Week of July 7

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July 9, 1733

Colonial Jewish mother instructs her son to eat "bread and butter"

July 9, 1967

Jennie Tourel sings on Mt. Scopus

July 10, 1948

Hortense Calisher debuts in the "New Yorker"

July 11, 1986

Liz Lerman dance celebrates Statue of Liberty centennial

July 12, 1982

Radical activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson dies

July 12, 1989

"When Harry Met Sally" hits theaters

July 13, 1935

Tillie Lewis opens cannery for American-grown Italian tomatoes

 

July 9, 1733

Colonial Jewish mother instructs her son to eat "bread and butter"

The 35 surviving letters written, between 1733 and 1748, by Abigaill Levy Franks to her son Naphtali in London offer rare access to the lives and concerns of colonial American Jews. On July 9, 1733, she offered Naphtali close instructions on his religious conduct, admonishing him to "be more Circumspect in the Observance of some things, Especialy y[ou]r morning Dev[otio]ns." She also warns him against eating anything but bread and butter at the London home of her brother, Asher, "nor noe where Else where there is the Least doubt of things not done after our Strict Judiacall [Jewish/kosher] method."

Napthali moved to London from New York at age 16 in order to seek out better business (and presumably marriage) prospects than those available in the new world. His mother's letters from New York highlight how personal and kinship connections helped to maintain a network of Jewish merchant families around the Atlantic world. Moreover, the letters yield valuable insights on New York politics and society, illustrate the ways in which Jews were able to enter into colonial American society, and reflect the strains and challenges of maintaining a distinctive Jewish identity in that setting.

Abigaill's letters attest to the challenges of finding acceptance while maintaining distinctiveness. As indicated in the July 9th and other letters, she wondered about the rationale for some Jewish practices ("wathever my thoughts may be Concerning Some Fables"), but she remained committed to their observance ("this and Some other foundementalls I Look Open the Observence Conscientioussly, and therefore with my blessing I Strictly injoin it to your care."). Her letters demonstrate the extent of her family's integration into non-Jewish New York society and culture, but also reveal the painful costs of acceptance. Abigaill's most emotional letter (June 7, 1743) conveys the depth of her anguish upon learning that her daughter, Phila, had secretly wed Oliver Delancey, who came from a prosperous non-Jewish family. There is no indication that Abigaill ever saw Phila again.

Abigaill's despair over her daughter's wedding indicates the value she placed on Jewishness. The attachment to Judaism of her husband, Jacob Franks, may be inferred from his leading role in New York's Shearith Israel congregation. Yet, ultimately, their story points to the tenuousness of Jewish identity for acculturated colonial Jewish families. Historians are fond of pointing out that none of Abigaill Franks' grandchildren remained Jewish. None of her children who remained in America married Jews. And although her sons who moved to England, Napthali and Moses, both married Jewish women, their children married non-Jews.

Sources: Leo Hershkowitz and Isidore S. Meyer, eds., Letters of the Franks Family, 1733-1748, (Waltham, MA, 1968); Edith B. Gelles, ed., The Letters of Abigaill Levy Franks, 1733-1748 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). The June 7, 1743 letter from Abigaill to Naphtali can be seen at www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-haven.html.

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July 9, 1967

Jennie Tourel sings on Mt. Scopus

On July 9, 1967, mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel joined Leonard Bernstein for a concert on Jerusalem's Mount Scopus to celebrate the end of the Six-Day War. It was a moment that brought together several of the themes of her life: music, dedication to Israel, and work with prominent composers and conductors. Born in Vitebsk, Belorussia (now Belarus) in 1900, she trained as a singer in Paris, where she debuted at the Opéra Comique in 1933. She won acclaim for her performance of the title role in Bizet's Carmen. For nearly a decade, she was the star of the Opéra Comique, singing the roles of Charlotte in Massenet's Werther and the title role in Thomas's Mignon.

