Trude Weiss-Rosmarin

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Trude Weiss-Rosmarin (June 17, 1908 – June 26, 1989) was a German-born American writer, editor, scholar, and feminist activist. Born in Frankfurt, she studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig, earning a PhD in Semitics, philosophy, and archaeology from the University of Würzburg in 1931. She and her husband, Aaron Rosmarin, moved to the United States in 1931 and settled in New York City. In 1933 they opened the School of the Jewish Woman in Manhattan, under the auspices of Hadassah. The school was modeled after Frankfurt's Lehrhaus created by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber and aimed to give women better access to Jewish education; it offered Torah, Jewish history, Hebrew, and Yiddish. The school closed in 1939, but its newsletter grew into the Jewish Spectator, a quarterly magazine Weiss-Rosmarin edited for fifty years. Through the Jewish Spectator she pushed for changes in Jewish family law, Jewish–Arab coexistence in Israel, women’s education, and gender equality in the synagogue and public life. Her 1970 article "The Unfreedom of Jewish Women" is considered a pioneering feminist work on Jewish women's status by historian Paula Hyman. She also wrote a regular column, "Letters from New York," for the London Jewish Chronicle and served as national co-chair of education for the Zionist Organization of America. Weiss-Rosmarin taught at New York University and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and published numerous books, including Judaism and Christianity: The Differences (1943), Toward Jewish-Muslim Dialogue (1967), and Freedom and Jewish Women (1977). She died of cancer in Santa Monica, California, in 1989. She also contributed articles to Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility. She and Aaron Rosmarin divorced in 1951.