Joining the Faculty Club: Jewish Women Academics in the United States

In the United States, both Jews and women encountered major obstacles in attempting to pursue academic careers before World War II. Aspiring Jewish women academics faced both antisemitism and sexism and had to surmount even more daunting hurdles than did their non-Jewish female or Jewish male counterparts, whether in the sciences, the humanities or the social sciences. Although antisemitism gradually became a less significant factor in academic hiring after 1945, for several more decades women frequently were barred from tenured positions and academic promotions as a result of nepotism rules and other forms of discrimination. For Jewish women with doctorates, their gender, even more than their religion or ethnic origins, limited their opportunities for academic advancement throughout much of the twentieth century. Only from the 1970s on, thanks to second-wave feminism, did Jewish women manage to carve out secure niches for themselves within the academy.