Fleeing Paris just a week before the Nazi invasion, Tourel made her way to New York via Portugal, Cuba, and Canada. Though at first she had trouble finding work, she eventually impressed a musical agent who arranged an audition with the conductor Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini, in turn, hired her to sing with the New York Philharmonic, and she soon appeared with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra as well. Later, Leonard Bernstein wrote the Jeremiah Symphony especially for her voice, and Tourel performed it all over the world.

In her late forties, Tourel became well-known as a song recitalist. Though she had received critical and popular acclaim for her work in opera, her performances of French, German, and Russian songs, including Ravel's Shéhérazade, Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, and works by Schubert and Schumann, gained her an even wider circle of fans. At an age when many singers retire, Tourel continued to give acclaimed performances to eager audiences. She continued to perform until past the age of seventy.

In addition to performing all over the world, Tourel taught at New York's Juilliard School, and annually at the Samuel Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem. In 1949, she became one of the first internationally-known artists to visit the infant Jewish state. Following that first visit, she remained involved in the musical life of Israel, with frequent visits and master classes. Tourel died on November 23, 1973. Leonard Bernstein paid her tribute in a eulogy at her funeral, saying, "when Jennie opened her mouth, God spoke."

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1408-1409; New York Times, November 25, 1973, December 9, 1973, September 22, 1974.

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July 10, 1948

Hortense Calisher debuts in the "New Yorker"

The July 10, 1948, edition of the New Yorker magazine included as its fiction selection Hortense Calisher's short story "The Middle Drawer." It was Calisher's first published work. The daughter of a Southern Jewish perfume-maker and a German immigrant, Calisher was born on December 20, 1911, in New York City, and educated at Barnard College where she studied English and philosophy.

After working briefly for the New York Department of Public Welfare, Calisher got married, moved to the suburbs, and occupied herself mainly with raising two sons. She later said that she had composed "The Middle Drawer" while walking her son to school. Like much of her later work, this O. Henry Award-winning story drew upon themes of Calisher's own life. Most of Calisher's fiction features Jewish characters, but their ethnic identity is usually part of the background rather than a dramatic element.

Calisher published her first book of short stories, In the Absence of Angels, in 1951, and her first novel, False Entry, in 1961. She has written about her own family in three memoirs. The most recent, Tattoo for a Slave (2004), traces the history of her father's family from before the Civil War to her own lifetime. She has been a Guggenheim fellow twice and a National Book Award finalist three times. Though popular fame has eluded her, she has been lauded as a "writer's writer" with a wide imaginative and formal range, and has been both praised and criticized for her intricate plot and rich character development.

Past president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and of PEN, Calisher lives in New York City.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 201-202; http://www.harcourtbooks.com/bookcatalogs/bookpage.asp?isbn=0151009309&option=authorbio.

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July 11, 1986

Liz Lerman dance celebrates Statue of Liberty centennial

As part of the celebrations of the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, Liz Lerman's Still Crossing was performed in Manhattan on July 11, 1986. The performance, part of a series of dance performances in a show called "Liberty Dances," brought together dancers from both of Lerman's companies: Dancers of the Third Age, a company of elderly dancers, and the younger Dance Exchange. The professional dancers were joined by members of the 92nd Street Y and a YWCA in Brooklyn in a piece that the New York Times reviewer described as simple but moving, with "dignity and eloquence."

Choreographer Liz Lerman was educated at the University of Maryland and at George Washington University, where she earned an M.A. in dance. She established the Dance Exchange in Washington, DC, in 1976, as a school that included classes for senior adults and "special populations." After three years, she also launched a touring Dance Exchange company; the school was later closed so that Lerman and the company could focus on creating new works.

From the beginning, Lerman's work has been deeply involved in issues of community building and community-based art. Like Dancers of the Third Age, many of her projects have incorporated performers outside of the mainstream dance world. In addition, she has created site-specific projects, including dances celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Portsmouth, NH, naval shipyard. Similarly, many of her dances take on themes of political or social importance. A 1987 program called "Atomic Priests and Other Dances" included a dance based on an official Department of Energy Report about how people 10,000 years from now might deal with nuclear waste. She has also produced what she calls a docudance entitled "Nine Short Dances About the Defense Budget and Other Military Matters." A reviewer has called Lerman "one of the most articulate and compassionate of social commentators in the arts today."

