Politics and Government

Hannah Greenebaum Solomon

Hannah Greenebaum Solomon was the founder and first president of the National Council of Jewish Women. In creating the first national association for Jewish women, she redefined the roles they could play in American society.

Anna Sokolow at Emanuel Sisterhood of Personal Service, 1922

Sisterhoods of Personal Service in the United States

Sisterhoods of Personal Service coordinated the philanthropic work of synagogue sisterhoods across New York City and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assisting a considerable number of immigrants through a variety of financial, vocational, educational, and social programs.

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.

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.”

Carrie Obendorfer Simon

Carrie Obendorfer Simon helped shape the Reform movement as founder of the National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods, which quickly became the largest Jewish women’s organization in America.

Maxine Singer

Maxine Singer’s distinguished career included positions at the National Institutes of Health, the Carnegie Institution, and Johnson & Johnson. Her work focused specifically on investigations of genetic material; she also concentrated on creating opportunities for women and minorities in the sciences.

Caroline Klein Simon

Attorney Caroline Klein Simon’s long career included state office and judicial posts. She was a fierce advocate for gender and racial equality and made the first laws against real estate brokers using “blockbusting” tactics to force sales of homes.

Beverly Sills

Beverly Sills was a trailblazing opera singer who, after a robust singing career at the New York City Opera Company (NYCO) and the Metropolitan Opera House, became the first female director of the NYCO, and the first female chair of the Lincoln Center board. Sills defied the odds in her career accomplishments while raising two children with disabilities and being actively involved with several charitable organizations.

Elizabeth Blume Silverstein

Elizabeth Blume Silverstein’s long and productive life revolved around her work in criminal law, real estate management, and Jewish life. After successfully defending Orzio Ricotta on a homicide charge, a first for a New Jersey woman lawyer, Silverstein became a public speaker, and she was involved in law, politics, and Zionism.

Irene Kaufman Settlement House Childcare, 1924

Settlement Houses in the United States

Founded beginning in the 1880s in impoverished urban neighborhoods, settlement houses provided recreation, education, and medical and social service programs, primarily for immigrants. Jewish women played significant roles as benefactors, organizers, administrators of, and participants in these institutions.

Clara Lemlich in a Shirtwaist, circa 1910

Clara Lemlich Shavelson

Clara Lemlich Shavelson pushed union leaders to recognize the importance of women in the labor movement and sparked the famous Uprising of the 20,000 garment workers strike in 1909. She continued her activism throughout her life, organizing around women’s suffrage and leading food boycotts and rent strikes.

Letter from Henrietta Szold to Alice Seligsberg, October 8, 1931

Alice Lillie Seligsberg

A passionate social worker and Zionist, Alice Lillie Seligsberg devoted herself to underprivileged youth and to the Zionist movement. Although Seligsberg is best known for her leadership in the national Hadassah organization, her work in social services in New York City also led to historic changes in the field.

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.

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.

Bertha Singer Schoolman

Bertha Singer Schoolman gave a lifetime of service to the betterment of Jewish education and the cause of Youth Aliyah, the movement to bring Jewish youth out of Germany to live in children’s villages in Israel. Schoolman risked her life under fire to help bring convoys to and from kibbutzim.

Mathilde Schechter

Mathilde Schechter, wife of Solomon Schechter, founded the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism. She was a multifaceted individual, creative both in her home and in the public arena. As an organizational person, she developed herself fully, in line with the traditional women’s roles of the times yet stretching them in new and creative ways.

Jessie Ethel Sampter

Jessie Sampter was an important Zionist activist, writer, and educator. As an influential member of Hadassah, the woman’s Zionist organization, she advocated for an inclusive vision of Zionism. Putting her ideas into practice, she moved to Palestine in 1919. Although Sampter’s disability and non-normative family structure did not align with Zionist ideals of strong, healthy bodies, she championed Zionism, though not always uncritically.

Anna Rosenberg

Anna Lederer Rosenberg was an administrator, diplomat, and public relations and manpower expert who advised multiple presidents. In 1950 she became the first female Assistant Secretary of Defense. Deeply admired by military and government leaders, Rosenberg’s success demonstrates how deftly she maneuvered within these male-dominated arenas.

Ethel Rosenberg

Ethel Rosenberg, convicted in 1953 alongside her husband for conspiracy to divulge atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, became the second woman in the United States to be executed by the federal government. The verdict and the Rosenbergs’ execution became one of the most-questioned cases in United States history, as well as one piece of a much larger Cold War picture of anti-Communist hysteria and antisemitism.

Esther Rome

A coauthor of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a classic women’s resource book, Esther Rome came of age with the onset of the modern feminist movement and was a leader in shaping modern American notions of self-help and advocacy for women’s physical and mental health.

Lilly Rivlin

Lilly Rivlin is a documentary filmmaker whose films are centered around feminism, the Arab-Israeli peace process, Jewishness, and her family relationships. Rivlin’s films The Tribe (1984), Miriam’s Daughters Now (1986), and Gimme a Kiss (2000), all of which explore Jewishness and family, are among her best.

Freda Resnikoff

Freda Resnikoff was a founder and dedicated leader of the Mizrachi Women’s Organization and mother, mother-in-law, and grandmother-in-law of three of its national presidents.

Julia Richman

A polarizing and important social reformer, Julia Richman sought to better manage the massive influx of immigrants in New York by Americanizing the new arrivals as quickly as possible, particularly through intense training in English. An educator who eventually became district superintendent of the Lower East Side schools in 1903, she created playgrounds, improved school lunches, and enforced health examinations for students.

Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush

Following in the footsteps of her famous father, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Elizabeth Brandeis Raushenbush became an expert on labor legislation in the United States and one of its strongest defenders.

Cecilia Razovsky

Cecilia Razovsky was a remarkably active woman who spent her life striving to assist immigrants in adapting to life in the United States and other countries. Razovsky found countless ways to help Jewish refugees in particular, from writing plays and pamphlets to running committees and organizations for immigrant aid.

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