Week of November 17

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November 17, 1950

Roberta Peters debuts at the Met

November 18, 1977

Bella Abzug convenes National Women's Conference in Houston

November 19, 1887

Emma Lazarus dies at age 38

November 20, 1929

Gertrude Berg debuts in "The Goldbergs"

November 21, 1935

Rebekah Kohut honored for fifty years of communal activism

November 22, 1909

Clara Lemlich sparks Uprising of the 20,000

November 22, 1978

Dianne Feinstein's career changed by violence

November 23, 1847

American women mark death of British author Grace Aguilar

 

November 17, 1950

Roberta Peters debuts at the Met

Roberta Peters has achieved international fame for her soprano voice and performing success. Born in 1930 and raised in New York City, Peters began voice lessons at age 13 and auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera at age 19. Though she had no performing experience, she impressed the general manager enough to earn a contract to appear in Mozart's The Magic Flute. Scheduled to debut in February, 1951, Peters in fact made her debut on November 17, 1950, when she was called upon to replace a colleague on only six hours notice. On that day, she sang the part of Zerlina in Mozart's Don Giovanni. The New York Times called her appearance "a very neat, well-sung, intelligent performance." It was the beginning of a long career at the Met, where Peters achieved the longest tenure of any soprano in the Opera's history.

During more than 35 years at the Met, Peters gave over 500 performances in more than 20 roles. Among the most well-known were performances as Gilda in Rigoletto, Rosina in The Barber of Seville, and Lucia in Lucia di Lammermoor. Success in New York soon led to performances elsewhere. In 1951, Peters debuted at London's Covent Garden in The Bohemian Girl. Tours in Chicago, San Francisco, Germany, and Austria soon followed. In 1972, she performed at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where she received the Bolshoi Medal. It was the first time the Medal had been awarded to an American-born artist.

In addition to her operatic career, Peters has been an ambassador of classical music to the general public. In recitals and master classes throughout the world, and in a record 65 appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, Peters has brought her music to the people. In her television appearances and recitals on college campuses and for Jewish groups, Peters sings American, European, and Yiddish folk songs as well as classical arias. She has performed often in Israel and also in specifically Jewish works like Abraham Kaplan's Kedushah Symphony (1982). In 2000, at age 70, she was still singing in about 25 concerts each year.

Peters has also devoted energy to social and philanthropic causes. She has served as chairman of the National Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and on the boards of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and the Carnegie Hall Corporation. She has performed in benefit concerts for AIDS research, and established a scholarship fund at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1991, President George Bush appointed her to the National Council on the Arts. She has received awards from the Federation of Women's Clubs (1964) and the Foundation for Jewish Culture (1997). In 2000, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani presented her with the Handel Medallion for enriching New York City's cultural life.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp 1046-1048; web.archive.org/web/20080209233950/http://www2.jewishculture.org/awards/awards_arts_peters.html; www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=41:45646~T1; New York Times, November 18, 1950; New York Daily News, November 3, 2004; Roberta Peters, A Debut at the Met (New York, 1967).

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November 18, 1977

Bella Abzug convenes National Women's Conference in Houston

On November 18, 1977, 20,000 women, men and children gathered in Houston to participate in an unprecedented event, the first federally funded National Women’s Conference. Longtime feminist activist and U.S. Representative Bella Abzug presided over the conference, for which she had paved the way two years earlier by authoring a bill in Congress that provided the conference’s funding.

Preparation for the national Houston meeting included conferences organized in each state to discuss women’s needs and public policy and to consider a “National Plan of Action” to improve the lives of women. The Houston Conference subsequently approved the National Plan. While many grassroots women’s organizations used these meetings as an opportunity to mobilize and use government to achieve feminist goals, opponents approached them as an opportunity to unite in a fight against feminist causes. Phyllis Schlafly and others attacked the Houston conference and its agenda and created the basis for a new anti-feminist constituency in American public life.

Over the course of the conference’s three days, a diverse group of about 2,000 official delegates ratified a National Plan of Action dealing with everything from the Equal Rights Amendment to Civil Rights to disarmament. This set of recommendations was then presented to the White House and to Congress. The National Plan of Action called for equal opportunities for women in artistic, professional, and political fields, comprehensive childcare facilities, a national healthcare system, civil rights for lesbians, protection against rape and child abuse, and a better welfare system, among many other issues.

On November 10-11, 2007, the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute, directed by Bella's daughter, Liz Abzug, celebrated the 30^th anniversary of the Houston Conference by convening a "national women's and girls conference," entitled Freedom on Our Terms.

Sources: jwa.org/exhibits/wov/abzug/houston.html; www.jofreeman.com/photos/IWY1977.html; womhist.alexanderstreet.com/dp59/doclist.htm; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism.

