Week of May 19

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May 19, 1974

Sandy Sasso ordained as first female Reconstructionist rabbi

May 20, 1989

Death of comedian Gilda Radner at 42

May 21, 1907

Atlantic City hotel apologizes to Bertha Rayner Frank for anti-Jewish discrimination

May 22, 1899

Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls opens

May 23, 2004

Susan Sontag publishes last essay

May 24, 1982

Carol Gilligan publishes "In a Different Voice"

May 25, 1929

Birth of opera star Beverly Sills

 

May 19, 1974

Sandy Sasso ordained as first female Reconstructionist rabbi

Sandy Eisenberg Sasso became the first female Reconstructionist rabbi when she was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Philadelphia, on May 19, 1974.

Very involved in her Reform Philadelphia congregation and youth group as a girl, Sandy Eisenberg thought from the age of 16 that she would like to become a rabbi even though she was aware that this role had not been open to women. She recalls that during a high school seminar, her rabbi, who knew of her interest in the rabbinate, asked her to read out loud a passage from Leo Trepp's Eternal Faith, Eternal People which noted that no woman in America had been ordained as a rabbi yet.

Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Jewish Reconstructionism, had been reluctant to turn his movement into a formal denomination with a rabbinical school of its own. When RRC was founded in 1968, however, it was assumed that women would be welcome as students. Eisenberg was nonetheless aware that she would be anomaly as a female rabbinical student and delayed applying to RRC until the end of her senior year in college. She enrolled in the fall of 1969, joining RRC's second class of rabbinical students.

While in school, Sandy Eisenberg married her classmate, Dennis Sasso, making them the first rabbinical couple in history. Like the Reform movement's Sally Priesand, who became the first woman ordained by a rabbinical seminary in 1972, Sasso found that, as a rabbinical student, others looked to her as a voice for women's roles and progress within Judaism. She soon became identified as one of the voices of feminist Judaism.

After her ordination, Sasso served as rabbi of the Manhattan Reconstructionist Congregation. In 1977, she and her husband were hired to serve as the rabbis of Beth El Zedeck in Indianapolis, which is identified both with the Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. She thus became the first woman to serve a Conservative congregation and the first woman to serve as rabbi in partnership with her husband at the same congregation. Not surprisingly, Sasso holds title to many firsts as a woman rabbi, including becoming the first rabbi to become a mother when her son David was born on June 22, 1976.

Sasso is very active in interfaith activities and lectures at Butler University and the Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. She is the author of eleven acclaimed children's books (with a forthcoming twelfth due for publication in Spring 2009) as well as a monthly column on religion and spirituality for the Indianapolis Star. She also recently published a book for adults on midrash, God's Echo – Exploring Scripture with Midrash, and speaks nationally on children and spirituality. Today, Sasso and her husband serve as the senior rabbis of Congregation Beth El Zedeck in Indianapolis.

Sources: Personal communications from Sandy Sasso to the Jewish Women's Archive, May 2005 and May 2008; Pamela S. Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985 (Boston, 1998); www.beliefnet.com/author/author_51.html.

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May 20, 1989

Death of comedian Gilda Radner at 42

Gilda Radner's death from ovarian cancer on May 20, 1989 at age 42 cut short a vital life and comedic career. Born in Detroit in 1946, Radner became widely known as a hilarious member the first cast of Saturday Night Live.

Radner attended the University of Michigan, but left school to move to Toronto where she began her professional acting career. As part of Toronto company of the improvisational group Second City Comedy, she worked with her future SNL colleagues Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Bill Murray. Radner moved to New York in 1973 where she performed Off-Broadway in "The National Lampoon Show." In October 1975, she appeared in the premier of Saturday Night Live and she remained with the show until 1980, winning an Emmy Award in 1978.

Radner created numerous memorable characters, like Roseanne Roseannadanna, while on SNL which established her as one of the cast's most popular members. While on SNL, Radner appeared in numerous skits which drew attention to her Jewish identity. Her fake advertisement for "Jewess Jeans," mocked the materialism of young Jewish women, but also presented the "Jewess" as a role model to which women from other ethnic and racial groups should aspire. A skit which focused on the celebration of Hanukkah offered a rare positive enactment of Jewish ritual on 1970s TV.

