Jehuda Reinharz served as President of Brandeis University from 1994–2010. He is currently the Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis. He is also the president and CEO of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. On September 25, 2009, Reinharz announced his retirement as President of Brandeis, but at the request of the Board of Trustees, he stayed on until a replacement could be hired. On January 1, 2011, Reinharz became president and CEO of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation.
Phyllis Chesler is an American writer, psychotherapist, and professor emerita of psychology and women's studies at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). She is a renowned second-wave feminist psychologist and the author of 18 books, including the best-sellers Women and Madness (1972), With Child: A Diary of Motherhood (1979), and An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (2013). Chesler has written extensively about topics such as gender, mental illness, divorce and child custody, surrogacy, second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, incest, and violence against women.
Amy Eilberg is the first female rabbi ordained in Conservative Judaism. She was ordained in 1985 by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, one of the academic centers and spiritual centers of Conservative Judaism.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin is an American author, journalist, lecturer, and social activist. She is a founding editor of Ms. magazine, the author of twelve books, and was an editorial consultant for the TV special Free to Be... You and Me for which she earned an Emmy.
Elinor W. Gadon is an American cultural historian, Indologist, art historian and author notable for her examination of women in myth and culture in history.
Gender and Jewish Studies is an emerging subfield at the intersection of gender studies, queer studies, and Jewish studies. Gender studies centers on interdisciplinary research on the phenomenon of gender. It focuses on cultural representations of gender and people's lived experience. Similarly, queer studies focuses on the cultural representations and lived experiences of queer identities to critique hetero-normative values of sex and sexuality. Jewish studies is a field that looks at Jewish people and Judaism, through such disciplines as history, anthropology, literary studies, linguistics, and sociology. As such, scholars of gender and Jewish studies are considering gender as the basis for understanding historical and contemporary Jewish societies. This field recognizes that much of recorded Jewish history and academic writing is told from the perspective of “the Jewish male” and fails to accurately represent the diverse experiences of Jewish people with non-dominant gender identities.
Judith Margolis is an Israel-based American artist working visually in paintings, drawings, artist's books and multi-media collages. In her art and writing she "explores tensions between consciousness, feminism, and religious ritual tradition".
Esther David is an Indian Jewish author, an artist and a sculptor. She is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award.
Galit Hasan-Rokem is the Max and Margarethe Grunwald professor of folklore at the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author and editor of numerous works, including co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Folklore (2012), her research interests include proverbs, folklore and culture of the Middle East, and folklore genres and narratives. She is also a published poet and translator of poetry, and a Pro-Palestinian activist. The Jerusalem Post has called her "a figure of some prominence in Jerusalem intellectual circles".
Elyse Goldstein is a Canadian Reform rabbi. She is the first woman to be elected as president of the interdenominational Toronto Board of Rabbis and president of the Reform Rabbis of Greater Toronto.
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Marcia Falk is a poet, liturgist, painter, and translator who has written several books of poetry and prayer.
Zoe Helene is a classically trained multi-disciplinary artist, environmentalist, and cultural activist who founded Cosmic Sister, an environmental feminist collective, and originated “psychedelic feminism.”
Evelyn Torton Beck has been described as "a scholar, a teacher, a feminist, and an outspoken Jew and lesbian". Until her retirement in 2002 she specialized in women's studies, Jewish women's studies and lesbian studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Dame Rosie Gojich Stephenson-Goodknight, known on Wikipedia as Rosiestep, is an American Wikipedia editor who is noted for her attempts to address gender bias in the encyclopedia by running a project to increase the quantity and quality of women's biographies. She has contributed thousands of new articles.
Vanessa L. Ochs is an American scholar of religion at the University of Virginia, an ordained rabbi and an important figure in the fields of Jewish feminism and Jewish ritual. She is a member of the Jewish Studies Program at the university, where she teaches courses in Judaism, the anthropology of religion, and spiritual writing.
Ruth Halperin-Kaddari is an Israeli legal scholar and international women's rights advocate who is known for her work on family law, feminist legal theory, women's rights in international law, and women and religion. She was a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women from 2006 to 2018, and was the committee's vice chair during several terms. She is Professor of Law at the Bar-Ilan University and is the founding Academic Director of the Ruth and Emanuel Rackman Center for the Advancement of the Status of Women. She is also involved in international academic collaborations on the theme of women, state, and religion, and participates in international litigations as an expert on Israeli family law.
Shulamit Reinharz was the Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University until 2017. During her tenure at Brandeis, she was director of the women's studies program from 1991 to 2001 and launched The Scholars Program, the first graduate program to focus on Jewish women. She was the founding director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in 1997 and founder and director of the Women's Studies Research Center in 2001.
Marilyn Salzman Webb, also known as Marilyn Webb, is an American author, activist, professor, feminist and journalist. She has been involved in the civil rights, feminist, anti-Vietman war and end-of-life care movements, and is considered one of the founders of the Second-wave women's liberation movement.
Margalit Shilo is an Israeli historian. Until her retirement, she worked at the Land of Israel Studies and Archeology Department at Bar Ilan University where her area of focus was the Jewish community in pre-state Israel, and women and gender in Israel. She is the author and editor of 12 books and 80 papers.