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November 19, 1887

Emma Lazarus dies at age 38

When Emma Lazarus died on November 19, 1887 at the age of 38, the obituary published in the New York Times referred to her as “an American Poet of Uncommon talent,” but did not mention her poem, “The New Colossus,” which today is indelibly associated with The Statue of Liberty.

One of the first successful Jewish American authors, Lazarus was part of the late-19^th-century New York literary elite, and was celebrated in her day as an important American poet. In her later years, she wrote bold, powerful poetry and essays protesting the rise of anti-Semitism and arguing for Russian immigrants’ rights. She called on Jews to unite and create a homeland in Palestine before the title Zionist had even been coined. She is best known today for her poem, “The New Colossus,” which was written in 1883 as part of the effort to raise money for a pedestal to the Statue of Liberty. France was donating the statue to the United States, but Americans had to raise the funds for the pedestal.

Her untimely death, probably from cancer, was mourned in both the Jewish and broader communities. It was only, however, after Lazarus’s friend Georgina Schuyler installed a bronze memorial tablet inside the entrance to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903, inscribed with the lines from “The New Colossus,” including

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,”

that Lazarus’s memory became forever associated with her powerful vision of America as a symbol of hope for the down-trodden.

Sources: jwa.org/exhibits/wov/lazarus/; www.350th.org/exhibit01/index.html; New York Times, November 20, 1887; May 6, 1903; Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (Schocken, 2006).

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November 20, 1929

Gertrude Berg debuts in "The Goldbergs"

Gertrude Berg's popular radio program, The Goldbergs, about an upwardly mobile American Jewish family debuted on NBC radio on November 20, 1929. Berg developed the kernel of the show as a series of live sketches to entertain guests at her family's Catskills hotel. It was produced in recurrent runs as a daily 15-minute program on NBC and other networks for nearly two decades before shifting to television in January, 1949. On both radio and TV, Berg served as the sole writer, producer, and star of one the nation's most popular programs.

Throughout its 30 years on radio and television, as well as in presentations on Broadway and on film, The Goldbergs dealt explicitly with Jewish life in the United States, joking about the cultural differences between "old world" immigrants and their American-born offspring. Berg's Molly became a cultural touchstone, a figure combining old world wisdom, new world common sense, and a mother's humanity in confronting the perplexities of American life. Over the show's three decades, the Goldberg family moved from a New York City tenement to the Bronx and later to suburban Connecticut, mirroring the upward progression of many Jews into the American mainstream.

Although Berg continued to produce The Goldbergs into the 1950s, the show's popularity declined. The demise of The Goldbergs reflects the homogenizing trend in postwar American society. As millions of ethnic Americans fled their traditional urban enclaves in search of an un-hyphenated, simply "American" identity in the suburbs, programming explicitly grounded in ethnic cultures gave way to more all-American shows like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. The Goldbergs went off the air in 1955.

Sources: www.museum.tv/archives/etv/G/htmlG/goldbergsth/goldbergsth.htm; www.museum.tv/archives/etv/B/htmlB/berggertrude/berggertrud.htm; www.radiohof.org/comedy/goldbergs.html; You Never Call, You Never Write: A History of the Jewish Mother (Antler, 2007).

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November 21, 1935

Rebekah Kohut honored for fifty years of communal activism

U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Henry Morgenthau, and 800 others honored Rebekah Kohut’s 50 years of communal work at a special dinner on November 21, 1935. Chaired by the novelist Fannie Hurst, the dinner assembled a wide array of political, cultural, and philanthropic notables who spoke of Kohut’s varied contributions, her role as “a great moral teacher,” and her pioneering efforts to apply scientific principles to charitable work.

Kohut was presented with a check for $10,000 from Felix M. Warburg as the first installment of a promised fund of $50,000 that she was to be given to distribute to her own favorite charities.

Kohut was a notable activist in the Jewish and secular communities in the areas of education, social welfare, and women’s organizational life. She came to the United States from Hungary as a child, growing up in Richmond, Virginia and San Francisco where her father served as a rabbi.

In 1887, while in her early 20s, Rebekah married the traditionalist New York rabbi Alexander Kohut, a widower with eight children, six under the age of 13. Rebekah devoted herself chiefly to these children and to her husband’s scholarly work until his death in 1894.

In succeeding years, Kohut devoted herself to the expanding world of Jewish women’s organizational life and the financial support of her family. She was the first president of the New York Section of the National Council of Jewish Women, gave public lectures on Jewish subjects, and opened a private school in cooperation with her stepchildren.

During World War I, she became involved in employment work, which led to her role as an advisor on unemployment to New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt in the early 1930s. Her efforts to bring relief to devastated European Jewish communities after World War I led to her leading role in convening the World Congress of Jewish Women in Vienna in 1923 and being elected as the organization’s first president.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 749-751; New York Times, November 22, 1935.

