Florence Mendheim was a Jewish librarian for the New York Public Library, and in 1933 she went undercover to spy on Nazi-associated groups in the United States. Her collection, featuring a large amount of antisemitic propaganda, is held by the Leo Baeck Institute, and is an invaluable window into the spread of fascist…
In honor of Women’s History Month, I
would like to offer some guidance to those who are seeking to discover and
share the stories of their elusive female ancestors. One of the most common
“brick walls” that genealogy researchers face when tracing the family history
of a female ancestor is that their family doesn’t know her maiden name. For
…
Image: Signed First Edition of How to Make it in a Man’s World from the library of The American Jewish Historical Society
Before Sheryl Sandberg told women to Lean In, Letty Cottin Pogrebin (Born June…
Women in the Performing Arts
Bertha Kalich: Star of the New York Stage
by J.D. Arden, M.L.I.S. candidate, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History
Above image: Yiddish theater poster for Bertha Kalich in Midway at Irving Place Theatre. c/o American Jewish Historical Society.
Bertha Kalich was born in 1874 in Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia, what is today Lvov, Ukraine….
Women Represented in the Collections: Lucy S. Dawidowicz
by Ilana Rossoff, Reference Services Research Intern, Center for Jewish History
Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915-1990) was a Jewish-American historian well-known for her polemical writings on the devastation of the Nazi genocide and the historical rise of Christian and German anti-Semitism.
Dawidowicz, born Lucy Schildkret to immigrants of Eastern Europe in New York City, was immersed…