In 1979, Radner appeared in a solo Broadway show, Gilda Radner - Live from New York, and in succeeding years appeared in a number of movies. During the filiming of Hanky Panky (1982), she met her second husband, actor Gene Wilder, with whom she would act in Haunted Honeymoon (1986), before Radner was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Radner, who had struggled thoughout her career with issues related to eating disorders, battled cancer with fierce humor and continued engagement in the world. In an 1988 appearance on It's Gary Shandling's Show, she celebrated her own physical and comedic resilience. She also wrote an autobiography during her illness, It's Always Something, describing her career and the support she'd found within the Wellness Community in battling her illness. After a year of reemission, Gilda Radner's cancer reemerged, and she died on May 20, 1988.

In addition to her comedic legacy, Radner's death helped to sharpen the movement for cancer awareness and early detection and treatment. In addition to the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles established by Gene Wilder, Gilda's Clubs throughout North America offer a crucial supportive environment for women and their families in the struggle against cancer.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encylopedia, pp. 1121-1122; Making Trouble (film, 2007); .

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May 21, 1907

Atlantic City hotel apologizes to Bertha Rayner Frank for anti-Jewish discrimination

In May 1907, Baltimorean Bertha Rayner Frank's vacation turned into a cause célèbre when she was confronted with the reality of anti-Jewish social discrimination. The recently widowed Mrs. Frank had been in residence for a few days at the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel in Atlantic City where members of her family had stayed earlier in the year. When Frank went to reserve lodgings for two of her nieces, however, she was confronted with a clerk's inquiry as to whether her nieces were "Hebrews," and the accompanying explanation that "We don't entertain Hebrews."

Greatly "affronted," Frank, who was the sister of U.S. Senator Isidor Rayner from Baltimore, left the hotel abruptly, and her predicament landed on the front page of major American newspapers. The New York Times story detailed Mrs. Frank's outrage: "I was so annoyed at this insult to Jews at large, never having heard directly of such a thing happening to self-respecting Jews of good position, that I immediately ordered my trunks packed and left the hotel."

The fact that many upscale hotels and resorts discriminated against Jews was in fact, as the Times reported, "well known." The first major public case that brought the practice to public attention occurred in 1877 when Joseph Seligman, a prominent financier and pal of President Grant, was excluded from the Grand Hotel in Saratoga, New York. In 1907, according to the Times, many prominent Jews, having sent inquiries for accommodations to hotels in Atlantic City, had received cards engraved with the message that "The patronage of Hebrews is not solicited."

In the initial Times article reporting on the Frank case, the hotel management equivocated about their policy toward Jews, noting that "We have many well-known and prominent Hebrews among our regular patrons, and we never have any difficulty with them," but also maintaining that "We have always reserved the right to exercise a certain degree of discrimination in respect to our patrons."

What seemed most shocking both in 1877 and 1907 was not the fact that hotels might choose to discriminate in their clientele, but that such socially respectable individuals as Seligman and Frank should be among those excluded. Both the Times article about the "affront" and an accompanying article described Frank's respectability and philanthropic involvement in both Jewish and "non-sectarian" causes in great detail, noting that she "is a woman of exceptional culture and wide acquaintance, received and welcomed by people of the highest social position in this country and Europe."

Frank's own comments reveal that what she found offensive was not so much that the hotel might exclude Jews but that they would dare to exclude Jews of her stature and acquaintance, declaring "if you can't distinguish people who are quite on a par with the best in the land you really should employ a detective to keep you acquainted with those who are unobjectional [sic] Jewish people. You seem to entertain a very mixed assemblage... many of whom I should not care to meet and certainly not to know." There was an implicit understanding that while hotels might have reason to exclude uncultured Jews of Eastern European origin, it was outrageous to apply such discrimination to well-established German Jews of "good position."