Lerman's work has been widely recognized for excellence. Lincoln Center, the American Dance Festival, BalletMet, and the Kennedy Center have all commissioned works. In 1988, Lerman was named Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine. She has also received an American Choreographer Award, an American Jewish Congress "Golda" Award, and, in 2002, a MacArthur Fellowship.

Today, the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange operates out of Takoma Park, MD, and performs all over the United States and the world. Dancers of the Third Age, which also performs widely, operates as an adjunct company to the Dance Exchange. Current projects include "Prayer as a Radical Act/Radical Action as Prayer," which will be a dance/theatre piece that draws from ancient and contemporary prayer practices to explore unity and division, and "Ferocious Beauty: Genome," which will be a multi-media work exploring the impact of genetic research on our lives.

Sources: New York Times, July 13, 1986, October 23, 1987; www.danceexchange.org.

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July 12, 1982

Radical activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson dies

Born in 1886, Clara Lemlich Shavelson was already a confirmed radical when she arrived in New York City in 1905. Raised in a religious household in Ukraine, she had defied her parents to learn Russian, traded folk songs for volumes of Tolstoy, and borrowed revolutionary tracts from a sympathetic neighbor. In New York, she found work in a Lower East Side garment shop, and soon began organizing the workers. She quickly became an influential member of the new International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), where she protested the virtually all-male leadership's habit of ignoring female union members.

In 1909, Lemlich burst onto a larger political stage when her speech in New York's Cooper Union Hall galvanized young, predominantly Jewish, working girls and set off what became known as the Uprising of the 20,000 (See This Week in History for November 22, 1909). Though the strike was only partially successful, the speech marked the beginning of Lemlich Shavelson's long career in political activism. Her next project was women's suffrage; she helped to found the Wage Earners League for Women's Suffrage, a group distinguished by its working-class membership at a time when most suffrage organizations were composed of more moderate middle-class members. (See This Week in History for April 22, 1912).

Although Lemlich Shavelson's radicalism eventually cost her the paid organizing position with the suffrage league, she remained an outspoken activist, leading the kosher meat boycotts of 1917 and the New York City rent strikes of 1919. After her 1913 marriage and a move to Brooklyn, some of Shavelson's colleagues in the trade union movement felt that she had sold out to middle-class ideals by raising children in the suburbs. However, Shavelson redirected her energies without moderating her radicalism, joining the Communist Party in 1926, and founding the United Council of Working-Class Housewives and then, in 1929, the United Council of Working-Class Women (UCWW). The UCWW argued that consumption was integrally tied to production and that housewives, as consumers, could be an integral part of the class struggle. The Council led meat, milk, and bread boycotts (see This Week in History for May 27, 1935), marched on Washington, and staged rent strikes and sit-ins, winning periodic victories that addressed some of the most pernicious threats to the economic survival of many families during the depression. In addition, Shavelson's insistence on the importance of women's labor in the home laid the groundwork for the later feminist movement's emphasis on gender politics and personal power relations within the family.

After the Second World War, Shavelson became a peace activist, working as an organizer for the American League Against War and Fascism, which opposed nuclear weapons. She also worked for a time in a garment shop, and renewed her activism in the ILGWU, from which she finally retired in 1954. Although she is still hailed as a founder of that union, she was never granted a union pension. At age 81, Shavelson moved into the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles, where she spent her time convincing the administrators to honor grape and lettuce boycotts, and organizing a union among the orderlies. She was impatient with those who came to record her historic contributions, telling one researcher: "Why are you here interviewing me about what I did? If you want to do something, do something." Shavelson died on July 12, 1982.

See also: This Week in History for November 22, 1909; April 22, 1912; and May 27, 1935.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1238-1241; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995).

