Congregation appoints first woman to serve as senior rabbi

August 1, 1979

Reconstructionist rabbi Linda Joy Holtzman was appointed the spiritual leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Coatesville, PA, on August 1, 1979. The appointment made her the first woman to lead a Jewish congregation in the U.S. Although Sally Priesand had been ordained as a rabbi seven years earlier, and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso was the first woman to be ordained as a Reconstructionalist rabbi in 1974, no woman rabbi prior to Holtzman had won appointment as the leader of a synagogue. Women ordained as rabbis in the 1970s generally either served as associate or assistant rabbis, or found jobs outside the synagogue. In hiring Holtzman, Beth Israel broke with tradition in a second way; the congregation was affiliated officially with the Conservative movement, which had not yet authorized the ordination of women.

Holtzman's appointment was greeted with excitement by supporters of women's ordination, who understood that she had opened a door that more women rabbis would then be able to walk through. Holtzman told the New York Times that she believed her appointment was "very significant for women and for the Jewish community." Similarly, Rabbi Wolfe Kelman of the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly called it "an historical breakthrough and simply fantastic," noting that Holtzman's hiring would make it easier for other congregations to move forward with hiring women without having to feel that they were breaking entirely new ground.

Holtzman remained at Beth Israel for six years. Following her tenure there, she moved to Beth Ahava in Philadelphia, a gay and lesbian synagogue. While at Beth Ahava, she founded the Reconstructionist Hevrah Kadishah of Philadelphia, or traditional Jewish burial society. Later, Holtzman helped to found Kavod v'Nichum [Honor and Comfort], an organization which works to educate Jewish communities about the traditional practices of honoring the dead and comforting the bereaved, and to help communities and families adapt the rituals to their own needs. After leaving Beth Ahava, Holtzman served as interim rabbi for Philadelphia's Congregation Mishkan Shalom, and then for five years as that synagogue's Education Director.

Holtzman is currently an associate professor of practical rabbinics and director of the Department of Practical Rabbinics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She has published extensively, including chapters in Twice Blessed (1989) and in Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation (2000).

See also: Rabbis in the United States; Reconstructionalist Judaism in the United States. See where this event took place at On the Map.

Sources:www.rrc.edu; New York Times, August 16, 1979; www.jewish-funerals.org/morekavod.htm; www.jew-feminist-resources.com/a_0730_0805.html; www.jewish-funerals.org/conference/conferencespeakers.htm.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords returned to Congress to cast debt ceiling vote

August 1, 2011

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Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is the first Jewish woman to be elected from Arizona.

Just seven months after a gunman’s bullet nearly killed her, Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords returned to the floor of the House of Representatives to cast her vote in favor of a bill to raise the nation’s debt ceiling.

She smiled as she entered the House floor, escorted by her good friend, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.  As soon as her congressional colleagues saw her, they lept to their feet, giving her a sustained standing ovation. It was a rare moment of unity amid a tumultuous, polarizing showdown between Democrats and Republicans over the handling of the nation’s debt ceiling.

Wasserman Schultz, Chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, was one of the few people who knew in advance of Giffords’ plans.

“At the end of the day, Gabby knew that this was probably the most important vote that we were going to cast in this Congress,” Wasserman Schultz said. “She wanted to make sure that her constituents were represented."

The bill passed the House 269-161. The next day, it passed the Senate and was signed by President Obama, avoiding what would have been the first default ever on the nation’s debt. 

Gabrielle Dee Giffords was born on June 8, 1970, in Tucson. After earning her bachelor degree from Scripps College in 1993, she won a Fulbright Scholarship and went on to get her master’s degree in urban planning at Cornell University. In 2000, she was elected to the Arizona State House of Representatives on her first try for office.

Two years later, she became the youngest woman ever elected to the Arizona Senate. She easily won re-election in 2004 but resigned a year later to seek the U.S. Congressional seat being vacated Rep. Jim Kolbe. In a district that often favored Republicans, this self-proclaimed “centrist Democrat” won with 54 percent of the vote.

She was re-elected in 2008 and 2010, despite taking positions that often put her at odds with more conservative voters in her district. Her outspoken support for President Obama’s health care plan drew loud objections, and many Republicans considered her seat vulnerable in 2012.

The debate came to a halt at a Safeway grocery store in Tucson on January 8, 2011. Giffords was there for a “Congress on Your Corner” event. Suddenly, gunshots rang out. Jared Lee Loughner, 22, shot 19 people, killing four, including a nine-year-old girl. Giffords was shot in the head. For weeks, she clung to life, in critical condition. To save her life, doctors removed parts of her skull. No one was sure whether she would ever speak or walk again.

Yet, with her husband Mark Kelly at her side and with the steadfast determination that had defined her throughout her life, Giffords dedicated herself to her rehabilitation. While she still She speaks and walks haltingly, she has made miraculous progress in her recovery. 

By the end of 2011, she had recovered enough to co-author with her husband, Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope. In the book, she writes that the debt ceiling vote would not be the last one she casts as a Congresswoman.“I will get stronger,” she promised. “I will return.” However, on January 22, 2012, she announced that she would attend the State of the Union address but  then resign from Congress in order to devote all her energies to her recovery. Her final appearance in the House was greeted with the same affection and admiration which greeted her the day she cast her vote on the debt 

To learn more about Gabrielle Giffords, read Arizona’s first Jewish Congresswoman with Attitude on Jewesses with Attitude.

See also: Rep. Gabrielle Giffords returns to vote on dept ceiling, Update: Rep. Giffords opens her eyes, sees strong women friends and mentors, Jewish Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot, may pull through on Jewesses with Attitude; Jewish Women in Politics; Cool Jewish Women: Gabrielle Giffords.

Sources: “Gabrielle Giffords returns to Congress to Vote on Debt Ceiling Deal’” The Huffington Post, August 1, 2011; “Humor and Determination Key to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Recovery.” ABC News, November 14, 2011; Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope, Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly, 2011.

Amy Loveman helps found "Saturday Review of Literature"

August 2, 1924

Born in 1881, Amy Loveman shaped the literary choices of generations of readers through her work with two important institutions: The Saturday Review and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Educated at Barnard College, where she earned a B.A. in 1901, Loveman's first literary work was as an assistant to an uncle who was revising The New International Encyclopedia. From that job, she moved to the New York Evening Post, where she became a book reviewer and then associate editor of the newspaper's literary review.

In 1924, Loveman and three colleagues left the Post to form the Saturday Review of Literature, whose first issue appeared on August 2, 1924. Loveman was listed as an associate editor. She remained at the Saturday Review for three decades, becoming the magazine's poetry editor in 1950. In the first two decades alone, she wrote close to 800 items for the Review. These included editorials, reviews, and answers to readers' questions.

In addition to her work at the Saturday Review, Loveman played an important role in the Book-of-the-Month Club, where she joined the reading committee soon after its founding in 1926. In 1939, she became head of the Club's editorial department, a job she balanced with her ongoing work at the Review. In this role, she helped to select books for the Club as well as writing frequent reviews herself. In 1951, she joined the Club's editorial board. Loveman's compelling writing style and devotion to literature were recognized by several awards. In 1946, she received both the Columbia University Medal for Excellence and the Constance Lindsay Skinner Achievement Award of the Women's National Book Association. Loveman died in 1955.