Apparently under some pressure from the unwanted publicity, the hotel managers sent Mrs. Frank a public apology on May 21, 1907. They assured her that she had been " a welcome guest in our house as your family had been before," and expressed their exceeding regret "that you should have been given the impression that either you were not welcome or that your friends were not wanted." Their letter, however, did not address whether the hotel intended to exclude Jews who were not among Mrs. Frank's friends and family.

One New York State senator, inspired by the affront to Mrs. Frank, brought a bill to the New York Senate that would have banned public announcements such as were used by numerous establishments stating that "Jewish patronage is not solicited." Such statements, however, continued to be promulgated for many decades.

The whole episode illustrates the unsettled place occupied even by those early 20^th-century Jews who had most reason to feel that they had a firm claim to American acceptance and privilege. The fact that even the wealthy sister of a U.S. Senator could feel the unwelcome pain of exclusion emphasized the marginality of all American Jews. Implicit as well in both the outrage and apologies occasioned by the incident were the ugly prejudices and apprehensions brought forth by what both WASPs and acculturated Jews saw as the unrefined conduct of nouveau riche Eastern European Jews. As far as Bertha Rayner Frank and her family had come in America, American Jews were still a long way from the acceptance and inclusion that she and her Eastern European counterparts equally craved.

Sources: "Hotel Affronts Senator's Sister," New York Times, May 18, 1907; "Apology to Mrs. Frank," New York Times, May 23, 1907; "Bill to Protect Jews in Hotels," New York Times, May 24, 1907.

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May 22, 1899

Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls opens

Funded by a bequest from the British Baroness Clara de Hirsch, the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls opened its doors on New York's East 63rd Street on May 22, 1899. Two years in the planning, the Home was designed "to benefit working girls ... to improve their mental, moral, and physical condition, and train them for self-support." With bedrooms for 100 young women, the Home was designed to shelter both American-born and immigrant young women either working or preparing to work.

In addition to lodging, the Home provided meals, physical exercise, and classes in housework, millinery, laundry, dressmaking, and other "domestic" and "industrial" skills. Reflecting the anxieties of its time, the Home sought as much to protect the girls' morals as to ensure their physical health. The Home's initial Board of Directors, composed mostly of women of German-Jewish heritage, believed that positions as domestic servants would be safe and appropriate for their charges, and that all the girls should ultimately marry and be homemakers. Therefore, they sought to train them in the skills that would serve them well in both roles.

In addition, the Home provided educational and social opportunities. Because it was meant to serve mainly Eastern European immigrants, the Home offered English language classes as well as elementary education classes. In addition, basic Jewish religious instruction was offered for one hour a week. Outside of these classes, residents were offered literary and social clubs, access to a library, and trips to museums, parks, and concerts. Finally, the Home sponsored regular dances in an effort to keep girls away from the corrupting influence of the public dance hall.

Mirroring similar efforts by Jewish and non-Jewish clubwomen around the country, the Clara de Hirsch home combined two distinct but related aims. Supporters hoped to aid and support newcomers who might struggle to survive and thrive in the harsh urban conditions faced by immigrants. In addition, they sought to Americanize their charges and teach them a well-defined version of middle class respectability.

Over time, the Home's programs changed in response to changes in city life and the needs of New York's young women. Reacting to the imposition of immigration restriction laws and an expansion of educational opportunities for women, the Home closed its trade school in 1926, ending the classes in millinery, sewing, and other "industrial arts." In the next decade, the institution became home to rising numbers of European Jewish refugees, and also to self-supporting students. In 1960, facing a declining demand for its services, the Home merged with the 92nd Street YMHA, closing its doors on 63rd Street and contributing its assets to the building of new dormitories at the Y.

Sources: New York Times May 1, 1897, April 24, 1898, May 23, 1899, May 18, 1949; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 232-234.

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May 23, 2004

Susan Sontag publishes last essay

Public intellectual and controversial essayist Susan Sontag published her last essay, "Regarding the Torture of Others," in the May 23, 2004, edition of the New York Times Magazine. The essay discussed the recently-released photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Bush administration's response, and the power of photography to shape ideas and memory in the modern world. "Photographs have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events," Sontag wrote, and, "to live is to be photographed … but to live is also to pose. To act is to share in the community of actions recorded as images." About the photos of prisoners degraded and tortured in Iraq, she wrote that "what is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality." And, she added, despite the administration's stated wishes, "the pictures will not go away. … even if our leaders choose not to look at them, there will be thousands more snapshots and videos. Unstoppable."

