Non-Fiction

Content type
Collection

Bracha Habas

Bracha Habas was an educator and one of the first professional women journalists in Erez Israel. She was a member of Davar’s editorial board and the co-founder of its children’s newspaper, Davar le-Yeladim. Enumerating on Habas’s 48 publications, Rahel Adir described her as “the recorder of Yishuv history.”

Sophie Von Grotthuss

Born in Berlin, Sophie von Grotthuss grew up with a mother who resented her Judaism and who married her off at fifteen into an unhappy relationship. In her later years she became a prolific author, but only a few of her works, including a story and a play, have survived.

Ruth Gruber

Reporter and writer Ruth Gruber dedicated her life to rescuing and covering the stories of suffering Jews worldwide. She made history as the youngest PhD in the world, escorted European refugees on a secret mission to America, and famously reported on the crisis of the Exodus 1947 and the foundation of Israel.

Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg

As director of the Child Study Association of America, Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg blended the best research on child development and her own experience as a mother of four, publishing numerous books and articles on parenting. She was a leader and publicist in the parent education movement and an authority in the field of child study.

Vivian Gornick

Vivian Gornick is an American essayist, memoirist, and noted second-wave feminist. She is known for bringing a personal lens to political and critical writing.

Michal Govrin

Michal Govrin, born in 1950 is an Israeli poet, writer, and stage director. She takes a highly individualized perspective on Israeli-Jewish post-Holocaust reality by combining artistic experimentation with Biblical and Rabbinic sources and philosophical discourse. In her poetry, prose and essays she examines places and spaces within a polyphonic context of architecture, art and theater, the sanctity of land, and the national narrative.

Dorothy Lerner Gordon

Dorothy Lerner Gordon—musician, broadcaster, author—dedicated her talents to the entertainment and education of children and young people. Throughout her career, she created radio programming to give children access to literature, music, and current events.

Luba Robin Goldsmith

In 1902, Luba Robin was the first woman to graduate from the school of medicine at the Western University of Pittsburgh (later the University of Pittsburgh). Her career combined private medical practice, teaching, writing, lecturing, and active participation in educational, social, and public health work.

Rose (Berman) Goldstein

An early advocate of increased rights and responsibilities for women in Jewish life, Rose Goldstein was a prominent leader in the National Women’s League of the United Synagogue of America. She published a book detailing her relationship between scripture and her own self-understanding in 1972.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was a potent voice of anarchism in North America and Europe in the early twentieth century, and her controversial beliefs made her many powerful enemies. Yet even after enduring many contentious interactions with law enforcement, Goldman continued to speak, write, and teach on freedom and individual rights, inspiring her followers to question authority at every turn.

Josephine Clara Goldmark

Josephine Goldmark laid the groundwork for transforming American labor laws by amassing data that forced lawmakers to confront the painful realities of factory work. At the National Consumers’ League, she compiled data on working conditions, wrote articles, led campaigns for legislative reform, and recruited her brother-in-law, Louis D. Brandeis, to argue for those reforms in court.

Eleanor Glueck

For half a century, Eleanor Glueck worked with her husband, a professor of criminology at Harvard Law School, to produce studies of juvenile delinquency and adult crime. In addition to statistical modeling of crime, they did follow-up studies to understand the roots of criminal behavior.

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.

Esther Schiff Goldfrank

Although she never earned a degree in anthropology or taught a class, Esther Schiff Goldfrank made significant contributions to the field through her studies of communities as disparate as Pueblo Indians and New Yorkers.

Nora Glickman

Argentine-born Nora Glickman is a prolific dramatist and short story and non-fiction writer, translator, editor, and professor of Latin American literature.

Élisabeth Gille

Élisabeth Gille (1937-1996) was a French author known most of all for biography of her mother, best-selling novelist Irène Némirovsky, murdered at Auschwitz. It was written borrowing Némirovsky’s voice, narrated in the first person as “dreamt memoirs.”

Carol Gilligan

The pioneering work of American psychologist Carol Gilligan changed the way the field of psychology studied women and, arguably, the way society views women. Challenging mainstream psychology through her interrogation of the accepted benchmarks of moral and personal development, she proposed that women and men have different moral criteria and follow different paths in maturation.

Ruth Gay

Through her writing, Ruth Glazer Gay captured an engaging view of the Jewish community, both past and present. As a writer, journalist, and archivist, she demonstrated throughout her life the possibility of having an intellectually vibrant career while still accommodating marriage and motherhood.

Abraham Geiger

Abraham Geiger (1810-1874) was one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the nineteenth century. He was one of the major intellectual leaders and founders of the Reform movement in Germany and a strong supporter of Jews entering European society. As part of his vision of Judaism, he argued for a Judaism oriented around the home and domestic life, but also a Judaism that both elevated and sidelined the women that had long created that domestic life.

Elisabeth Rozetta Geleerd

Elizabeth Rozetta Geleerd’s work on extreme psychological conditions such as amnesia and schizophrenia led to new methods for treating seriously disturbed children and adolescents. Along with opening her own private practice, Geleerd became a training analyst and a member of the educational committee of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and helped shape its child and adolescent analysis program.

Mamie Gamoran

Mamie Goldsmith Gamoran combated assimilation in America by writing children’s books on Jewish history and holidays that encouraged children to feel proud of their dual identities as Jews and Americans. Gamoran served as a volunteer for Hadassah and as both a national board member and vice president of Histadrut Ivriot of America, an organization that promoted the Hebrew language.

Evelyn Garfiel

Evelyn Garfiel’s Jewish scholarship on topics like the prayer book and the Hebrew language helped make Jewish study accessible to the broader public. She served on the boards of several Jewish women’s organizations and published a book in 1957 that explored the prayer book and explained the origins and purpose of different prayers.

Ruth Gavison

Ruth Gavison was an Israeli human rights expert and law professor. In addition to her academic work as a lecturer and researcher and her work in social organizations, Gavison has also been a member of various committees. Her work has been amply recognized and awarded.

Norma Fields Furst

Higher education was not merely a family priority for Norma Fields Furst; it also became her professional focus. Furst used her positions of authority at different colleges and universities to garner support for civil rights and gender equality within academia.

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal

Miriam Freund-Rosenthal brought her passion for art and history to her leadership of Hadassah. Among other leadership positions, she served as the national president from 1956 to 1960.

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