Powerful Jewish women who made history

The theme for this year’s International Women’s Day (on Monday, 8 March) is #ChooseToChallenge, which conveys the message that people with power need to stand up against gender inequality.

Here are a few women who chose to challenge gender stereotypes. They will be remembered for being some of history’s most daring, influential, and noteworthy Jewish women, who left their mark on the world.

Golda Meir

Who can forget Golda Meir? Born Goldie Mabovitch in 1898, she was Israel’s fourth prime minister, and the first woman to be elected leader of Israel. Hailing from Kiev, she and her family emigrated to the United States (US) in 1906, where they settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She emigrated to British Mandate Palestine in 1921 with her husband, Morris Myerson, and settled in Kibbutz Merhavya.

Later elected to the executive of the Jewish Agency, Meir was active in fundraising to help cover the costs of the Israeli War of Independence, and became one of the state’s most effective spokespeople.

In 1948, David Ben-Gurion appointed Meir a member of the provisional government. A few days before the declaration of independence, he sent her disguised as an Arab on a hazardous mission to persuade King Abdullah of Jordan not to attack Israel. The King, however, had already decided his army would invade the Jewish state following the British departure.

Ben-Gurion would call her “the best man in the government”, and she is portrayed as being strong-willed and straight-talking. Meir was minister of labour and foreign minister for the Labor Party before coming out of retirement in 1969 – at the age of 70 – to lead Israel as prime minister.

Gertrude Elion

Gertrude Elion was a Nobel Prize recipient, biochemist, and pharmacologist who helped to develop medicine that treated leukaemia, malaria, AIDS, and kidney transplant rejection.

Born in 1918 in New York City, Elion was an avid reader from the start, and graduated high school at 15. While furthering her education at Hunter College, she lost her beloved grandfather to stomach cancer, leading her to choose chemistry as “a logical first step in committing myself to fighting the disease”.

Elion received her Bachelors in chemistry from Hunter College in 1937, but found work opportunities scarce for a woman chemist. After several unfulfilling jobs, she entered graduate school at New York University, receiving her Master of Science in chemistry in 1941. She found work as a quality control chemist at Quaker Maid Company, and then later as a research chemist at Johnson & Johnson. Elion finally found a rewarding and challenging career in 1944 as a research chemist at Burroughs Wellcome, a noted pharmaceutical company.

Although she never completed her PhD, Elion’s biochemical work resulted in chemotherapies for leukaemia, immunosuppressive drugs for kidney transplants (azathioprine), treatments for gout, lupus, and severe rheumatoid arthritis, and the important antiviral drug acyclovir used to treat herpes. She received a Nobel Prize in 1988, and 20 honorary doctoral degrees.

Rabbi Regina Jonas

Rabbi Regina Jonas broke the religious mould, becoming the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in 1935. Born in Berlin in 1902, she displayed a passion for Jewish history, Bible, and Hebrew in high school. Many people supported Jonas’s interests, among them the Orthodox rabbis Isidor Bleichrode, Felix Singermann, and Max Weyl.

Jonas pursued her studies, submitting a thesis on whether women could hold rabbinic office in 1930. The paper is the first known attempt to find a halachic basis for the ordination of women.

She didn’t follow the reform movement, which was willing to achieve modernisation by abandoning halacha, but wanted to deduce gender equality from Jewish legal sources.

She continued to pursue ordination, and after receiving it in 1935, she was employed in Berlin as a “pastoral-rabbinic counsellor” in its welfare institutions and even delivered sermons in more liberal shuls.

In 1942, Jonas and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt, and even there, she continued preaching and counselling. Tragically, they were later deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where it’s believed they were killed on the day of arrival.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Affectionately known as RBG, this diminutive and soft-spoken US Supreme Court justice (who died in September 2020) was a voice for gender equality and the rights of workers. She ruled on a landmark case that made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states of the US. She was the second female Justice in the US and the first Jewish female to hold this position. She served 27 years on the nation’s highest bench.

When she began her career in law, women were treated worse than men. They were restricted by law, barring them from jobs, rights, even jury service. By the time she became a judge, she had made many changes to women’s rights.

In 1996, she overturned the men’s only attendance at Virginia Military Institute in the US.

Hailing from Brooklyn, she attended Harvard Law School with her husband, Marty, and was one of nine women in a class of more than 500. The dean asked her why she was taking up a place that “should go to a man”.

She was an academic star, but she battled to find work because law firms weren’t interested in taking on a woman even though she was recommended for a Supreme Court clerkship.

Her mentor managed to get her a clerkship in New York by promising a judge that if she didn’t work out, he would find someone else. That was her beginning.

Ginsburg – who died at 87 – was a woman who defied stereotypes.

Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus left her mark in the literary sphere. Born in 1849, she was one of the first successful Jewish American authors, part of the late 19th century New York literary elite and recognised in her time as an important American poet. She later wrote bold, powerful poetry and essays protesting the rise of antisemitism and arguing for Russian immigrants’ rights, and even called on Jews to unite and create a homeland in Palestine before the term “Zionist” had even been coined.

Famous lines from her poem, The New Colossus, are displayed on the Statue of Liberty and still welcome newcomers to America: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr, often touted as the most beautiful woman in the world, was not only famous, but Jewish and scientifically gifted to boot. Born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, she was given her new surname by Louis B Mayer when she signed with MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) in 1937.

Although she achieved international fame as a Hollywood movie star, Lamarr wasn’t satisfied with acting. Between takes in her trailer and staying up all night at home, she practised her favourite hobby: inventing.

It is said that while the 26-year-old Lamarr was thriving in Hollywood in September 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down and sank a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. Tragically, 77 of them drowned in the frigid North Atlantic.

Lamarr, at this point a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria who had made America her home since 1938, was outraged. She fought back by applying her engineering skills to the development of a sonar submarine locator to protect Allied torpedoes from German U-boat fire. The system was called “frequency hopping”, in which torpedoes would “hop” between frequencies to avoid detection. Ingenious though her invention was, the US navy chose, for reasons unknown, not to implement her design. Although it did patent it, it never went further in the war effort.

The existence of Lamarr’s invention became known only in recent years, proving there was more to her than her beauty. In addition, the principles of her work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, code-division multiple access, and Bluetooth technology, and this work led to her being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.