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Alice Davis Menken

The Remarkable Social Worker: Alice Davis Menken

By Jackie Brettschneider, Research Intern, Center for Jewish History

Alice Davis Menken was a social worker for the courts and correctional institutions of New York state and city. She worked to rehabilitate delinquent girls within the penal system. This makes her an interesting Jewish woman because of her desire to help girls with no one else to turn to. Seeing these girls as people,…

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Alice Davis Menken was “born to privilege in 1870 and [she] married into wealth in 1893,” as Michael D. Feldberg explains in Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History. Menken “dedicated her life to helping Jewish women less fortunate than herself" (p. 106).

We can guess from Alice Davis Menken’s personal papers—which live here at the Center for Jewish History in…

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