To learn more about Amy Loveman, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 875-876; New York Times, December 12, 1955.

Lillian Copeland wins Olympic gold

August 2, 1932

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This photo was taken during the 1930s, the decade in which all-round athlete Lillian Copeland both won an Olympic gold medal—in the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics—and was one of the many athletes to boycott the Olympic Games that were held in Berlin in 1936.

Institution: United States Library of Congress

On August 2, 1932, Lillian Copeland set new world and Olympic records in discus, with a throw of 133 feet, 1 5/8 inches, winning a gold medal. It was not the first time Copeland had set new records; as one of the earliest female athletes to excel in track and field events, she had established a name for herself at several earlier competitions.

Born in New York City in 1904, Copeland moved with her mother and stepfather to Los Angeles, where she attended high school. A consummate athlete, she held National Amateur Athletic Union titles in shot put, discus, and javelin by 1926. While a student at the University of Southern California, she won every women's track event that she entered. By the 1928 U.S. Olympic trials, Copeland was a four-time national champion in the shot put. However, shot put was not yet an Olympic event, so she entered the trials in discus, and set a new world record. She was also a member of the world-record-setting 400-meter-relay team at the trials. At the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, the first at which women were allowed to compete in track and field events, Copeland won a silver medal in discus.

Returning to college after the Olympics, Copeland earned a B.A. in political science in 1930, and then entered the U.S.C. Law School. In 1931, she won two more national championships, in shot put and in javelin. At the 1932 Olympics, where shot put was still not among the events, Copeland won her gold medal in discus. It was a crowning achievement for the woman who between 1925 and 1932 had set six world records each in shot put, discus, and javelin.

Though she won the discus, shot put, and javelin titles at the 1935 World Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv, Copeland did not compete in the 1936 Olympics. Like many others, Copeland boycotted that year's Games, held in Berlin, to protest Nazi Germany's exclusion of Jewish athletes from German Olympic teams. She never competed again. In 1936, Copeland joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, where she worked until her retirement in 1960. She spent sixteen of those years in the Juvenile Bureau, and the rest at other assignments. Copeland died on July 7, 1964. She was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 1980 and the United States Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1994.

To learn more about Lillian Copeland, visit the Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See where this event took place at On the Map.

See also: Jewish Women in the Olympics; Sports in the United States; Jewesses with Attitude, "Not Just Fun and Games -- Women, Jews, and the Olympics".

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 288-290; www.jewsinsports.org; www.jewishsports.net/BioPages/LillianCopeland.htm; New York Times, July 8, 1964; Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1964.

Puppeteer and TV star Shari Lewis dies

August 2, 1998

Born in New York City on January 17, 1934, Shari Lewis was attracted to music and performance from a young age. She began taking piano lessons from her mother at age two, and first went on the stage at age thirteen. Her first act was as a magician, performing tricks with Jewish themes, such as multiplying one candle into eight to illustrate Chanukah. She later studied piano and violin at New York's High School of Music and Art, dance at the American School of Ballet, and acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

In 1952, Lewis appeared on the television show Talent Scouts, winning first prize with her hand puppet Lamb Chop. Four years later, she appeared with the puppet on Captain Kangaroo. Her extensive work in television included her own shows, Shari-Land and The Shari Show, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1959, she had won four Emmy Awards—two as "most outstanding female personality" and two for "television's most outstanding children's show"—and had been described as "all eyes and mouth and charm and talent." These shows, along with her later programs, Lamb Chop's Play-Along (1989–1995) and The Charlie Horse Music Pizza (1998), were distinguished by their focus on encouraging children to interact with the program. Rather than simply presenting action, Lewis's shows provided opportunities for viewers to make crafts at home, sing along with the characters, and devise their own imaginative play.

In addition to producing her television shows, which eventually won a total of 12 Emmy Awards, Lewis wrote 60 books for children, including Magic for Nonmagicians, Things that Kids Collect, and Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah. A series of very short tales included the titles One-Minute Bedtime Stories, One-Minute Fairy Tales, and One-Minute Greek Myths. Lewis also produced numerous audio and video recordings for children.

Always concerned with the quality of children's television programming, Lewis testified in Congressional hearings on the Children's Television Act in 1993. At the hearings before the House Telecommunications Subcommittee, Lewis not only spoke herself, but also brought along the puppet Lamb Chop. The puppet gave an impassioned speech about the need for the government to regulate children's programming. Shari Lewis died of cancer on August 2, 1998.

To learn more about Shari Lewis, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Television in the United States.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 841-843; New York Times, February 2, 1958, October 25, 1959, October 9, 1960, January 29, 1961, August 4, 1998.

Birth of fashion designer Anne Klein

August 3, 1923

Born in Brooklyn on August 3, 1923, Hannah Golofski would grow up to become noted fashion designer Anne Klein. Discovering her gift for design while attending Girl's Commercial High School in Brooklyn, she found work in the garment industry directly out of high school. Within a year, she was working at Varden Petites where she redesigned the firm's line, introducing a new style of ready-to-wear and sophisticated clothing for young (thin) women that would come to be known as Junior Miss.

In 1948 she married clothing manufacturer Ben Klein and became principal designer of Junior Sophisticates, a new company established by her husband. In this role, Anne Klein transformed the type of clothing available for petite women like herself. Junior Sophisticates offered elegant styles to shorter women who previously had to make due with more child-like attire. In addition, Klein was the first designer to follow the example of French designer Coco Chanel, adapting men's clothes (suites, jackets, shirts) for women's use.

Klein continued to innovate. During the 1950s, she introduced clothing that was sold as "separates," offering women a range of jackets, blouses, skirts, and slacks that could be bought together and then assembled into many different outfits. When Klein's marriage ended in 1960, so did her connection with Junior Sophisticates. In 1963, she remarried and established her own design studio. She specialized in redesigning the failing clothing lines of other companies. In 1968, Anne Klein and Company opened with Klein as director and half-owner. By the early 1970s, more than 800 American department stores and dress shops carried her creations.

Klein won numerous fashion awards. In 1973, she was the only woman invited to participate in a fashion show consisting of five American and five French prominent designers, intended to raise money for renovations at Versailles. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York restaged the American component of this show in 1993.

Since the designer's death in 1974, the Anne Klein label has remained a strong presence in retail stores around the world.

See also: Donna Karan; Advertising and Consumer Culture in the United States. See where Anne Klein studied design, Girl's Commercial High School at On the Map.

Source: Fred Carstensen, "Anne Klein," American National Biography Online, www.anb.org.

Ruth Gruber finds haven for 1,000 Holocaust refugees

August 3, 1944

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Photo courtesy of Ruth Gruber

When President Roosevelt decided to accept a thousand European immigrants in the midst of World War II and the Holocaust, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes chose the Jewish-American writer and journalist, Ruth Gruber, to go on a secret mission to escort the refugees to the United States. The journey—which culminated in the refugees' arrival in New York harbor on August 3, 1944 and their being given sanctuary on an old army base in Oswego, New York—became "the defining Jewish moment" of Gruber's life.

In her role as a spokesperson for the refugees, Gruber presented the refugees' journey as a human interest story for the press. She told the New York Times that the refugees represented "a cross-section of every refugee now pouring into Italy," including Jews, Catholics and Protestants for whom religious services were held onboard the ship. In a touching moment in Haven, her book recounting the voyage, Gruber recalls a rabbi conducting a service as the boat passed the Statue of Liberty, and her pride in telling the Jewish refugees of the Holocaust that the poem on the base was written by Emma Lazarus, an American Jew.

