The recently passed legislation provides pregnant workers with much-needed—and long overdue—protections. 

The more I learn about the world and the society we live in, the more dissatisfied I feel and the more eager I am to change it.

Alla Aberson was interviewed in Framingham, Massachusetts, as part of the Soviet Jewry Oral History Project. Aberson discusses her parents' "refusenik" jobs, life under KGB surveillance, participation in hunger strikes, antisemitism in the FSU, and their path to leaving the Soviet Union.

Ronda Spinak interviewed Rabbi Barbara Penzner on February 25, 2014, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, as part of the Boston Women Rabbis Oral History Project. Rabbi Penzner reflects on her Jewish upbringing, calling to become a rabbi, studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, exploration of the mikvah ritual, working with interfaith couples, and balancing motherhood and her career.

Clara Lemlich, the female garment workers she led in striking, and the women who have come after her prove that strength truly comes in numbers and in unity.

Suffragist Maud Nathan could never have predicted the labor protections and voting rights we have now, and just like her, I can never give up on fighting for what is right.

No one figure serves as the champion of the early 20th-century union movement, but Bessie Abramowitz Hillman comes close.

Ann Zinn Buffum and Sandra Stillman Gartner, project directors, interviewed Ellen David Friedman on November 8, 2005, in East Montpelier, Vermont, as part of DAVAR's Vermont Jewish Women's History Project. Friedman reflects on her family background, immigration history, Jewish identity, involvement in progressive politics, volunteer efforts, and her role as a grassroots labor organizer in Vermont.

From activists like Rose Schneiderman in 1919 to activists today advocating for the paid leave section of the trillion-dollar infrastructure bill in Congress, we've been trying to change the system.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz (1945-2018) was a lesbian-feminist writer and editor. She made multiple theoretical contributions to understanding Judaism, lesbianism, and feminism as intersectional identities, extended an awareness of class and economic justice through a Jewish lens, and made visible racial differences within Jewish communities. She advocated Radical Diasporism as a progressive alternative to Zionism.

Evelyne Serfaty was one of the most active women in the Moroccan Communist Party. Through her activities with the party, she militated for Moroccan independence from French and Spanish colonial rule. She was kidnapped and tortured for her brother’s political activities in the early 1970s under Morocco’s post-independence authoritarian state.

Esther Luria was a freelance journalist whose work appeared in many politically left-of-center Yiddish publications in the early twentieth-century United States. A socialist, a feminist, and a political activist, she was also an educator. She used her columns not only to advocate for the ideas in which she believed, but also to provide her mainly east European immigrant readers with a better understanding of their new environment.

Ray Harmel was a powerful force in the trade union movement in Apartheid South Africa, a committed Communist, an anti-Apartheid activist, and ultimately a member of the African National Congress.

Domestic Labor is labor. Time to pay up.

Bessie Margolin was raised in New Orleans’s Jewish orphanage, where she learned powerful lessons in social justice that propelled her trailblazing legal career through the New Deal and Nazi War Crimes Trials to the United State Supreme Court, where she championed the rights of millions of American workers. A reluctant feminist who became the nation’s top fighter for equal pay for women and a co-founder of NOW, Margolin used intellect and charm to open courtroom doors for countless women who have followed.

Last summer, I embarked on a URJ Mitzvah Corps service trip to Costa Rica. As part of our program we spent a week in Yorkin, a community located in the Indigenous reserve of Bribri.

In my opinion, Abella has demonstrated intersectional feminism through her work as a legal advocate and supporter of civil rights for marginalized communities. Before her appointment to the bench, Abella was considered one of Canada's foremost human rights lawyers.

The directory of Jewish female labor activists is endless, from the better-known to the nearly invisible. [This] Labor Day, here is a list of Jewish female labor activists you never knew, or never knew were Jewish, or never knew said that, or never knew did that.

Let’s be honest: the Fourth of July is a fun holiday, what with the hamburgers, the watermelons, the fireworks, and thesummer camps, but I’m guessing that many of us are not super enthused about celebrating the land of the free and the home of the brave this year, given the current garbage fire of American politics and the dark truths that said garbage fire has revealed about the priorities and mores of our nation.

Authors are often asked about the inspiration behind their books. Usually, that question is a tricky one to answer. But in the case of my historical novel for young adults,Audacity, it’s easy. The life of labor activistClara Lemlich was all the inspiration I needed.