Posts tagged Mount Sinai Hospital
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![Women in HistoryNobel Prize Winnersby David P. Rosenberg, M.P.A., Reference Services Research Coordinator, Center for Jewish History
I recently researched women with Jewish roots who have won the Nobel Prize. Seven people hold the distinction in a range of topics from medicine to chemistry to literature:
Gerty Cori was the third woman, and the first American woman, to win the prize when she won for her work in physiology in 1947.
She has an entry Biographia Judaica Bohemiae, which is available in our reference collection.
Rita Levi-Montalcini also won the prize for physiology or medicine; she was awarded the prize in 1986.
The AJHS library here at the Center holds In praise of imperfection: my life and work by Rita Levi-Montalcini.
The YIVO library here at the Center has a book by Gian Paolo Brizzi: Bologna 1938: silence and remembering : the racial laws and the foreign Jewish students at the University of Bologna.
Levi-Montalcini, an Italian, also had her career drastically affected by Mussolini’s racial laws. She wrote the preface for Brizzi’s work.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was also awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. She was awarded the prize in 1977. She studied and taught at Mount Sinai Hospital. (AJHS also holds a collection on Mount Sinai Hospital that has a box list online.)
The YIVO library holds the biography Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel laureate: her life and work in medicine: a biographical memoir.
Ada Yonath is the first Israeli woman to win the prize; she won for her work in chemistry in 2009. She has an article in Encyclopaedia Judaica. We have a print copy of this invaluable resource in the reference collection in addition to access to the online version.
Elfriede Jelinek, Austrian novelist, playwright and activist won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2004. She was raised by her Catholic mother and Jewish father. Her work was surely affected by her Roman Catholic preliminary education, the Vienna Conservatory where she earned a degree in organ, and her further studies at the University of Vienna.
If you search the catalog, search.cjh.org, there are eight works in the collection that speak about Jelinek’s work or have contributions by her, including Sexualisierte Gewalt : weibliche Erfahrungen in NS-Konzentrationslagern / Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer, Brigitte Halbmayr; mit einem Essay von Elfriede Jelinek [ Sexual violence: female experiences in Nazi concentration camps / Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer, Brigitte Halbmayr, with an essay by Elfriede Jelinek], which is particularly relevant considering her well-known work The Piano Teacher.
Also available is “Ich will kein Theater”: mediale Ueberschreitungen [“I want no drama” About media shortfalls], which is particularly relevant considering her role in the release of Jack Unterweger.
Nadine Gordimer, South African author and political activist, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991. Multiple books she penned were banned during Apartheid.
Noted photojournalist for Newsweek magazine Bernard Gotfryd has a collection at the YIVO archives, RG 1380, that includes a photograph of Nadine Gordimer.
The LBI library here at the Center also holds a work with contributions by Gordimer: Wege im harten Gras: Erinnerungen an Deutschland, Suedafrika und England [Way in the tough grass: Memories of Germany, South Africa and England].
Within this distinguished group of Nobel Prize winners, the partner collections hold the most material on poet Nelly Sachs, who is pictured above. The first stanza of her poem “O The chimneys” is always particularly poignant to me. Click here for the text and analysis. (The book linked to here, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, is available in hard copy in the reference collection at the Center.)
Searching our catalog, search.cjh.org, for “Nelly Sachs” will reveal over a hundred items including more than ten original works by Sachs.
Of particular note is the exhibition catalog from an exhibit held by LBI in 1966, which documented the life and work of Nelly Sachs, Nobel Laureate in literature.
There is also an extensive collection of archival material held by the LBI archive that includes photographs of this exhibit. The entire collection, which amounts to a linear foot of material, is available entirely online. For photographs, including those above, click here.
Links to the digitized material are available via the finding aid.
For the exhibit documentation, reference Series IV: Leo Baeck Institute Exhibition April 1967, 1966-1967, or click here.