The story of these European refugees stands out as a momentary relaxation of America's restrictive immigration policy. President Roosevelt's decision provided the refugees with a safe haven as "guests" in the United States during the war, with the assumption that "they were destined to be sent back to their homelands when the peace comes." While Roosevelt planned to allow the 984 refugees to reside in the United States only until the end of hostilities, when the end of the war came, Gruber lobbied the President and Congress—with the help of Catholic, Jewish and Protestant clergy—and convinced the officials to let the refugees stay. While the story ended happily for these refugees, sadly it came at the expense of others waiting in displaced persons camps in Europe. Since the overall immigration laws and quotas remained unchanged, the close to 1000 refugees were just subtracted from that year's quota.

To learn more about Ruth Gruber, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for September 30, 1911; Jewish Women On the Road; Jewesses with Attitude, "A Time for Travel".

Sources: Ruth Gruber, Haven: The Unknown Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees (New York, 1983); New York Times, August 5, 1944.

Inspiration for Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Ariel Glaser is born

August 4, 1981

If you think a single life can change the world, Ariel Glaser’s brief one would provide a prime example.

On this day in 1981, Ariel was born with HIV, the result of a contaminated blood transfusion her mother Elizabeth Glaser received while giving birth to her. While HIV and AIDS were recognized diseases in the adult population at the time, health care providers were unaware that HIV could be passed to newborn children. There were no drugs on the market that had been tested for use in infants.

Elizabeth Glaser was not raised as a practicing Jew but embraced Judaism when she had children; she felt it important that Ariel have a Jewish name.

In 1988, the year that Ariel died at age 7, Elizabeth Glaser, Susie Zeegen, and Susan DeLaurentis founded the Pediatric AIDS Foundation to raise money for research, prevention, care, and treatment of pediatric HIV, giving hope to children and families affected by HIV and AIDS.

Today, pediatric AIDS has been virtually eliminated in the United States. More than half of HIV-positive pregnant women in underdeveloped countries now receive medicines to help prevent transmission of HIV to their babies — a three-fold increase from just three years earlier. The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation continues to fund research, treatment programs, and advocacy on behalf of the 1,000 children around the world who are born with HIV every day.

See also: Elizabeth Glaser in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Elena Kagan joins the Court

August 5, 2010

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Elena Kagan is the fourth woman, and second Jewish woman, to become a U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

On this day in 2010, Elena Kagan was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a Supreme Court justice, joining Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second Jewish woman to become a Supreme Court Justice.

An honored graduate of Princeton, Oxford, and Harvard Universities, she began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School in 1991, becoming a full professor in four years. After working in the Clinton administration from 1995-99, she returned to teach at Harvard in 1999 and became the Dean of Harvard Law School in 2003, the first Jewish woman to do so. She continued to break new ground when she was named the first woman Solicitor General of the United States in 2009 by President Obama.

Kagan's confirmation marked the fourth time in history that a woman had been appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States and the first time in history that three women Justices served on the Court at the same time.

See also: Elena Kagan in My Bat Mitzvah Story; "Justice Elena Kagan Confirmed, Jewish Women Rock the Bench!" in Jewesses with Attitude; and “Elena Kagan confirmed by U.S. Senate as first woman Solicitor General of the United States” in This Week in History.

“Dinah Shore Show” debuts on NBC radio

August 6, 1939

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Dinah Shore, Miami Book Fair International, 1990. Image courtesy of MDCarchives.

Frances “Fanny” Rose Stein remade herself into Dinah Shore shortly before beginning a career on America’s airwaves with the debut of her variety show on NBC Radio on this date in 1939. She would continue to be a cultural force in the United States for over fifty years.

Raised in urban Tennessee, where Jewish families were a rarity, Shore felt pressure as a girl to be well behaved and accomplished in performance at all times. Beginning her singing career shortly after graduating from Vanderbilt University, her hits included “Blues in the Night” and “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To.” She had 80 charted popular records in the following decades.

Her radio show made the move to television in 1951, where the variety show (shown “in living color” after 1956) continued until 1963, always ending with Shore blowing a big kiss to the camera. She moved to a daytime talk show format for a decade in the ‘70s with Dinah’s Place and Dinah and Friends, where her warmth and intelligent spirit charmed a new generation of viewers, as she mixed her singing with informal chats with entertainment and political figures. Her public romance with actor Burt Reynolds (20 years her junior) reinforced her independent image as a new role model for women. She completed her broadcasting career with the TNN show A Conversation with Dinah, a half-hour one-on-one interview show that aired from 1989 – 1992.

There is now a Dinah Shore Boulevard in her hometown of Winchester, Tennessee.

To learn more about Dinah Shore, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Actress Sylvia Sidney born

August 8, 1910

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Cropped screenshot of Sylvia Sidney from the trailer for the film The Wagons Roll At Night, 1941. This photo is in the public domain.

Actress Sylvia Sidney was born Sophia Kosow on August 8, 1910. After her parents' divorce, she was adopted by her stepfather and took his last name. Raised in New York City, Sidney studied at the Theatre Guild School in Manhattan and debuted on Broadway in The Squall at age sixteen. She soon attracted interest from Hollywood and made her first film, Thru Different Eyes, in 1929. After a return to Broadway, she signed a contract with Paramount Pictures. At Paramount, she starred in City Streets (1931) under the direction of Rouben Mamoulian. That film, along with a role in the film version of Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy the same year, brought Sidney to stardom.

Over the next decade, the actress starred opposite such film icons as Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Henry Fonda, and Spencer Tracy. In most of her films, Sidney was cast as an anguished heroine, a wistful sufferer of injustice. Her working-class urban heroines endeared her to audiences, despite her own distaste for being typecast. Among her films from this period were Dead End (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), and Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936).

In 1956, Sidney left Hollywood and returned to Broadway. In the 1950s and 60s she appeared in Enter Laughing and as the title character in Auntie Mame, among other roles. She returned to film in 1973 in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams; she was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for that role. Moving back and forth among film, television, and stage roles, Sidney went on to act in Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré on Broadway (1977), in the film Beetlejuice (1988), and as the grandmother of AIDS patients in the television movies An Early Frost (1985) and André's Mother (1990).

In addition to acting, Sidney was involved in AIDS research and, after the 1985 death of her son from ALS, in research and advocacy for Lou Gehrig's disease. In addition, she published two books about needlepoint, in 1968 and 1975. Sidney died of throat cancer in 1999.

To learn more about Sylvia Sidney, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Film Industry in the United States.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1251-1252; New York Times, August 16, 1931, July 2, 1999.

Birth of conservative intellectual Gertrude Himmelfarb

August 8, 1922

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Respectively wife and sister of her fellow conservative essayists Irving Kristol and Milton Himmelfarb, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb is a political devotee of England's Victorian era who has argued for a return to tradition in social values as well as academic methodology.

