. She has received many awards for her work and taught at Georgetown University for over 30 years.

Nathalie Sarraute

Writer and lawyer Nathalie Sarraute was an innovative figure in post-World War II French literature. No longer allowed to practice law during the German occupation of France, she posed as the governess of her three daughters to hide her Jewish identity. Sarraute’s many novels and plays are characterized by an “inwardness” and an unusual lack of characters, names, and plot.

Rachel Salamander

Rachel Salamander is a writer, scholar, editor, and publisher. Born in 1949 in a DP camp in Germany, she has written and published multiple works about German Jewry and DP camps after World War II. In 1982, Salamander established the Literaturhandlung in Munich, a prominent bookshop and meeting place specializing in Jewish literature.

Eva Salber

Using the lessons she learned as a doctor in South Africa, Eva Salber worked with poor populations in Massachusetts and North Carolina to improve public health and empower community leaders. Salber also published three books that sharing her intimate knowledge of the various communities she helped.

Vera Cooper Rubin

Through her groundbreaking research, astronomer Vera Cooper Rubin forever changed our fundamental view of the cosmos, from a universe dominated by starlight to one dominated by dark matter. Among her many accomplishments, she received the Presidential National Medal of Science in 1993 and mentored many astronomers, saying she would always be “available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers.”

Dame Miriam Rothschild

Dame Miriam Rothschild was a renowned British natural scientist who published over 300 scientific papers throughout her lifetime, making groundbreaking contributions to the fields of entomology, zoology, marine biology, and wildlife conservationism. In 1985 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and credited for her work in the histology, morphology, and taxonomy of fleas.

Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman

Esther Rosenthal-Shneiderman was a Soviet-Yiddish educator, journalist, writer, and memoirist. Her books concentrate on personalities and events in the Soviet Union’s Jewish Autonomous Oblast, Birobidzhan, providing insightful portrayals of Soviet Yiddish cultural history, its Soviet state-sponsored development, and its total liquidation.

Chava Rosenfarb

Chava Rosenfarb, a major Yiddish novelist of the second half of the twentieth century, is one of the few Holocaust survivors who transmuted their experiences into fiction rather than memoirs or reminiscences.

Norma Rosen

Born in Brooklyn in 1925 to secular and assimilated parents, Norma Rosen was an American-Jewish novelist, essayist, educator, editor, and professor. Rosen’s exploration of Jewish history and religion in her writings contributed to questions surrounding Jewish theology and Jewish feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.

Sophia Moses Robison

Sophia Moses Robison discovered her passion for social advocacy in college. Active in the National Council of Jewish Women throughout her life, Robison was also a published researcher and studied the economic impact of arriving refugees after World War II for the federal government. Her explorations into youth delinquency demonstrated the class and social biases in the reporting of delinquency.

Colette Roberts

Colette Roberts devoted her life to increasing people’s understanding and appreciation of modern art. The success she earned as a gallery director, art critic, and educator influenced the art world of the mid-twentieth century in New York and Paris and throughout the world.

Eva Gabriele Reichmann

Born in Silesia, Eva Gabriele Reichmann studied economics in Germany and, after fleeing the Nazis, in London. A prolific writer, especially after her retirement in 1959, Reichmann focused mainly on Judaism and the social history of German Jewry. She was awarded several medals for her contributions to democracy, freedom, and tolerance and died at the age of 101.

Flora Sophia Clementina Randegger -Friedenberg

Born in Italy in 1825, Flora Sophia Clementina Randegger-Friedenberg was a persistent educator and writer. She is best known for the publication of her Jerusalem journal, which shared her extraordinary experiences in a way that combined messianic hope and the enlightenment ideals of knowledge and progress.

Frances Raday

Frances Raday’s career as a leading human rights advocate, feminist academic, and litigator evolved on no less than three continents: starting in England, passing through Africa, and finally settling in Israel.

Psychology in the United States

Although Jewish women in psychology generally deemphasized their Jewish identities in favor of identifying their work with scientific objectivity and universal human paradigms, they have been well represented in the field as theorists, researchers, and pioneers. They have made their most important contributions in two areas—clinical psychology and the social psychology of intergroup relations, especially as it involves groups marginalized in our society.

Hortense Powdermaker

Hortense Powdermaker explored the balance of involvement and detachment necessary for participant-observer fieldwork in cultural anthropology, stressing the ability to “step in and out of society.” Her secular Jewish identity was apparently a factor in learning this skill, exemplified in an academic career that included thirty years of college teaching and the writing of five major books based on widely diverse fieldwork studies.

Sylvia Field Porter

The first woman on the financial desk of a big-city newspaper and the first woman to break into the world of writing about finance, Sylvia Field Porter was a pioneering economist, columnist, and best-selling author. For over half a century, she educated the American consumer about money matters, empowering women to achieve economic independence.

Anna Sophia Polak

Anna Polak was an important figure in the Dutch women’s movement in the early twentieth-century, who served as director of the National Bureau of Women’s Labor in The Hague for 28 years. Her controversial views on the importance of involving women in the working world led to her international recognition; she was beloved and admired by many.

Harriet Fleischl Pilpel

Harriet Fleischl Pilpel was a prominent participant and strategist in women’s rights, birth control, and reproductive freedom litigation for over half a century.

Clara Asscher Pinkhof

Clara Asscher Pinkhof dedicated her life and work to helping and advocating for Jewish children, initially as a teacher and later as an author. She is most known for her accounts of the experiences of Jewish children during the Nazi occupation.

Marion Phillips

As Chief Women’s Officer of the Labour Party, Marion Phillips was one of the most important figures in the campaign to free women from domestic drudgery at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her work brought a quarter of a million women into the Labour Party.

Helen Harris Perlman

With almost seventy years as a social work practitioner, supervisor, teacher, consultant, and author to her credit, Helen Harris Perlman was a legend in her field. She pioneered the “Chicago School” of social work, arguing that many people in crisis needed short-term therapy and solutions rather than long-term Freudian analysis.

Jessica Blanche Peixotto

Jessica Blanche Peixotto defied convention and her family to become a respected authority in the field of economics. Through her education, professorship, and departmental leadership at the University of California at Berkeley, she broke down barriers for women in education.

Ruth Peggy Sophie Parnass

Born in Germany, Ruth Peggy Sophie Parnass was sent to Sweden to escape the Nazis. Parnass became a journalist, actress, court reporter, feminist activist, and writer. Parnass combines her private and public lives in her writing, whether on her childhood under Nazi rule in Hamburg and as an exile in Sweden, on women's issues, or on political matters.

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