For poems, including translations and handwritten, material see Series III: Writings and Translations by Nelly Sachs, 1921, 1965-1966.
Many Jewish women who have not won the Nobel Prize have still made vast contributions to society. These range from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first female Jewish Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to mothers and teachers. To learn more about Jewish women in daily life, see the online bibliography, or search our collections by clicking here.
The above image of Nelly Sachs is from the Leo Baeck Institute collections.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/4db48183cc3376c1b82235a8e867ffc2/tumblr_mlax1xncK01r3qmd1o1_r1_400.jpg)
Women in History
Nobel Prize Winners
by David P. Rosenberg, M.P.A., Reference Services Research Coordinator, Center for Jewish History
I recently researched women with Jewish roots who have won the Nobel Prize. Seven people hold the distinction in a range of topics from medicine to chemistry to literature:
Gerty Cori was the third woman, and the first American woman, to win the prize when she won for her work in physiology in 1947.
She has an entry Biographia Judaica Bohemiae, which is available in our reference collection.
Rita Levi-Montalcini also won the prize for physiology or medicine; she was awarded the prize in 1986.
The AJHS library here at the Center holds In praise of imperfection: my life and work by Rita Levi-Montalcini.
The YIVO library here at the Center has a book by Gian Paolo Brizzi: Bologna 1938: silence and remembering : the racial laws and the foreign Jewish students at the University of Bologna.
Levi-Montalcini, an Italian, also had her career drastically affected by Mussolini’s racial laws. She wrote the preface for Brizzi’s work.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was also awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. She was awarded the prize in 1977. She studied and taught at Mount Sinai Hospital. (AJHS also holds a collection on Mount Sinai Hospital that has a box list online.)
The YIVO library holds the biography Rosalyn Yalow, Nobel laureate: her life and work in medicine: a biographical memoir.
Ada Yonath is the first Israeli woman to win the prize; she won for her work in chemistry in 2009. She has an article in Encyclopaedia Judaica. We have a print copy of this invaluable resource in the reference collection in addition to access to the online version.
Elfriede Jelinek, Austrian novelist, playwright and activist won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2004. She was raised by her Catholic mother and Jewish father. Her work was surely affected by her Roman Catholic preliminary education, the Vienna Conservatory where she earned a degree in organ, and her further studies at the University of Vienna.
If you search the catalog, search.cjh.org, there are eight works in the collection that speak about Jelinek’s work or have contributions by her, including Sexualisierte Gewalt : weibliche Erfahrungen in NS-Konzentrationslagern / Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer, Brigitte Halbmayr; mit einem Essay von Elfriede Jelinek [ Sexual violence: female experiences in Nazi concentration camps / Helga Amesberger, Katrin Auer, Brigitte Halbmayr, with an essay by Elfriede Jelinek], which is particularly relevant considering her well-known work The Piano Teacher.
Also available is “Ich will kein Theater”: mediale Ueberschreitungen [“I want no drama” About media shortfalls], which is particularly relevant considering her role in the release of Jack Unterweger.
Nadine Gordimer, South African author and political activist, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991. Multiple books she penned were banned during Apartheid.
Noted photojournalist for Newsweek magazine Bernard Gotfryd has a collection at the YIVO archives, RG 1380, that includes a photograph of Nadine Gordimer.
The LBI library here at the Center also holds a work with contributions by Gordimer: Wege im harten Gras: Erinnerungen an Deutschland, Suedafrika und England [Way in the tough grass: Memories of Germany, South Africa and England].
Within this distinguished group of Nobel Prize winners, the partner collections hold the most material on poet Nelly Sachs, who is pictured above. The first stanza of her poem “O The chimneys” is always particularly poignant to me. Click here for the text and analysis. (The book linked to here, The Holocaust Encyclopedia, is available in hard copy in the reference collection at the Center.)
Searching our catalog, search.cjh.org, for “Nelly Sachs” will reveal over a hundred items including more than ten original works by Sachs.
