Week of March 24

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March 25, 1911

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

March 26, 2003

Rabbi Janet Marder becomes president of Central Conference of American Rabbis

March 29, 1951

Judy Holliday wins Academy Award for best actress

March 30, 1928

Hadassah president Irma Levy Lindheim challenges American Zionist leadership

 

March 25, 1911

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Approximately 500 workers were sewing shirtwaists at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company's sweatshop near Washington Square in Manhattan when a fire broke out on March 25, 1911.

The building lacked adequate fire escapes, firefighting equipment was unable to reach the top floors, and—most tragically—exit doors had been locked to prevent unauthorized work breaks. Some women, unable to reach an exit, jumped from ninth- and tenth-floor windows in a vain effort to save themselves. The fire did its work within twenty minutes. In the end, 146 died and many more were injured. Most of the dead were recent immigrant Jewish and Italian women between the ages of 16 and 23.

Just two years before, the Jewish owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company had been among the targets of the strike known as the uprising of the 20,000, which had sought union recognition through the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Although the strike forced some firms to settle with their workers, Triangle fired many of its union members and remained an anti-union shop.

In the wake of the fire, the Jewish community and leading women in the labor movement sprang into action. The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), a cross-class coalition that worked as an ally of the ILGWU, organized a public meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2. There, Rose Schneiderman, one of the leaders of the 1909 strike, called upon all working people to take action. Three days later, 500,000 people turned out for the funerals of seven unidentified victims of the fire.

Under pressure from the ILGWU, the WTUL, and others, New York State established a Committee on Safety in the wake of the fire. In addition, the state legislature set up a Factory Investigating Committee, which drafted new legislation designed to protect workers. Their recommendations included automatic sprinkler systems and occupancy limits tied to the dimensions of exit staircases. 36 labor and safety laws were passed in the three years after the fire, thanks to the agitation of working people.

Even as these regulations went into effect, the site of the Triangle fire remained a rallying point for labor organizing. Some survivors, galvanized by their experience, went on to lifetimes of labor activism. Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire, later became Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt. She said that the Triangle Fire was what motivated her to devote her career to helping workers. The last survivor of the fire, Rose Rosenfeld Freedman, died in 2001 at age 107.

See also: This Week in History entry for November 22, 1909.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1409-1412; Dave von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (New York, 2003); www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/; Jacqueline Jones et al., Created Equal (New York, 2003).

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March 26, 2003

Rabbi Janet Marder becomes president of Central Conference of American Rabbis

When Rabbi Janet Marder was named president of the Reform Movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis on March 26, 2003, she became the first woman to lead a major rabbinical organization and the first woman to lead any major Jewish co-ed religious organization in the United States.

Marder was ordained in 1979 by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). After graduate work in comparative literature at UCLA, she became the rabbi of Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles, the first gay and lesbian synagogue to be recognized by the Reform movement. At Beth Chayim Chadashim, Marder founded an AIDS-education program for the Jewish community, called NECHAMA.

After five years as a pulpit rabbi, Marder became the director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations Pacific Southwest Council in 1988. For 11 years, she supervised congregations in Nevada, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California. She returned to the pulpit in 1999, as senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, CA. With approximately 1300 families, Beth Am is one of the largest congregations in the U.S. to be headed by a female rabbi. Marder continued in this position during her two-year CCAR term.

In her presidential installation sermon on March 29, 2003, Marder spoke about the need to develop and sustain progressive Judaism in Israel, and about "developing an inner life—about personal prayer, about seeking the Holy One, and quiet hours inside a book, and the solitude that is essential for a life of clarity and integrity." Her term as CCAR President ended in 2005.

Sources:www.betham.org/staff.html; Los Altos Town Crier, April 2, 2003, www.losaltosonline.com/2003/04/02/ lah-rabbi-named-first-woman-to-lead-jewish-clergy/.

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March 29, 1951

Judy Holliday wins Academy Award for best actress

Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson, and Anne Baxter were all in the running. When the Academy Award for best actress was announced on March 29, 1951, however, the Oscar went to young comedienne Judy Holliday, for her performance as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. Holliday had created the Billie Dawn role on Broadway in 1946. On both stage and screen, Holliday played the ex-showgirl girlfriend of a corrupt tycoon who is trying to mold her to his will. In the end, Holliday's seemingly dumb-blonde character manages to overturn her boyfriend's plot to corrupt the federal government. The New York Times called her performance "not only funny but also human and moving."

Holliday's acting career was brief but impressive. Born in 1921, she grew up in New York City. She was brought up mainly within her mother's extended and socialist-leaning family. Her father was an active Zionist leader as well as the president of the American Federation of Musicians from 1929 to 1937.