Like other commentaries written around the same time, "Regarding the Torture of Others" condemned both the events at Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration's response. But as a cultural critic, Sontag also used her essay to interrogate the cultural moment that helped to produce the scandal, and the role of modern media (photography) both in this specific crisis and more generally as a shaping force in American culture. The essay thus echoed several themes that run throughout Sontag's work. Best-known for her essays on a variety of topics, she wrote most frequently about various aspects of popular culture and the media. Among her most famous essays are "Notes on Camp," (1964) which described an underground aesthetic of artifice and exaggeration then largely unknown outside gay culture; and "Against Interpretation" (1966), which argued that art should be experienced viscerally rather than cerebrally, appreciated for its style rather than its content. That approach to art brought controversy when it led Sontag to praise the work of Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi Germany's famous filmmaker, as aesthetic masterpieces ("On Style," 1966). Sontag reconsidered her position in a later essay, "Fascinating Fascism" (1974).

Other acclaimed essay collections included On Photography (1977), which won the Nation Book Critics Circle Award for criticism; Illness as Metaphor (1978); AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989); and her last collection, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). In addition, Sontag published four novels: The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000). A review of In America characterized Sontag's fiction as "always ripe with ideas" and her prose as "lithe" and "playful."

But not everyone responded to her work with praise. Always bold and outspoken in print, Sontag drew fire from both ends of the political spectrum; for instance, the right condemned her when she wrote glowingly of North Vietnam, and the left when she denounced European communism as "fascism with a human face." As an obituary noted, she was called, variously, "explosive, anticlimactic, original derivative, … condescending, populist, puritanical, sybaritic … ardent, bloodless … visceral, reasoned, chilly, effusive, relevant [and] passé…. No one ever called her dull." Due in part to this divided but uniformly strong public response to her critical work, in part to her roles in pop-culture films by Woody Allen and Andy Warhol, and in part to her striking features—especially her intense gaze, and mass of dark hair with a streak of white—her image became by the late 20th century an instantly recognizable part of American popular culture.

Susan Sontag died of leukemia on December 28, 2004.

Sources: New York Times, March 12, 2000, May 23, 2004, December 29, 2004; Washington Post, December 29, 2004; Jewish Women in America, pp. 1292-1295; Sohnya Sayres, Susan Sontag: The Elegaic Modernist (1990).

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May 24, 1982

Carol Gilligan publishes "In a Different Voice"

Carol Gilligan has built a career out of challenging the mainstream. After earning a B.A. at Swarthmore College, an M.A. at Radcliffe, and a Ph.D. at Harvard, she taught psychology at the University of Chicago in 1965 and 1966. There, she was actively involved in the civil rights movement and in protests against the Vietnam war. With other junior professors, she refused to turn in grades that might jeopardize a student's draft exemption. Returning to Harvard in 1968, she began to question the standard theories of women's moral development, noting that they had been derived solely from studies of men. Her first book, published on May 24, 1982, was In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. Challenging long-held assumptions and igniting national debate, Gilligan argued that women make moral choices from within a framework of relationships rather than according to a set of abstract rules. The book continues to be a mainstay of gender-studies reading lists and college courses.

Following the groundbreaking work of In a Different Voice, Gilligan went on to publish several more important books about women and girls. These include Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School (co-editor, 1990) and Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development (1992). Though some of her methods and conclusions are considered controversial, her research had a profound impact on the fields of psychology and gender studies and on the modern women's movement.

More recently, Gilligan has widened her focus to include men and boys. In 2002, publisher Alfred A. Knopf released The Birth of Pleasure. Drawing on Greek myth, Shakespeare, Freud, Toni Morrison, and research with heterosexual couples, adolescent girls, and young boys and their parents, Gilligan presents in this book a new map of love. She argues that people tend to relive tragic stories of loss and betrayal and suggests that we can learn to relive other stories instead. In 2008, she published her first work of fiction, Kyra: A Novel.