Institution: Online repository

Gertrude Himmelfarb, who was born on August 8, 1922, has made her career as an intellectual historian, but she has perhaps made her larger mark on the world as a conservative public intellectual. Raised in Brooklyn, Himmelfarb earned her B.A. from Brooklyn College before studying at the University of Chicago. At Chicago, beginning in 1942, she studied with a group of predominantly Jewish, immigrant, and conservative thinkers who were in the process of reformulating Western political thought. Their approach to history and politics profoundly shaped Himmelfarb's own thinking. She earned her Ph.D. in history in 1950, and later published her dissertation, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (1952).

Beginning with that dissertation, which focused on a Victorian-era British parliamentarian, Himmelfarb has devoted her scholarly career to studying the Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic. As she wrote about Acton, she consistently found the Victorian era to be "highly relevant for the post World War II world." In most of her writings, she has advanced the argument that a modern decline in emphasis on personal morality is at the root of political and social problems of the late twentieth (and early twenty-first) century. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (1984) favorably examined Victorian treatment of the poor, while Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (1986) and Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (1991) both described Victorian dedication to traditional social mores as superior to the "value-free" relativism that succeeded it.

Himmelfarb's sense that the past was superior to the present extended to her assessment of historical methodology. When she joined the faculty of the City University of New York in 1965, the "new social history," which emphasized the experiences of "ordinary" people over the traditional political narrative, was just taking hold. The "new social history" also emphasized quantitative methods and borrowed heavily from psychology, sociology, and Marxism. Himmelfarb condemned all of these innovations, arguing that they "belittle[d] the will ... and freedom of individuals." Later, she was equally harsh in her critique of postmodernism and multiculturalism in history.

More recently, Himmelfarb has turned her pen directly to the travails of modern society. In two books, The De-Moralization of Society (1995) and One Nation, Two Cultures (1999), she argues that a lack of moral courage is at the root of modern social ills. In the earlier volume, she contrasts modern America to the Victorian age and argues that reinstating social stigmas on out-of-wedlock births and welfare recipients, for example, could help to eliminate dependency and illegitimacy. In the later volume, she argues that the counterculture of the 1960s represented a break with a long-standing earlier social system, and that what she regards as modern social pathology (premarital sex, confessional memoirs, profanity, divorce) has its roots in that break. Her more recent books include The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), The Moral Imagination: From Edmund Burke to Lionel Trilling (2006), and The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot (2009).

Although a New York Times reviewer called One Nation, Two Cultures "not convincing," Himmelfarb has received significant recognition for her work. She has won fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Wilson foundations, and ten honorary degrees. In addition, through essays in Public Interest, Commentary, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times, she has reached a public well beyond the academy. A 1999 New York Times essay on "compassionate conservatism," for example, showcases her voice as an influential conservative public intellectual. Himmelfarb's neoconservative identity is bolstered by her personal connections to husband Irving Kristol, editor for forty years of the journal The Public Interest, and son William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard. Himmelfarb is currently a professor emerita at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

To learn more about Gertrude Himmelfarb, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Gertrude Himmelfarb and the Politics of Morality on Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 634-636; New York Times, July 28, 1999, December 19, 1999.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg joins U.S. Supreme Court

August 10, 1993

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As a Jew and a woman, the Columbia Law School graduate known as "Kiki" had trouble obtaining a job. Brooklyn-born Ruth Bader Ginsburg went on to become the first Jewish woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. She is pictured here in 2004.

Institution: Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

On June 14, 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be an associate justice on the United States Supreme Court. When she was sworn in, on August 10, 1993, she became the second woman, and the first Jewish woman, to serve on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg replaced retiring justice Byron R. White.

Born in Brooklyn on March 15, 1933, Ginsburg was the first in her immediate family to attend college. She earned her B.A. from Cornell, with High Honors in Government, in 1954. Admitted to Harvard Law School, she delayed her studies to move with her husband to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Social Security Administration. Returning east, Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard in 1956, but switched to Columbia Law School for her final year when her husband accepted a job offer from a prestigious New York law firm. At both Harvard and Columbia, Ginsburg was accepted to the Law Review; at Columbia, she tied for first in her class.

Despite this record of achievement, Ginsburg found it difficult to work as a lawyer upon graduation. Few judges and no law firms were willing to accept a woman as clerk or staff member. Finally, she won a clerkship with Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Palmieri accepted her only on the promise from a male lawyer that if Ginsburg did not work out, he would find an overqualified man to take her place. That proved unnecessary. After her clerkship, Ginsburg worked for the Columbia Project on International Civil Procedure, which did basic research on foreign systems of civil procedure and recommended changes in the U.S. system of transnational litigation.

With the completion of the Columbia Project, Ginsburg embarked on an academic career, first at Rutgers University (1963-1972) (where she was paid less than her male colleagues), and then at Columbia (1972-1980), where she was the first tenured woman on the law faculty. Just before her move to Columbia, Ginsburg also became co-director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project.

Dividing her time between Columbia and the ACLU, Ginsburg worked extensively on sex-discrimination cases, especially those relating to employment. In this work, Ginsburg filed briefs in nine major sex discrimination cases that were decided by the Supreme Court, personally arguing six of them. Ginsburg argued that protections granted to persons under the constitution should apply to women and, thus, successfully established that differential treatment based on gender was unconstitutional.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She served there for thirteen years, until her nomination and confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. In nominating Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, President Clinton described her as "one of our nation's best judges, progressive in outlook, wise in judgment, balanced and fair in her opinions." He also said that "Ruth Bader Ginsburg cannot be called a liberal or a conservative. She has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels." Ginsburg's record as a centrist likely helped to ease her confirmation; the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously endorsed her nomination, and the full Senate voted 96-3 in her favor.

On the Court, Ginsburg's work has been characterized by cool logic and reason, and a pragmatism that takes into account the real-life implications of Court decisions. In her written decisions she has continued to establish the constitutional basis for prohibiting discrimination based on gender. During the 2006–2007 session of the Court, Justice Ginsburg took the unusual step of reading two of her dissents orally. Observers have seen these forceful and passionate dissents as evidence of Ginsburg's growing frustration with the decisions and reasoning of her more conservative colleagues.

Justice Ginsburg took an active role in the 2004-2005 celebration of the 350th anniversary of Jewish life in North America, pointing proudly to Judaism's eternal pursuit of justice, the promise of America, and the accomplishments of Jewish women who have preceded her. The resignation of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in 2005 left Justice Ginsburg as the only woman on the Supreme Court until the confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor in August of 2009. On August 5, 2010, Elena Kagan was confirmed to the Supreme Court. She joins Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor as the third woman on the bench, and is the second Jewish woman to become a Supreme Court Justice.

To learn more about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Rocks!, Ruth Bader Ginsburg tells it like it is, Ruth Bader Ginsburg raises her voice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: 16 years as Supreme Court Justice!, Jewesses with Attitude; Law in the United States.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 515-520; Symposium: Celebration of the Tenth Anniversary of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States (New York, 2004); New York Times, June 15, 1993, August 4, 1993, May 26, 1999, May 31, 2007; www.supremecourtus.gov/about/biographiescurrent.pdf; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/?id=JWA027.

Swimmer Dara Torres qualifies for fourth Olympics

August 10, 2000

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Dara Torres, a five-time Olympic athlete, waves to the crowd after taking silver in the women's 50m freestyle event in Beijing, August 17, 2008. Image courtesy of Bryan Allison.

