Women We Love!

Jews are generally not a quiet people -- at least not in America in this day and age. We like to speak up, to speak out, to express our opinionated selves fairly loudly. So when the White House announced this year's recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, it's not surprising that there was a vocal "Jewish response."

Sixteen years ago today, Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. 

From This Week in History:

Last night comedians including Carl Reiner, Gilbert Gottfried, Greg Giraldo, Jeffrey Ross, and Mario Cantone roasted Joan Rivers on Comedy Central.&n

Sonia Sotomayor has just been confirmed as the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice! Wow. Just, wow.

Forty-five years ago today, the bodies of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael (Mickey) Schwerner, and James Chaney were discovered, buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi. They had disappeared six weeks earlier in Neshoba County, Mississippi, while participating in Freedom Summer, a project of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Our friends at the National Museum of American Jewish History have recently announced a new project for which they are seeking public input. Their new museum, scheduled to open in November 2010, will include a gallery called "Only in America," that will -- in their words -- "examine the choices, challenges, and opportunities faced by a remarkable group of a token 18 American Jews on their paths to accomplishment."

If you haven't read it already, check out this excellent NYT interview with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- a JWA hero -- by Emily Bazelon (a senior editor at Slate, a founder of their new online women's magazine, Double X, and a serious Jewess with Attitude in her own right).

Today would have been the 102 birthday of Frida Kahlo, the painter famous for her striking self-portraits and her marriage to Diego Rivera (not to mention her impressive eyebrows). Though she came to be known for her representations of Mexican life and was, in fact, referred to as La Mexicana -- the quintessential Mexican woman -- her work often explored issues of identity and its hybridity, informed by her own experience as the daughter of a German Jewish immigrant father and a Mexican Catholic mother.

Here we are, poised on the edge of a "holiday weekend" in which we celebrate America's independence through those ever-meaningful traditions of barbeque, fireworks, and shopping sales.