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November 22, 1909

Clara Lemlich sparks Uprising of the 20,000

“I am one of those who suffers from the abuses described here, and I move that we go on a general strike.” Thus, in Yiddish, 23-year-old Clara Lemlich addressed a crowd of thousands of restless laborers at New York City’s Cooper Union on November 22, 1909. They had been listening for hours as numerous labor leaders decried current working conditions in New York’s garment industry but who nonetheless advocated caution when considering a strike.

Lemlich’s words and passion stirred the crowd. The chairman of the event came to her side and called out “Will you take the old Hebrew oath?” Although not an exclusively Jewish gathering, most in the crowd raised their right arms and pledged with him in Yiddish: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may my hand wither from the arm I now raise.” And so began the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a critical turning point in American labor activism.

In the months that followed, thousands of garment workers, mainly young Jewish and Italian women, walked picket lines and confronted police brutality. A strong corps of Jewish women, led by figures like Lemlich, Rose Schneiderman, and Pauline Newman, worked tirelessly to organize and sustain the strike effort. They insisted that their concerns extended beyond wages and hours as they fought for dignity in working conditions and for women’s right to union recognition. While the strike was only partially successful, it set off a wave of general strikes from 1909-1915 in cities across the United States. As a result, U.S. labor leaders who had long dismissed the needs of women workers and ignored the work of female activists had to accept the centrality of women’s needs within the American labor movement.

Sources: Jewish Women in America, An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 772-773; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill, 1995), pp. 48-59; Jacob Rader Marcus, ed., The American Jewish Woman: A Documentary History (Cincinnati, 1981), pp. 568-570.

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November 22, 1978

Dianne Feinstein's career changed by violence

On November 22, 1978, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated in City Hall by a former city supervisor, Dan White. Dianne Feinstein, who was then the President of the San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, was the first to discover Harvey Milk’s body.

Feinstein, who was the first female president of the Board of Supervisors, was then sworn in as the first female mayor of San Francisco in Moscone’s stead. In 1979, she was elected to the first of two full terms as mayor. In 1992, she won a special Senate election to replace Pete Wilson who had left his seat to become governor of California. Joining her in winning election to the Senate in 1992 was Barbara Boxer, another Jewish woman. Feinstein was re-elected in 1994, 2000, and 2006.

Ashlee Temple plays Dianne Feinstein in the film Milk (2008) about Harvey Milk's life and the events leading up to his assassination.

Sources: E-mail communication to JWA from Senator Feinstein’s office, March, 2004; feinstein.senate.gov/public/.

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November 23, 1847

American women mark death of British author Grace Aguilar

On November 23, 1847, The Ladies of the Society for the Religious Instruction in Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution of tribute at the passing of the British author, Grace Aguilar. Aguilar had died on September 16, 1847 at the age of 31.

Aguilar’s work had been championed by Philadelphia editor Isaac Leeser, who published Aguilar’s books in the United States and included her writings in his monthly magazine, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate. As a result, Aguilar was in many ways better known in the Jewish community of the United States than in England.

In addition to historical romances (e.g. The Vale of Cedars) and reflections on Judaism (The Spirit of Judaism, 1842) Aguilar’s influential book, The Women of Israel (1844), contested the claims by numerous Christian authors that Judaism denigrated women. Aguilar argued for Judaism’s ancient and contemporary regard for women by detailing the strong and admirable women who appear in Judaism’s essential defining text, the Bible.

Aguilar returned the feeling of kinship that American Jewish women bore her. She even responded to an 1843 request from Savannah to contribute to a fair that local Jewish women were holding to raise funds to hire a rabbi. Aguilar sent along two purses, six needle cases, and 12 pincushions on which she had done the needlework, along with additional needlework pieces gathered from some of her friends. In mourning Aguilar’s passing, the Charleston women truly felt they had lost one of their own.

Aguilar’s death at a young age evinced a strong response. Leeser observed that “there has not arisen a single Jewish female in modern times who has done so much for the illustration and adornment of her faith as Grace Aguilar.” The Charleston women expressed their appreciation for the “power and effect” of the “pen of this champion of our faith, against that giant Prejudice, whose shadow blackens the earth.” Citing her as the “moral governess of the Hebrew family,” the women of the Society resolved that her death “must be regarded as a national calamity; and that no demonstration of respect, however high, can convey an adequate sense of the exalted estimation in which we hold her character or of the profound regret with which we received the tidings of her dissolution.”

Sources: Occident and American Jewish Advocate, 5:8 (November 1847): 419; 5:10 (January 1848): 510-511 [see www.jewish-history.com/Occident/]; Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism, (Cambridge, MA, 2000), p. 65.

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