At the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in Indianapolis, Indiana, on August 10, 2000, Dara Torres swam the 100-meter butterfly in a time of 57.86. Jenny Thompson was ahead of her by eight one-hundredths of a second, but Torres's time was good enough to qualify her for the Olympics in Sydney. It would be her fourth Olympic Games.

Born in Los Angeles in 1967 and raised in Southern California, Torres swam for the University of Florida as an undergraduate. In four years there, she won 28 NCAA All-America swimming awards, the maximum possible. Between 1983 and 1986, she held the world record in the 50-meter freestyle (25.62).

Torres competed in her first Olympics in 1984; at those Games, she won a gold medal as a member of the 400-meter freestyle relay team. In 1988, she set a new world record in the 100-meter freestyle (55.30). At that year's Olympics in Seoul, she won two more medals: bronze in the 400-meter freestyle relay and silver in the 4x100-meter medley relay.

After the 1988 Olympics, Torres retired from competitive swimming and took a job with NBC as a sports research assistant. She returned to swimming in 1991 and won a spot on the 1992 U.S. Olympic team, which voted her the team captain. In Barcelona, she won gold again as a member of the 400-meter freestyle relay team; that team also set a new world record. She then retired for a second time, and worked successively for the Discovery Channel, ESPN, TNT, and Fox News Channel as a host and a reporter. She also became, in 1994, the first actual swimmer to appear in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.

After seven years away from the sport, Torres came out of retirement in 1999 to train for the 2000 Olympics. This comeback was more difficult than her first; not only had she been away for longer, but the sport had changed over those years. Upon her return, Torres had to learn new techniques and adapt to a new training regimen that included Pilates, vitamin and amino acid supplements, a special diet, and flexibility and weight training. Her work paid off; at the U.S. Olympic trials in August, 2000, she qualified for the U.S. team in the 100-meter butterfly, the 50- and 100-meter freestyle, and three relays. Placing first in the 50-meter freestyle, the 33-year-old became the oldest woman ever to win a race at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials.

In Sydney that September, Torres won five medals: gold in the 400-meter freestyle and 400-meter medley relays and bronze in her three individual events. Both relay teams also set new world records. With nine medals and three world records to her credit over four Games and sixteen years, Torres returned from Sydney as one of the most decorated Olympic athletes ever.

Torres retired again after the Sydney games, but at age 41 and after having her first child, she returned to competitive swimming and qualified to compete in her fifth Olympics in Beijing. This accomplishment makes Torres not only the first American swimmer to compete in five Olympics, but also the oldest female swimmer in the history of the Olympic Games.

In 2005, Torres was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and in 2009, she published her first book, Age is Just a Number.

To learn more about Dara Torres, visit Jewish Women in the Olympic Games.

See also: Olympic Medal Winners; Sports in the United States.

Sources:New York Times, August 8, 2000, August 11, 2000, August 17, 2000; http://www.jewishsports.net/BioPages/DaraTorres.htm; http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/siforwomen/news/1999/07/30/spotlight/; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12483160; www.daratorres.com; teamusa.org/news/article/2245.

Kohenet: the Hebrew Priestess Institute, Launches its first Training Institute in Accord, NY

August 14, 2006

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Kohenet Ordainees (top row) and Rav Kohanot (bottom row), the morning after an Ordination Ceremony. Photo courtesy of Kohenet: The Hebrew Priestess Institute.

Rabbi Jill Hammer (featured on jwa.org) and Holly Shere founded the Kohenet Institute on November 23, 2005, based on a shared vision of Jewish women’s spiritual leadership in an embodied, earth-honoring, and feminist mode. Hammer and Shere, both deeply committed to revitalizing “the Jewish connection with the Divine feminine” and to reclaiming the ancient role of women as facilitators of sacred experience, met through a mutual friend (Jay Michaelson, founder of Zeek and Nehirim). Within a week, they had laid the foundation for the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, with the following mission:

Through its programs and resources, Kohenet advocates and nurtures embodied Jewish spiritual leadership, creativity, and community from an earth-honoring, feminist perspective. Drawing on midrashic and mystical teachings from the Jewish tradition, Near Eastern myth, and women’s wisdom across the generations, Kohenet reclaims and innovates uniquely feminine models of Jewish spiritual leadership.

Kohenet’s first Hebrew Priestess Training Institute took place August 14-20, 2006, at the Elat Chayyim Retreat Center in Accord, NY, and has gathered for a week each winter and summer since then. The initial training consists of four retreats over one and a half years, focusing on 13 priestess paths: Maiden, Mother, Matriarch, Midwife, Wise Woman, Mourning Woman, Prophetess, Shrinekeeper, Shamaness, Seeker, Lover, Fool, and Weaver.

The expression of these archetypes in Jewish text and mystical imagination, Jewish women’s history, and ancient priestess work, is the framework for exploring and engaging sacred text, mystical writings, ritual craft, creative liturgy, thealogy, midrash (creative interpretation of sacred texts), sacred song and movement, spiritual journeying and dreamwork, as well as earth-honoring and mystical practices for Shabbat and festivals. The Kohenet Institute sees the Hebrew priestess as a woman who has chosen the practice of consciously embodying the Shekhinah, the indwelling Divine Presence, and trains women toward the goal of being catalysts for the sacred.

The training concludes with an initiation ceremony where students receive the title of tzovah or keeper of sacred space and time. Students who choose an additional year of advanced ritual and lifecycle training work toward smicha (ordination) as kohanot, Hebrew priestesses. This training program is sponsored by the Elat Chayyim Center for Jewish Spirituality at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center as well as by Kohenet: The Hebrew Priestess Institute.

On July 19, 2009, 11 women received smicha (ordination) as kohanot, becoming Kohenet's first priestess ordainees. These women are serving in their communities as lifecycle officiants, keepers of new moon and other ritual circles, writers of creative liturgy, members of chevra kadisha (burial societies), storytellers, teachers, and rabbinical students. They are heirs to a tradition of women spiritual leaders that is thousands of years old.

See also: Jewish Women in Environmental Activism.

Sources: "Priestly Caste", Tablet Magazine; “Kohenet Institute Herstory,” courtesy of the Kohenet Institute.

"Tell Me a Riddle" reissued in paperback

August 15, 1971

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Tillie Olsen.
Photo courtesy of Tillie Olsen.

On August 15, 1971, ten years after its original publication, Tillie Olsen's short story collection Tell Me a Riddle was re-issued in a new paperback edition. The collection of four stories, "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?," "O Yes," and the title story, was hailed at its original publication as "small in size but large in achievement." Decades later, Olsen's stories are still regarded as masterpieces, with their "almost miraculous rendering," as one reviewer put it, of the rhythms of human speech and thought.

Though she began writing as a teenager, literary success came late to Olsen. Born in Nebraska, she left high school in the eleventh grade, in 1929. As the Great Depression deepened, she joined the Young Communist League and the Omaha Council of the Unemployed. Later, she worked in a variety of low-wage jobs and was twice arrested for radical activities, once in Nebraska for distributing leaflets and once in California after a police raid targeting radicals. Olsen's involvement in leftist politics was a family tradition; her father had served as secretary of the Nebraska Socialist Party and was active in the Omaha Workmen's Circle.

