Non-Fiction

Content type
Collection

Australia: 1788 to the Present

The first Jewish women, like the first Jewish men, arrived in Australia on the very first day of European settlement in 1788. Those convict pioneers were followed by free settlers who made Jewish communal and congregational life viable and helped to develop the vast continent. Jewish women have made significant contributions to Australia's national story.

Dora Askowith

Dora Askowith, author, historian, and college educator, believed that a knowledge of Jewish women’s history would serve as a catalyst for organization, activism, and moral leadership. She taught women at Hunter College for a total of forty-five years and wrote that she was anxious to teach college students Jewish history because they were “poorly versed in the history of their own faith.”

Artists: Russia and the Soviet Union

Jewish women participated in the artistic life of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union for over a hundred years. Jewish women artists worked in all styles, from the routine academic to the extreme avant-garde. There were also well-known art patrons, gallery owners, art historians, and art critics.

Margaret Gene Arnstein

Margaret Gene Arnstein was a principal architect of the American nursing profession. Her belief that nurses should be involved in health policy and research helped transform her profession. Renowned for her work in public health, Arnstein also advanced nursing education and research.

Adrien Arpel

Adrien Arpel is a pioneering entrepreneur who has been highly successful in the skincare industry. She realized there was a need in the cosmetics marketplace for a business that would educate the consumer. Arpel was the president and CEO of Adrien Arpel, Inc., an enterprise with approximately 500 salons across the United States and Canada.

Hannah Arendt

Brilliant and controversial, Hannah Arendt was a German-trained political theorist whose books exerted a major impact on political theory in North America and Europe. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) made her an intellectual celebrity in the early years of the Cold War. She was the first woman to become a full professor at Princeton University.

Ruth Nanda Anshen

Ruth Nanda Anshen, twentieth-century philosopher, lecturer, and author, was an “intellectual instigator” for such writers of genius and eminent thinkers as physicist Albert Einstein, scientist Jonas Salk, and others. Anshen created connections between the great thinkers of different fields, offering them opportunities to explain their work to each other and the general public.

Mary Antin

With the publication of the memoir The Promised Land in 1912, the first bestseller written by and about an American Jew, the Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin celebrated America’s open door and boundless opportunities. Although the book’s reputation has waxed and waned over time, it has remained in print for more than a century.

Anglo-Jewish Writers in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Anglo-Jewish women writers have been active creators within the British literary arena since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of a number of Jewish female voices, although it was not until the 1990s that the works of Jewish women writers began to be recognized as part of the British literary canon. Anglo-Jewish women writers’ multifaceted perspectives are reflected in a literary production characterized by experimentation and fragmentation.

Ziva Amishai-Maisels

Ziva Amishai-Maisels is an Israeli/American art historian whose research on modern Jewish and non-Jewish art and on the impact of the Holocaust on art are an outstanding contribution to the study of art.

Ray Alexander (Simons)

Ray Alexander began her involvement in communist and trade unionist organizations as a child in Latvia. After moving to South Africa as a teen, Alexander became a prominent organizer for several trade unions and faced banning and harassment from the government for her activism. She continued advocating for women’s rights, worker’s rights, and racial equality throughout her life.

Hedva Almog

As commanding officer of the Israeli Army’s Women’s Corps, Hedva Almog created training programs and promotion opportunities for female officers, working to create a better environment for women in the army. After her lengthy service in the army, she became a politician, serving on Haifa’s City Council and as deputy mayor.

Grace Aguilar

Grace Aguilar was an Anglo-Jewish poet, historical romance writer, domestic novelist, Jewish emancipator, religious reformer, educator, social historian, theologian, and liturgist. In her short life, she wrote twice as many books as Jane Austen, from popular historical romances to an introduction to Judaism that was used by both churches and synagogues.

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove

Fay Ajzenberg-Selove not only made significant contributions to physics, she also made huge strides for women by demanding she be judged on her merits, not her gender. Despite her struggles against sexism and a long battle with cancer, Ajzenberg-Selove was praised for both her dedicated teaching and her contributions to nuclear spectrometry of light elements.

