Politics and Government

Content type
Collection

Edith I. Spivack

A leading member of the Law Department of the City of New York for seventy years, Edith Spivack served as a pioneer female lawyer and a role model for generations of women.

Gladys Noon Spellman

During her five years in Congress, Gladys Noon Spellman was a voice for fiscal reform. Elected in 1975, Spellman served on the Committee on Banking, Currency and Housing, the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, and the Committee on Post Office and Civil Service. Her service coincided with a period of American politics in which Jews were becoming increasingly visible, both as voters and as elected officials.

Hannah Marks Solomons

Hannah Marks Solomons was an influential San Francisco educator and civic worker, as well as the wife of a leading member of the Jewish community.

Eva Sopher

Eva Sopher was a Brazilian-Jewish theater manager and cultural entrepreneur in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, where she worked for 41 years. Sopher is recognized for her leadership in the renovation of the world-renowned São Pedro Theatre and her contributions to Brazilian theater, art, and culture.

Bertha Solomon

As one of the first women’s rights activists in South Africa, Bertha Solomon used her positions as one of the first practicing women advocates in South Africa and as a member of parliament to work to expand the rights of all South African women. Throughout her long career in government, Solomon acted as a parliamentary watchdog over women’s rights, committed to ensuring women’s suffrage and marital rights.

Judith Solis-Cohen

Judith Solis-Cohen had a prolific literary career that covered a wide range of topics, from clothing to education to women’s suffrage. She was also active in Philadelphia’s Jewish intellectual circles and introduced Jewish literature to the blind.

Sociodemography

Over the last several decades, Jewish women attained significant achievement in the socio-economic sphere and played a leading role in maintaining Jewish continuity. In general, Jewish women are educated and participate in the labor force at higher rates than their non-Jewish counterparts.

Chava Slucka-Kesten

Chava Slucka-Kesten started teaching in Warsaw before World War II and continued her career through the war in Moscow. After the war she became an author and sustained her political involvement. Writing from the perspective of a politically engaged woman, Slucka-Kesten offers a unique glimpse into pre- and post-war Jewish life in Poland’s cities and villages, as well as into the early years of the State of Israel.

Virginia Snitow

Virginia Levitt Snitow was a multifaceted woman who was a teacher, political activist, pre-Second Wave feminist, poet, writer and founder of US/Israel Women to Women. Ahead of her time in the fight for both civil and women’s rights, Snitow was unafraid to take unpopular stances when fighting for others.

Michal Smoira-Cohn

One of Israel’s best-known musicologists, Michal Smoira-Cohn was involved in innumerable musical features and events and was a leading figure in Israel’s cultural life.

Rachel Skidelsky

In 1894, at a time when “working mother” was a contradiction in terms for middle-class women, Rachel Skidelsky, a Russian immigrant with a husband and two children under age ten, was a well-known physician in the city of Philadelphia.

Tess Slesinger

Novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Tess Slesinger was born in New York on July 16, 1905. She published several works, including: The Unpossessedand Time: The Present. Slesinger died of cancer at age thirty-nine before the premiere of one of her final works, the acclaimed A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Helene Simon

Greatly influenced by the socialist ideology of the Fabian Society in London, Helene Simon was as a pioneer in the theory and practice of social policy and welfare in Germany. Simon was a major advocate for structural changes in Germany’s welfare system, especially for the benefit of women and children.

Rebecca Sieff

Rebecca Sieff, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Manchester, England, played an active role in two central social-historical movements: the struggle for women’s rights and the Zionist movement that eventually led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

Ida Lewis Siegel

Ida Lewis Siegel was a volunteer leader in Toronto dedicated to Zionism and education. Siegel’s organizing talents over the decades benefited many Jewish community institutions, including the Youth Aliyah. She was also involved in the wider Toronto community, serving as a trustee of the Toronto Board of Education.

Lillie Shultz

Lillie Shultz poured her boundless energy into all aspects of her life. She was a journalist, a Zionist, a champion of the oppressed, a skilled administrator, and a businesswoman.

Dora Shulner

Dora Shulner was a Yiddish writer who vividly evoked for her readers life in the Pale of Settlement before, during, and after the Russian Revolution and Civil War. She candidly portrayed women in their most intimate relationships with men, revealing the complexity of their disappointments and aspirations.

Esfir Il’inishna Shub

Esfir Shub was active as an editor, director, and writer of nonfiction films for twenty years, from 1927 to 1947—one of the few women in the Soviet Union at that time to achieve some standing in the film industry. Shub found success as a woman in the film industry by pioneering the form of compilation documentary and by producing technically competent work that satisfied the political needs of the communist moment.

Mania Wilbushewitch Shochat

Zionist and socialist, radical and revolutionary, Mania Shochat left behind her labor activism in Russia to come to Palestine, where she initiated the country's first collective settlement and helped to establish the Jewish defense group Ha-Shomer.

Anna G. Sherman

Anna G. Sherman was one of the unsung heroes of the Hebraist movement in the United States. She taught Hebrew classes at the Teachers Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary for nearly forty years, inspiring hundreds of students, mostly adult women, to connect to their Judaism through the study of Hebrew.

Mindel Cherniack Sheps

As a pioneering physician, biostatistician, and demographer, Mindel Cherniack Sheps was acutely aware of the role science could play as a powerful social force. She taught that peace, social justice, and science were inextricably bound; humanism in any field must be based on social equity and knowledge.

Sarah Shmukler

Sarah Shmukler was a nurse and midwife who emigrated to Palestine from the Russian Empire during the Second Aliyah period. Her short life was characterized by providing medical assistance to migrant workers in Palestine and by close friendships with her fellow pioneers.

Sarah Shner-Nishmit

Polish author and historian Sarah Shner-Nishmit traveled constantly to evade capture during World War II, working at a labor camp and joining a partisan group. Shner made aliyah in 1947 and subsequently began her writing career, which included children’s books and historical research. She also helped found Kibbutz Lohamei ha-Getta’ot, where she lived until her death.

She'erit ha-Peletah: Women in DP Camps in Germany

Family played an important role in the lives of Holocaust survivors in DP (displaced persons) camps – in 1947, the birth rate in DP camps was one of the highest in the world. Women served as teachers and eager students, and they were active in the effort to open immigration to Palestine.

Shelamziyyon Alexandra

Queen Shelamziyyon Alexandra ruled Judea in the 1st century BCE. During her reign, which was the only time a woman inherited the throne from her deceased spouse, she deposed the ruling party that had supported her husband. In the place of that party, she appointed the Pharisees, whose heirs portray her positively in the rabbinic literature they composed.

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