Of particular note is the exhibition catalog from an exhibit held by LBI in 1966, which documented the life and work of Nelly Sachs, Nobel Laureate in literature.
There is also an extensive collection of archival material held by the LBI archive that includes photographs of this exhibit. The entire collection, which amounts to a linear foot of material, is available entirely online. For photographs, including those above, click here.
Links to the digitized material are available via the finding aid.
For the exhibit documentation, reference Series IV: Leo Baeck Institute Exhibition April 1967, 1966-1967, or click here.
For poems, including translations and handwritten, material see Series III: Writings and Translations by Nelly Sachs, 1921, 1965-1966.
Many Jewish women who have not won the Nobel Prize have still made vast contributions to society. These range from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first female Jewish Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to mothers and teachers. To learn more about Jewish women in daily life, see the online bibliography, or search our collections by clicking here.
The above image of Nelly Sachs is from the Leo Baeck Institute collections.
From the Collections: Jewish Nurses
by Susan Woodland, Senior Archivist, American Jewish Historical Society
Jenna Weissman Joselit recently wrote a thoughtful column in The Jewish Daily Forward entitled, “Where Have All the Nurses Gone? Jews Flocked to Every Helping Profession But One.”
The column ruminates on nurses, why there have always been so few Jewish nurses, and the importance of Jewish nurses in the professional life of Henrietta Szold and the long history of Hadassah. Hadassah’s mission of practical Zionism, of course, began with 2 Jewish nurses in 1913 and continued with a medical unit in 1918 that sent American Jewish nurses and other health professionals to Palestine to heal the sick as well as to begin training local Jewish women as nurses.
There are many links between Jenna’s column and the collections at the Center for Jewish History. First and foremost is the Hadassah archives, currently on deposit with the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center. Here can be found many of Henrietta Szold’s papers dealing with her leadership during Hadassah’s earliest days and the development of the Hadassah Medical Organization in Palestine. (View the finding aid for the Hadassah Medical Organization collection at: http://digital.cjh.org/826508).
Hadassah led by Henrietta Szold was indeed the driving force behind the creation and funding of the American Zionist Medical Unit, which was finally permitted to sail as part of an American military convoy in the summer of 1918, as WWI was ending. Also participating in the funding for this Unit were the Joint Distribution Committee and the Federation of American Zionists (the forerunner of today’s Zionist Organization of America). For a detailed and powerful oral history recounting the trip across the Atlantic, the long journey from London to Jerusalem that summer, and the unhealthy and unsanitary conditions that these young American Jewish nurses found on their arrival, listen to the oral history recorded by one of the young nurses, Madeleine Lewin-Epstein, 40 years after the event: http://digital.cjh.org/1358275.
Henrietta Szold’s “Familiar Letters,” from which Jenna quotes, are not yet available online, but they can be viewed onsite for research by sending a request to the Center’s reference staff. Jenna wrote, “I couldn’t possibly hold a candle to the glories of Szold’s prose.” Henrietta Szold’s writing is indeed beautiful, detailed and very heartfelt. One of the deepest pleasures of researching original materials is the opportunity to discover unpublished letters, beautifully written.
Jenna also mentions The American Jewess. You can read about The American Jewess Project undertaken by the Jewish Women’s Archive, with issues now available through their website, at: www.jwa.org/research/americanjewess.
Another Center collection in which to find information about Jewish hospitals in New York City is the UJA-Federation of New York collection, now undergoing processing by the American Jewish Historical Society thanks to generous funding from UJA-Federation of New York. Nursing-related files that have turned up so far include mostly budgetary and financial files from the Mount Sinai Hospital Training School for Nurses, 1918 to 1951, plus an intriguing folder labeled, “Salaries of Nurses and Orderlies, 1918-1919.” Within the next few years, watch for announcements of finding aids posted for this large and diverse collection.