After graduating at the top of her class at the Julia Richman High School, she got her start in the theater as a member of the Revuers, a group that played clubs in New York's Greenwich Village. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who would go on to great fame as a musical-comedy writing team, were also members of the troupe. Holliday's first Broadway role was as a prostitute in Kiss Them for Me (1945), for which she won the Clarence Derwent Award for best supporting actress. During this period, Hollywood producers convinced the actress to change her last name from Tuvim. She chose Holliday because of its relationship to holy days, one of the Hebrew meanings of Tuvim.

Despite her success on stage in Born Yesterday, Harry Cohn, the producer of the film version, wanted to find a more glamorous and well-known star for the movie role, reputedly dismissing Holliday as "that fat Jewish broad." The efforts of director George Cukor and stars Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey to spotlight the young actress in a supporting role in Adam's Rib (1949) finally convinced Cohn of Holliday's marketability.

One year after receiving her Academy Award, Holliday got caught up in the McCarthy-era investigations of Hollywood and was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee in 1952. Transcripts reveal that she used her "dumb blonde" persona to deflect the committee's attempts to implicate her or get her to name names. She was not accused of being a Communist, but the taint of the investigation kept her off of television and radio for a number of years. Holliday's contract with Columbia studios continued, however, and she appeared in a series of films including The Marrying Kind (1952) and It Should Happen to You (1954). Holliday returned to Broadway in 1956 in the hit musical Bells are Ringing, written by her friends Betty Comden and Arthur Green, with music by Comden, Green, and Jules Styne, and directed by Jerome Robbins. Holliday played a wish-fulfilling telephone operator, a role for which she earned the New York Drama Desk Award and the Tony Award (chosen over Ethel Merman and Julie Andrews). Holliday also starred in the film version of the musical in 1960.

A diagnosis of breast cancer in 1960 limited Holliday's future work. She died in 1965, at age 43.

Sources: Gary Carey, Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story (New York, 1982); William Holtzman, Judy Holliday (New York, 1982); Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 647-649; New York Times, March 30, 1951, June 8, 1965; http://www.jwa.org/discover/comedy/holliday.html; The Judy Holliday Resource Center: http://www.wtv-zone.com/lumina/judy/main.html.

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March 30, 1928

Hadassah president Irma Levy Lindheim challenges American Zionist leadership

Irma Levy Lindheim served as the third president of Hadassah, the American women's Zionist organization, from 1926 to 1928. During her presidency, Hadassah was in frequent conflict with the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which wanted to control and dispense the funds raised from the Hadassah membership.

On March 30, 1928, Lindheim declared that the administration of the ZOA was "not an effective instrument for the achievement of world Zionist aims for the upbuilding of Palestine." In so doing, she asserted her opposition to the leadership of ZOA President Louis Lipsky. Although Lindheim was careful to note that she spoke as an individual and that Hadassah had no quarrel with the World Zionist Organization led by Chaim Weizmann, she came under attack for her comments from both ZOA leadership and other Hadassah members.

The Hadassah-ZOA conflict had roots dating back to 1918, when Hadassah (founded in 1912) first joined the umbrella organization, giving up some of its organizational independence. Seven members of the Hadassah board had been expelled in 1920 when the organization's Central Committee refused to raise money for the ZOA fund Keren Hayesod. Despite Hadassah's loss of autonomy, the organization's membership steadily increased even as general ZOA membership declined.

Following Lindheim's declaration, the national board of Hadassah voted "no confidence" in Lipsky on April 22, 1928. In retaliation, the Zionist National Executive Committee, meeting on May 27, 1928, threatened to discipline the women's organization. This conflict helped to establish Hadassah's independence from the male Zionist establishment. Lindheim, however, declined a second term as Hadassah president.

Lindheim remained an active Zionist after stepping down from the Hadassah president's chair, touring the U.S. to speak on behalf of the Zionist labor organization Histadrut and the labor Zionist groups Hashomer Hatzair and Poale Zion. In the 1930s, she parted ways with Hadassah, defining herself as further to the political left. After 1933, Lindheim split her time between Palestine/Israel and the U.S. In Israel, she helped to found several kibbutzim; in the U.S., she created educational programs to counter assimilation and to help mothers develop Jewish identity in their children. Lindheim died in California in 1978.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 571-583, 856-858; Irma Lindheim, Parallel Quest (New York, 1962); New York Times, March 31, 1928, April 1, 1928, May 28, 1928, April 11, 1978.

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