During the years of her groundbreaking research and writing, Gilligan has also been an influential teacher. She spent more than 30 years at the Harvard School of Education, where she became the first professor of Gender Studies in 1997. In 2002, she moved to New York University, where she is currently a University Professor affiliated with the law school. Outside the academy, she sits on the board of the Ms. Foundation for Women and the advisory board of the Holocaust-education organization Facing History and Ourselves.

Gilligan's work has earned her wide recognition. In 1984, Ms. magazine named her the "woman of the year." She has received a Grawemeyer award for contributions to education and a Heinz Award for contributions to understanding the human condition. Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential Americans.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 512-514; http://its.law.nyu.edu/faculty/profiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=bio.main&personID=19946; http://its.law.nyu.edu/faculty/profiles/CVFiles/Carol%20Gilligan%20CV%20Spring06.pdf; http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674445430/104-7894730-1983942.

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May 25, 1929

Birth of opera star Beverly Sills

Born on May 25, 1929 as Belle Miriam Silverman, Beverly Sills began singing in public at the age of four, when she appeared on the Uncle Bob's Rainbow Hour radio show. She began her formal musical training at age seven, under the tutelage of Estelle Liebling, who would remain her teacher until 1970. By the time she began studying with Liebling, Sills reportedly had memorized 22 operatic arias.

A New York Times review on April 7, 1975 reported that although the Metropolitan Opera's staging of The Siege of Corinth was impressive, "everything … was dwarfed by the presence of Miss [Beverly] Sills in her long-delayed and long-awaited Metropolitan debut." The review went on to praise Sills as "beautiful to look at, graceful in movement, authoritative in style." The coloratura-voiced singer—and her fans—had waited a long time for this event.

Although her father wanted her to go to college, Sills left school at 16 to tour with a Gilbert and Sullivan repertory company. Her grand opera debut came in 1947, when she played the Spanish gypsy Frasquita in Bizet's Carmen, with the Philadelphia Civic Opera. Though Sills had parts with many second-tier companies, she found no permanent position until she joined the New York City Opera Company (NYCO) in 1955. Although the NYCO was considered the city's "second" opera company, inferior to the Metropolitan, Sills's voice and acting ability brought the company new success and prestige. For the next two decades, with interruptions for the births of her two children, Sills was the NYCO's prima donna, performing a variety of roles, including some particularly unusual and difficult ones.

In 1975, Sills finally got the chance to sing at the city's premier opera house, when she sang the role of Pamira in The Siege of Corinth. She sang at the Met several times over the next few years, but retired from the stage in 1980. Her farewell gala was attended by two thousand fans at Lincoln Center and televised nationwide on PBS.

The year before her final performance, Sills took on a new role, as director of the NYCO. The first woman and the first performer to fill that job, Sills ran the company for the next decade. Her success as a fundraiser and public relations spokesperson enabled the Company to eliminate its debt. She also introduced innovations such as supertitles in English, enabling more people to enjoy opera. In addition, she emphasized casting American singers and staging American operas.

During her years at the helm of the NYCO, Sills also became a nationally-known spokesperson for the arts. She brought opera to a broader public, substituting on occasion for Johnny Carson as guest host of the Tonight Show and appearing in numerous specials including one called "Sills and [Carol] Burnett at the Met" which was broadcast on Thanksgiving in 1976. Music critic Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times has described her as "a media natural who demystified the performing arts for average Americans."

Sills was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. When Sills left the NYCO, it was to become chair of the Lincoln Center board, where she was again the first woman and the first performer to hold the position. After retiring from Lincoln Center, Sills became chair of the board at the Metropolitan Opera in 2002, retiring from that post on January 25, 2005. Beverly Sills died of lung cancer on July 2, 2007.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1252-1256; New York Times, April 8, 1975, March 20, 2005; Beverly Sills, Beverly: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1987); http://www.medaloffreedom.com/BeverlySills.htm.

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