It was also in the 1930s that Olsen began writing her novel, Yonnondio, though it would not be published for several more decades. She put away her writing when she married Jack Olsen, another member of the Young Communist League. Busy with raising four daughters, she found no time to write until the mid-1950s. Her first short story was published in 1956, the same year that she won a writing fellowship at Stanford. In 1961, "Tell Me A Riddle" won the O. Henry Short Story Award. In 1980, it was made into an Oscar-winning movie. It was republished in the collection of the same title also in 1961.

In the late 1950s, Olsen also unearthed the drafts of the novel she had begun in the 1930s. Yonnondio: From the Thirties tells the story of a poor Midwestern family seeking stable jobs and a better life during the Great Depression. Not published until 1974, the novel was hailed as "remarkable" and a work of "great depth and vibrancy" when it finally appeared. In addition to her fiction, Olsen wrote tellingly of the hardships faced by women writers who are limited by the demands of family. In Silences (1978) and earlier essays, she lamented the burdens that a patriarchal society places on female artists, and discussed her own long hiatus from writing. Olsen made an important contribution to the feminist movement in the 1970s both as an authentic voice for the experience of working-class women and by leading the way in uncovering the work of eloquent American women writers whose work had been forgotten.

Olsen received numerous awards for her fiction. In addition to a National Endowment of the Arts award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Mari Sandoz Award of the Nebraska Library Association, she won the Rea Award of the Dungannon Foundation for the best short story of 1994. Newsweek named her as its emblematic writer of the 1930s. In 2001, she received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association. Olsen taught writing at numerous colleges, and was a writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was always an outspoken advocate for progressive and working-class politics. Olsen died on January 1, 2007 in Oakland, California.

To learn more about Tillie Olsen, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and We Remember .

See also: Jewish Women On the Map - Birthplace of Writer Tillie Olsen; Tillie Olsen: Voicing What Was Silenced, Jewesses with Attitude; Tillie Olsen in the Virtual Archive.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1003-1004; New York Times, November 12, 1961, March 31, 1974; San Francisco Chronicle, March 9, 2001; Joanne S. Frye, Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York, 1995); Mara Faulkner, Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen (Charlottesville, VA, 1993); Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA038; jwa.org/discover/weremember/olsen/.

Documentary "Gloria: In Her Own Words" premiered on HBO

August 15, 2011

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Gloria Steinem at news conference, Women's Action Alliance, 1972.

On August 15, 2011, the documentary Gloria: In Her Own Words premiered on HBO. Using thousands of photos, rare video footage—and, of course, Gloria Steinem’s own stories—the hour-long film told the story of the women’s movement as seen through the eyes of one of its central figures.

For those who lived through the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, the film was, in Steinem’s phrase, “a home movie”—a look back at battles won and lost. For younger feminists, it brought to life experiences they have only heard or read about. As Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, wrote after seeing the film, “I and many of the women of my generation take for granted so many of the opportunities that Gloria and women of her generation had to demand… As I watched Gloria evolve from a journalist forced to cover patterned pantyhose to an activist demanding equality for women, the simple truth struck me over and over again: My life is better because of Gloria Steinem.”   

Steinem was reluctant to do the film, but her friend Sheila Nevins, President of HBO Documentary Films, would not take “no” for an answer. “At first, I said ‘no’, because no one person can be the framework for the women’s movement,” Steinem recalled. “But then I thought, ‘Ok, if [ Sheila ] tells me this is worth doing, I believe it.’” Nevins told the Los Angeles Times: "We wanted to capture what it was about Gloria that inspired a generation of women to fight for themselves."

Gloria Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio. Her mother Ruth, whom Gloria calls “a pioneer in journalism who couldn’t do it all,” suffered from mental illness. When her father abandoned the family, Gloria became her mother’s caretaker.    

As she grew up, she inherited her mother’s love of writing and journalism. But as an aspiring writer in the New York of the early 1960s, Gloria was lucky to get “fluff piece” assignments male editors considered appropriate for women. “The low point,” she says in the film, “was writing a piece on textured stockings.” In the era dramatized on Mad Men, there were frequent propositions from male bosses. “There were no words for sexual harassment then,” she says. “It was just life.”

The film includes rare footage of a women’s meeting that proved to be a turning point for Steinem. In 1969, abortion was illegal in New York, and the state legislature scheduled a hearing on whether to change the law. They invited 14 men and one woman—a Catholic nun— to testify. A group of feminists held their own counter-meeting at a Greenwich Village church, and Steinem went to cover it for New York Magazine. For the first time, she heard women who had illegal abortions speak publically about their often harrowing experiences. Steinem herself had had an abortion at age 22 but had never felt she could share the story with anyone. She says, “I began to understand that I wasn’t crazy. It was the system that was crazy."

Steinem got angry and put her anger to work. Frustrated that there was no national women’s magazine that was run by women, she co-founded Ms. Magazine in 1971. Realizing that social change and political clout go hand-in-hand, she helped organize the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, which attracted 20,000 women. With an eye toward passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, attendees adopted a National Plan of Action that would be presented to President Carter.

The film highlights Steinem’s efforts to expand the movement. At the risk of alienating fellow feminists who thought they would be more effective focusing solely on women’s issues, Steinem worked with Cesar Chavez and Delores Huerta of the United Farm Workers to champion the rights of laborers and the working poor. At a time when lesbians were labeled as “lavender menaces,” Steinem openly supported their involvement in the women’s movement.

In line with Steinem’s insistence on looking forward, the film ends with footage of her talking to college students. In the final shot, she looks into the camera and says, “The primary thing is not that they know who I am, but who they are. Being a feminist means that you see the world as a whole instead of a half. It shouldn’t need a name, and one day, it won’t.”

To learn more about Gloria Steinem, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: Gloria Steinem: Her words as relevant today as ever, My journey to love my legs and understand the Feminist movement, and Gloria Steinem: An unheralded GLBT advocate on Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources: “Exclusive Interview With Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words’” The Huffington Post, August 12, 2011; “Gloria Steinem: Looking Back and Moving Forward” The Huffington Post, August 11, 2011; “A Few Words With Gloria Steinem.” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2011; “Gloria: In Her Own Words—A l Life in Activism” Marcia G. Yerman, August 15, 2011.

Death of early music pioneer Wanda Landowska

August 16, 1959

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Wanda Landowska (1879 – 1959) was a celebrated harpsichord player and author. At a time when many musicians believed that a performer should simply reproduce the notes on the page as closely as possible, Landowska wrote that the performer should, instead, add her own style, combining intuition and knowledge to produce an "ecstasy of music."

This is a press photograph from the George Grantham Bain collection, which was purchased by the Library of Congress in 1948. According to the library, there are no known restrictions on the use of these photos.

Born in Warsaw in 1879, Wanda Landowska studied piano at the Warsaw Conservatory, from which she graduated at age 14. In 1900, she moved to Paris, where she taught piano and performed. In both cities, she devoted herself to learning the harpsichord, an instrument which had all but disappeared from the active classical repertoire. Though Bach, Handel, and others had composed myriad harpsichord pieces, by 1900 virtually no one played the instrument and works written for it were generally transposed for piano. But Landowska was determined to play these works on the original instrument, despite discouragement from musicologists and fellow musicians.

In 1912, Landowska commissioned a harpsichord to be built for her own use; she later transported the instrument all over Europe for her numerous performances. She began to teach harpsichord in Paris; after a stint in Berlin, she opened her own school outside Paris in 1919. Already renowned as a teacher and performer, she had her U.S. debut in 1923, with the Philadelphia Orchestra. After her first New York recital the following year, she found a large following in the U.S. and played often to packed houses. In 1941, forced to leave Nazi-occupied France, Landowska settled permanently in the U.S.