Rachel Adler

Rachel Adler is unquestionably among the leading constructive Jewish theologians, translators, and liturgists of the modern era. One of the first theologians and ethicists to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into the interpretation of Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics, Adler is the award-winning author of Engendering Judaism.

Nima Adlerblum

Nima Adlerblum was a writer, educator, and early Zionist activist in New York, whose life began and ended in Jerusalem. She wrote widely on philosophy, education, Jewish philosophy, and American history, and also founded Hadassah’s national cultural and educational program in addition to serving as its national and cultural chair from 1922 to 1935.

Jewish mother blogging

Judith Rosenbaum

A quick shout out to JWA heroine Joyce Antler -- scholar extraordinaire, chair of our Academic Advisory Council, founding board member, and last but certainly not least, mother to our resident comedian, Lauren. Joyce recently wrote a blog series at Jewcy, in which she elegantly spans the worlds of politics, pop culture, feminism, and humor. Check it out, and share your own Jewish mother funny stories with us in her honor.

Topics: Non-Fiction

Book Revew: Normal

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

Usually, we have used this space to review new books (see recent reviews of The Book of Dahlia, Away, and The Zookeeper's Wife), but I can not let the opportunity pass to write a bit about Amy Bloom's non-fiction book, Normal, which was first published in 2002. I had initially put Normal on the Jewesses with Attitude Summer Reading List as a whim - an aside, even, just something to accompany my reading of Away if I decided that I liked Amy Bloom. I liked Away a lot, and now, having read Normal, I like Ms. Bloom so much more.

Topics: Non-Fiction

Book Review: The Zookeeper's Wife

Lily Rabinoff-Goldman

I made the mistake of picking up The Zookeeper's Wife and reading it as though it were a novel.  Maybe I was just in that headspace because the first two books on the Jewesses with Attitude Summer Reading List were fiction.  The Zookeeper's Wife, however, is a genre-bending piece of prose that defies the conventions of history, memoir, and naturalist writing, all of which it employs.

Jewesses abound

Judith Rosenbaum

When we were planning this blog in the winter of 2006, we had long conversations about possible names, ultimately choosing to reclaim the word "Jewess" from its exotic and sometimes negative connotations and give it a new life in the blogosphere. Well, it turns out we were at the forefront of a cultural phenomenon! A recent article by Daniel Krieger explores the history of this term and its recent reclamation by young Jewesses. Check it out.

Topics: Non-Fiction

Where are her ovaries now? Chat with Rivka Solomon

Jordan Namerow

Jewesses With Attitude recently reconnected with Rivka Solomon, the founder and visionary of That Takes Ovaries (TTO) and recipient of the Jewish Women's Archive's Women Who Dared award. TTO takes many forms -- it's a book, an open mike movement, a play, and an organizing tool for women's and girls' empowerment. Most TTO events benefit women's and girls' causes -- women's shelters, Planned Parenthood, groups working to end human rights abuses around the globe, Amnesty International, and more.

New Book: Leveling the Playing Field

Jordan Namerow

"Imagine how much stronger Jewish organizations would be if women truly shared leadership with men," says Shifra Bronznick, co-founder of the national non-profit, Advancing Women Professionals and the Jewish Community (AWP). Wouldn't it be nice if we no longer needed to imagine this?

What would Bella do?

Judith Rosenbaum

Today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Bella Abzug, activist extraordinaire. With her big hats and even bigger charismatic personality, her sharp mind and even sharper tongue, Bella took on the world and changed it. As a young girl, she spoke on street corners for Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist youth movement. As a young lawyer in the 1950s, she took on civil rights causes in the atmosphere of McCarthyism. As a mother and activist, she fought for a nuclear-free world with Women Strike for Peace.

Barbara Seaman, z"l

Judith Rosenbaum

I first "met" Barbara Seamen through my dissertation research. Reading her books about women’s health and her personal archives, I encountered a woman who was prescient, outspoken, and brave. At a time when most feminists celebrated the wonders of the Pill, which freed sex from reproduction, Seaman investigated its costs to women’s health, publishing her first book, The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, in 1969.

Happy birthday, Roe

Judith Rosenbaum

Today is the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, legalizing abortion. In commemoration, I’ve been reading Behind Every Choice is a Story, by Gloria Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood – a book that I’ve been meaning to read for a while.

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