JWA - Jewish Women in Civil Rights - Elaine DeLott Baker

In Focus: Jewish Women in Civil Rights

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Interview: Elaine DeLott Baker

Elaine DeLott, Hebrew School Valedictory Address, Temple TiFereth, 1952. Courtesy of Elaine DeLott Baker.

Elaine DeLott Baker was born in Winthrop, Massachusetts, in 1942. Three of her four grandparents were from Eastern Europe. Issues of class, social mobility, and respectability were fraught with tensions for first- and second-generation American Jews. Elaine's father dropped out of school in the eighth grade to help support his family and worked as a plumber's helper. In addition, because his mother had been unable to provide for him, he had spent some of his childhood in an orphanage.

Elaine relates the northern Jewish communities' disapproval of her father not moving quickly enough into the middle class and how it influenced her to join the civil rights movement: "Even as a first-generation American, he was expected by his culture to achieve a status higher than a laborer. Within the Jewish community, my father was a failure." Baker's early sensitivity to categorizing people based on wealth "contributed heavily to my emerging sense of social justice."

How to Cite This Page
Jewish Women's Archive. "JWA - Elaine DeLott Baker - Interview." <http://jwa.org/discover/infocus/civilrights/baker/index.html>.