The following year, she made history with a performance of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" at New York's Town Hall. It was the first time the piece had been played on the harpsichord in the twentieth century; it is now a staple of the repertoire. A Landowska student later remembered that hearing that first performance was "like being in front of one of the greatest wonders of nature." Landowska made a similar splash in 1948 with a performance of Bach's complete "Well-Tempered Clavier." Her mastery of the harpsichord inspired not only listeners and students, but also composers, several of whom wrote new harpsichord works especially for her.

In addition to playing and teaching, Landowska also wrote about music. A 1909 book, written with her husband and first published in French, addressed "music of the past." During her years in the U.S., she published frequent essays and book reviews. After her death, some of this material, along with previously unpublished essays, was published as Landowska on Music (1964). In the volume's essays, Landowska wrote about the interpretation of Bach and other music. She also made a passionate case for the role of the individual performer as an interpreter. At a time when many musicians believed that a performer should simply reproduce the notes on the page as closely as possible, Landowska wrote that the performer should, instead, add her own style, combining intuition and knowledge to produce an "ecstasy of music."

Landowska was frequently honored for her work. She received citations from the Charles Cros Academy in France and from the U.S. National Federation of Music Clubs, both recognizing her recordings. France admitted her to the Legion of Honor in 1925, and awarded her the Grand Prix of the Paris Exposition in 1937. Landowska gave her last public performance in 1954. She died in Connecticut on August 16, 1959.

See also: This Week in History for February 21, 1942 "Early music harpsichordist Wanda Landowska plays Bach at New York City's Town Hall"; "If Wanda Landowska Were Alive Today", Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources:New York Times, August 17, 1959; August 23, 1959; December 20, 1964; June 19, 1983; July 10, 1999.

Birth of Confederate nurse Phoebe Yates Levy Pember

August 18, 1823

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Phoebe Yates Pember was a Richmond nurse during the Civil War. She served as the matron of Richmond's Chimborazo Hospital, reportedly the largest military hospital in the world in the 1860s.

Photo source: http://www.lib.unc.edu/. This photo is in the public domain.

Phoebe Yates Levy Pember was born into an assimilated Charleston, South Carolina, family on August 18, 1823. The fourth of seven children, she was raised in a wealthy and socially prominent family; her father was a successful merchant while her mother was a popular actress. One of Pember's sisters, Eugenia Yates Levy Phillips, would later be imprisoned — twice — for her support of the Confederate cause. Exemplifying the way in which wealth enabled some antebellum Jewish families to gain full community acceptance, the Levy family moved among Charleston's elite until a series of financial setbacks sent them to Savannah, Georgia, in the late 1840s.

Pember apparently received some formal schooling before her 1856 marriage to Bostonian Thomas Pember, a non-Jew. By late 1861, however, she was a childless widow, living with her parents in Marietta, Georgia, where they had fled to escape the ravages of war. Unhappy at home, Pember accepted an invitation to serve as the matron of Richmond's Chimborazo Hospital. She reported for duty in December, 1862.

A sprawling institution on the outskirts of the city, Chimborazo was reportedly the largest military hospital in the world in the 1860s. By the end of the Civil War, the hospital had cared for some 76,000 patients. Pember's job was to head up one of the facility's five divisions. It was an unusual job for a woman, at a time when virtually all nursing was done by men. Pember's varied duties surely required what one of her contemporaries described as her "will of steel under a suave refinement." Although Pember had to thwart efforts by her staff to pilfer supplies, once reportedly threatening a would-be thief with a gun, she also seems to have been accepted and valued by patients. In a male-dominated environment, she was able to give soldiers a warm, feminine presence. Lacking adequate food, medicine, and other supplies, often that warm presence was the best that Pember and her staff could offer. Although she dedicated herself to relieving the suffering of soldiers, she was often simply a final companion for the dying.

Pember remained at Chimborazo until the Confederate surrender in April, 1865. After the War, she wrote her memoirs, which were published as A Southern Woman's Story: Life in Confederate Richmond, in 1879. This book, which details her daily life through anecdotes of the war years, remains one of the best sources for understanding the experiences and ideas of upper-class Southern Jewish women before and during the Civil War. Following the War, Pember maintained her elite social status, and traveled extensively through the U.S. and Europe. She died on March 4, 1913, and is buried in Savannah.

To learn more about Phoebe Yates Levy Pember, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for November 29, 1862 "Phoebe Yates Levy Pember given charge of Confederate military hospital"; Jewish women On the Map - Chimborazo Hospital - Richmond National Battlefield Park; Civil War in the United States; Military Nurses.

Sources:Pember, Phoebe Yates, A Southern Woman's Story: Life in Confederate Richmond, including unpublished letters written from the Chimborazo Hospital (New York, 1879), Ed. by Bell Irvin Wiley, (reprint, Jackson, TN, 1959); Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1042-1043; jwa.org/discover/inthepast/infocus/military/nurses/pember.html.

Premiere of Sophie Maslow's "The Village I Knew"

August 18, 1950

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Jerome Johnson and Gisele Alvarez in Sophie Maslow's "Folksay," 2008. Photo by Paulgordonemerson.

The American Dance Festival premiered Sophie Maslow's The Village I Knew on August 18, 1950, in New London, Connecticut. The suite of dances, which was based on Sholom Aleichem stories and depicted life in a pre-war Russian Jewish shtetl, was called "charming" and "warm and tender and funny and distinctly a credit to Miss Maslow" in a New York Times review. After the success of this piece, which was later staged in many places including London and Israel, Maslow was often considered primarily a Jewish dancer and choreographer, but her dance roots were actually much broader.

Born in 1911 and raised in New York, Maslow studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where Martha Graham's early company was formed. From 1931 to 1940, Maslow was a member of the Martha Graham Company, appearing in productions of Primitive Mysteries (1931), American Document (1938), and Letter to the World (1940), among others. The new form of modern dance pioneered by Graham became an important part of Maslow's own style.

During the same time, many dancers in New York were involved with leftist politics; Maslow was no exception. She taught dance classes for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and participated, alongside lifelong friend Anna Sokolow, in Workers Dance League concerts. For League concerts, she choreographed or danced such pieces as May Day March (1936) and Women of Spain (1938).

Beginning in 1941, Maslow produced dances that focused on the American experience. The first piece to define this new style was Dust Bowl Ballads, based on the music of Woody Guthrie. Guthrie's songs were also incorporated—along with lines from Carl Sandburg—into Folksay (1942). An early dance critic called Folksay "radiantly outflung, joyous and free ... simple and heart-warming and endearing." Like Ballads and Folksay, many of Maslow's dances from this period incorporate folk music or grow out of folk dances. Also in the 1940s, Maslow formed the Dudley-Maslow-Bales Trio, which emerged from the leftist New Dance Group.

In the 1950s, following the success of Village, Maslow produced many more works with Jewish themes. These included Celebration, based on Israeli songs (1954), Anniversary, commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (1956), and The Dybbuk (1965). Jewish themes, however, were never her exclusive focus; in 1978, for example, she choreographed Visions of Black Elk, based on the massacre of American Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Most of these dances were originally staged by Maslow's own Sophie Maslow Dance Company, though they have since been widely performed by other groups. Maslow continued an active life, staging her dances and traveling widely, well into her eighties. In March, 2000, she was awarded a Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewy Beineke Chair for Distinguished Teaching by the American Dance Festival, an organization she had helped to found. Maslow died in June 2006 at the age of 95.