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July 12, 1989

"When Harry Met Sally" hits theaters

The movie When Harry Met Sally, which follows characters Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) and Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) through several decades of searching for love as they debate whether a man and a woman can be friends, debuted on July 12, 1989. Nora Ephron's screenplay was later nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe. The most famous line in the film comes at the end of a scene in a deli, where Sally fakes an orgasm to prove to Harry that it can be faked. When she is finished, another customer delivers the line, "I'll have what she's having." A blockbuster success, When Harry Met Sally was just one of Ephron's many achievements in an industry dominated by powerful men. In addition to writing, Ephron has found success as a film director with several hit romantic comedies to her credit.

Born in 1941 to screenwriting parents Henry and Phoebe Ephron, Nora Ephron was surrounded by films and writers from a young age. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1962, Ephron became a journalist, working first as a reporter for the New York Post. She then became a columnist, contributing editor, and eventually senior editor at Esquire magazine, where she worked until 1978. In addition, she was a contributing editor at New York magazine in 1973 and 1974. Collections of her columns, known for their wit and their attention to both feminist concerns and pop culture, were published as Wallflower at the Orgy (1970) and Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975).

In 1983, Ephron published the bestselling novel Heartburn, which was later made into a movie of the same name. In the same year, Ephron's first screenplay, written with Alice Arlen for Silkwood, was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1989, the same year that When Harry Met Sally was released, Ephron and Arlen produced the screenplay for Cookie. Later screenplays include My Blue Heaven (1990), This Is My Life (with sister Delia Ephron, 1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Mixed Nuts (with Delia Ephron, 1994), You've Got Mail (with Delia Ephron, 1998) and Hanging Up (with Delia Ephron, 2000).

Ephron made her directorial debut in 1992, on This Is My Life. She later directed Sleepless in Seattle, Mixed Nuts, and Michael (1996). Ephron's latest movie, Bewitched, which she directed and for which she co-wrote the screenplay, was released in 2005. In 2006, she published the bestselling I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 378-379; New York Times, July 9, 1989, December 13, 1998; www.imdb.com/name/nm0001188/.

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July 13, 1935

Tillie Lewis opens cannery for American-grown Italian tomatoes

Tillie Lewis, born Myrtle Ehrlich, in Brooklyn, NY, on July 13, 1901, left high school after one year to work in a wholesale grocery. Noticing the high demand for imported cans of Italian tomatoes, she formed the idea of growing the same variety domestically. Discouraged by agriculture specialists at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, who told her it could not be done, Lewis moved on to other things, studying business and working briefly on Wall Street.

However, Lewis returned to her tomato-growing idea in 1934, when the federal government raised the tariff on imported tomato products by 50%. Already on her way to Italy for a vacation, Lewis met an Italian exporter, Florindo del Gaizo, worried about losing his American customers. Lewis convinced him that Italian tomatoes could be grown in California, and they combined parts of their first names to create Flotill Products Inc. On July 13, 1935, her 34th birthday, Lewis opened the first Flotill cannery in Stockton, California. Two years later, when del Gaizo died, Lewis bought out his share of the business. Operating the first cannery owned by a woman, by 1940, she had made San Joaquin County the top tomato-producing county in the United States.

In addition to tomatoes, Lewis's Flotill Products, Inc., canned other fruits and vegetables, baby food, and frozen juices; during the Second World War, the company also became the largest producer of C-rations for the U.S. Army. By 1951, Flotill Products, later known as Tillie Lewis Foods, Inc., was earning $30 million per year, making it one of the five largest canning companies in the country. In the same year, Lewis was named "businesswoman of the year" by the Associated Press. In 1952, the company introduced a line of diet foods using low-calorie sweeteners and known as Tasti-Diet. Tillie Lewis Foods was eventually bought by the Ogden Corporation, which made Lewis one of its directors. Lewis died in 1977, but the Italian pomodora tomatoes she introduced to the U.S. are still a staple of American agriculture.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1951, September 11, 1952, May 7, 1961, May 3, 1977; New York Times, May 2, 1977.

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