Politics and Government

Natalie Cohen

Natalie Cohen was a twentieth-century athlete, umpire, journalist, and civil servant who earned the Presidential Sports Award from President Gerald Ford.

Rosalie Cohen Introducing Eleanor Roosevelt at the Launching of New Orleans Israel Bonds Organization, 1951

A lifelong Zionist, Rosalie Cohen worked to promote Jewish culture and education both on a national level and locally in New Orleans. Cohen’s talents as a leader and organizer, as well as her gracious southern manners, were key assets in overcoming the obstacles she faced as a Zionist in a southern city and as a woman in a predominantly male Jewish national arena.

Jessica Cohen

Jessie Cohen served as editor of the Jewish Review and Observer for most of her life, maintaining an important resource for Jews in the city of Cleveland. She ran the Jewish Review and Observer for decades, finally retiring due to ill health, and remained editor emeritus until her death in 1945.

Civil War in the United States

During the Civil War, Jewish women performed a range of classic responsibilities brought on by wartime exigencies. Their efforts tended to generate little in the way of documentation, and thus historians studying the involvement of Jewish women in the Civil War and the impact of the war on Jewish women have a sparse body of primary sources upon which to draw.

Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls

The Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls was established in May 1897 to provide housing, occupational training, and community to mostly poor and immigrant young women in New York City.

Club Movement in the United States

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Jewish women shifted from benevolent work to social and personal reform, often through aiding immigrants and young, vulnerable women. They facilitated educational opportunities to learn about Jewish history and ethics, which in turn helped inform their aid work. These efforts created a space specifically for women in American Jewish society.

Audrey Cohen

Audrey Cohen was the founder and president of Audrey Cohen College in New York City, which emphasized a purpose-oriented understanding of education. In 1964 she founded the earliest iteration of Audrey Cohen College, Women’s Talent Corps, which combined study with on-the-job training and greatly benefited low-income women.

Hannah Chizhik

Hannah Chizhik was an advocate for women’s emancipation and she was committed to the women workers movement. She became an expert in vegetable farming, agricultural work, and domestic labor for the groups of women pioneers. In 1926 she established a women’s smallholding in Tel Aviv, which became an important center for pioneer youth.

A unit of Israeli women soldiers marching in the “Yom Hamedina” parade in Tel Aviv’s Allenby Street, 1948.

CHEN: Women's Corps of the Israel Defense Forces

The Israel Defense Forces’ Women’s Corps (“CHEN”—Hel Nashim) was founded on May 16, 1948, following discussions as to whether women should be integrated into men’s units or separate battalions of women should be formed.

Kim Chernin

From poetry to the probing of women’s eating disorders, from autobiography to the story of a voice, from commentary on sexual identity to Israel and Palestine, Kim Chernin’s writing, “writing consultation,” and pastoral counseling practices all arose from the “spiritual politics” and deep examination of self and society that she considered the essence of her Jewishness.

Rose Chernin

Ambivalent about Judaism, passionately Marxist, charismatic, and courageous, Rose Chernin devoted a great deal of her life to securing the rights of disenfranchised citizens: the unemployed of the Depression, farm workers without a union, Black home buyers thwarted by redlining, and other foreign-born leftists, like herself, who faced deportation in the 1950s.

Phyllis Chesler

Dr. Phyllis Chesler is a feminist, best-selling author, and scholar whose career spans more than five decades and 20 books. An early and radical second wave feminist, she has focused on topics such as feminism, women’s rights globally and domestically, Islamic gender apartheid, academic freedom, Judaism, anti-Semitism, and freedom of speech.

Judy Feld Carr

Canadian-born Judy Feld Carr rescued 3,228 Jews out of Syria. For almost 30 years (1973-2001), Judy either ransomed Syrian Jews (with donations made to the Dr Ronald Feld Fund for Jews in Arab Lands) or made extensive use of her underground network inside Syria to bring Syrian Jews across heavily guarded borders into either Lebanon or Turkey

The exterior of a gymnasium with a curved roof

Cedar Knolls School for Girls

Founded in 1911 by the women of the New York Jewish Protectory and Aid Society, the Cedar Knolls School for Girls aimed to provide assistance to young and so-called delinquent Jewish women through education and vocational training.

Timeline Showing the Major Organizations of Jews in Germany, 1893-1943

Central Organizations of Jews in Germany (1933-1943)

During the Nazi regime, the political participation of the League of Jewish Women in the affairs of the Jewish self-help organization the Reichsvertretung was initially unwelcomed by male leaders, despite the fact that women attended its meetings. Following the dissolution of the League in 1938, four of its members created their own network in order to present a united front for Jewish women’s interests and continued to participate in important functions of the Reichsvertretung.

Peggy Charren

Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children’s Television (ACT), took on the burgeoning television industry of the 1970s and won. She received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 for her work on behalf of quality television programming for children.

Elinor Caplan

Elinor Caplan is a Canadian Liberal Party politician who spent a quarter-century in elected office. She was the first Jewish woman to serve as cabinet minister at the provincial and federal levels. Caplan served as a Member of Toronto’s Provincial Parliament for twelve years and in 1997 she was elected to federal parliament.

Shoshana S. Cardin

Shoshana Cardin’s lengthy career advocating for Jewish people and the state of Israel included roles such as being the first woman president of the council of Jewish Federations and the chair of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. She was known for her savviness and fearlessness, even when confronting world leaders.

Shulamith Cantor

As director of the Hadassah School of Nursing in Jerusalem, Shulamith Cantor helped set the standard for nursing in Palestine.

Canada: From Outlaw to Supreme Court Justice, 1738-2005

The positive aspect of the Canadian mosaic has been a strong Jewish community (and other communities) which nurtured traditional ethnic and religious values and benefited from the talent and energy of women and men restrained from participation in the broader society. The negative aspect has included considerable antisemitism and, especially for women, the sometimes stifling narrowness and conservatism of the community which inhibited creative and exceptional people from charting their own individual paths.

Hortense Calisher

Hortense Calisher was a significant presence in American letters for over forty years, producing novels, short stories, and memoirs of striking originality and intelligence. Although she did not achieve popular fame, the literary community holds her in high regard and even her critics agree she is a consummate stylist.

Ghitta Caiserman-Roth

Ghitta Caiserman-Roth was a well-known Canadian artist who showed her work in galleries in Canada and New York. Caiserman-Roth studied at Parsons School of Design, the École des Beaux-Arts, and at the American Artists’ School and won several awards for her artistic achievements. In her later years, she served on the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts council.

Black and white digital graphic of a tree silhouette with word cloud of English and Hebrew beneath

CAJE

CAJE—the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education—brought together a diverse spectrum of the Jewish community. After CAJE folded in 2009, it was replaced by NewCAJE, which shares ideas and innovations, offers professional development across denominational and workplace lines, and builds a strong Jewish community.

Bund Party - a group of young workers of Zambrów (Poland)

Women in the Bund

Jewish women played leading roles in the formative years of the General Jewish Workers’ Bund, which was established in the Tsarist Empire in 1897, and initially participated in the movement in large numbers. However, the Bund had somewhat less success in mobilizing women in independent Poland between the two world wars than it had during the Tsarist era.

Tullia Calabi-Zevi

Born in Milan, Tullia Calabi-Zevi began working as a journalist during World War II and wrote prolifically for a number of publications over the next few decades. In her later life she held many public leadership positions, including several in organizations specifically concerning Jewish life in Italy.

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