To learn more about Sophie Maslow, visit her Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and We Remember.

See also: Women of Valor - Anna Sokolow; Jewish Women and Modern Dance.

Sources:New York Times, August 19, 1950, February 10, 1978, March 6, 2000; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 895-898; Garafola, Lynn, ed., Of, By, and For the People: Dancing on the Left in the 1930's in Studies of Dance History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1994); Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC, 1997).

Drisha Institute graduates its first female Talmud scholars

August 18, 1996

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Drisha Institute was founded in 1979 to provide women with the opportunity to engage in the serious study of Jewish texts; since then, it has had a major impact on women's Torah learning.

Photographer: Joan Roth

On August 18, 1996, Devorah Zlochower, Leora Bednarsh, and Laura Steiner were recognized for completing a three-year program of Talmud study at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education in New York City. They made up the first class of women to graduate from the program.

The Drisha Institute was founded in 1979 by Rabbi David Silber as the world's first center dedicated specifically to women's study of classical Jewish texts. Although women studying for rabbinic ordination at Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative seminaries study Talmud as part of their curriculum, until recently most non-Orthodox Jews rarely engaged with Talmud. Conversely, in the Orthodox community where regular Talmud study is standard, women were until recently generally precluded—tacitly or overtly—from studying Talmud even as they received a strong Jewish education in other areas. Rabbi Silber included it in Drisha's curriculum from the beginning, because he considered it part of a "well-rounded Jewish education."

Drisha, then, is part of two related trends. One group of students at the Institute is made up of non-Orthodox women seeking deeper Jewish knowledge. The growth of these women's interest in serious Jewish text study echoes the rush of women to secular higher education and professional programs as they opened to women earlier in the century. A second group is made up of Orthodox women seeking to supplement their learning with a solid course of Talmud study. The influx of these women mirrors a larger trend of increased opportunities for women's participation in traditional Judaism. Many Drisha graduates are now teaching Talmud in a variety of Jewish contexts. Some of the Orthodox students and graduates anticipate that pathways to Orthodox female rabbinic leadership will open in the near future.

The program from which three women graduated in 1996 is now known as the Drisha Scholar's Circle and enrolls dozens of women each year. Drisha also offers less intensive programs, including part-time and summer courses. Although Drisha is not a formally accredited institution, participants in the Circle receive a Certificate in Talmud and Jewish Law after three years of study. Students are expected to "serve the Jewish community in an educational capacity" after graduation. Until June 2008, the Drisha faculty included Devorah Zlochower, one of the three original participants. Zlochower taught Talmud and Halakha (Jewish law) and oversaw the Beit Midrash, a full-time one year program of intensive study in biblical and rabbinic texts.

To learn more about the Drisha Institute, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Enyclopedia.

Sources:New York Times, August 2, 1992, August 18, 1996; www.drisha.org.

Birth of Dorothy Parker

August 22, 1893

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Dorothy Parker

The always witty, sometimes vicious writer Dorothy Parker was born on this day in 1893 to a Jewish father and Scottish mother. An outsider as a child, she developed an irreverent sense of humor early in life. She left school at age 14 to care for her ill father, who died in 1913. Four years later, she married a prosperous stockbroker from Hartford. The ten-year marriage was miserable from the start.

When her new husband went off to war, she got a job at Vanity Fair; within a year, she succeeded P.G. Wodehouse as the magazine’s drama critic. After her caustic reviews forced her departure from Vanity Fair, her life swung from one extreme to another, from suicide attempts and divorce to the glory days at the center of the Algonquin Round Table, a gathering of wits from the worlds of publishing, writing, and entertainment.

Success as a published poet did not soften her edges, as her poem “Resumé” illustrates:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

As Daniel Itzkovitz writes in his biography, “Through her worst years, [she] maintained a tough-talking and hard-drinking public exterior, scoffing at her own misery with blasé humor.”

Short stories and screenplays (including the original film of A Star Is Born) followed, as well as a second marriage with multiple breakups and reconciliations. Though she said that she was ”just a little Jewish girl trying to be cute,” Dorothy Parker’s was a brilliant chronicler of her times and ranks among the great American literary talents of the 20th century.

To learn more about Dorothy Parker, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Dorothy Parker Papers in the Virtual Archive.

Dietician Frances Stern connects nutrition to social welfare

August 23, 1914

"There is meager knowledge of the comparative nutritive value of various kinds of food," lamented Frances Stern in an August 23, 1914 column in the Boston Globe. The column went on to explain the importance of protein in the diet, and to compare the nutritional value of various foods, along with their cost. Stern particularly emphasized the importance of education in nutrition as a way of helping poor women make the most of their food budgets. A social worker, nutritionist, educator, and pioneering dietician, Stern was a leading exponent of the idea that adequate nutrition was crucial to social welfare.

Born in Boston on July 4, 1873, Stern, as a teenager, began working with children at The Industrial School in Boston's North End and teaching Sunday School at Temple Israel. Working with Isabel Hyams and Marion Ratshesky Ehrlich, she organized the Louisa May Alcott Club to teach nutrition and homemaking to young girls in 1895. Seeking more education, Stern took a special course of study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Ellen Richards, who went on to found the American Home Economics Association.

Stern's work developing visiting housekeeping programs for the Boston Association for the Relief and Control of Tuberculosis and the Boston Provident Association led to the publication of a book, Food for the Worker, in 1917. During World War I, Stern worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and for the American Red Cross in France. Upon her return from France, she founded the Food Clinic as part of the Boston Dispensary.

The Food Clinic dispensed practical advice on diet and nutrition to its clients and studied the ways in which health intersected with nutrition, ethnicity, and economic status. Stern tried to mold her education efforts to the needs of her clients, presenting information in multiple languages and through visual aids. She also tailored her dietary recommendations to patients' incomes and encouraged immigrant clients to prepare their own native foods.

The Clinic became widely recognized for excellence in nutrition education and became a training center for dieticians from all over the world. In 1943, the Clinic was renamed in Frances Stern's honor. Frances Stern died in Boston on December, 24, 1947, at age seventy-four. Today, the Frances Stern Nutrition Center is part of Tufts-New England Medical Center, and continues to train dieticians and educate patients, continuing Stern's holistic approach to diet and health.

To learn more about Frances Stern, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for December 23, 1947, "Death of Pioneering Nutritionist Frances Stern"; Nutrition and Social Welfare: What Would Frances Stern Do?, Jewesses with Attitude; Frances Stern in the Virtual Archive.

See the Frances Stern Nutrition Center On the Map.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. pp. 1335-1336; John LoDico, "To Those Who Knew Her, Stern Was a Great Mentor," Tufts Nutrition, Fall 1999; Mary Pfaffman, editorial, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, February 1948; Frances Stern, "The Food Clinic Lives in Peace and War", Journal of the American Dietetic Association, July-August, 1944; the Boston Globe, August 23, 1914; nutrition.tufts.edu/1177953850925/Nutrition-Page-nl2w_1177953851896.html.

German-language "Die Deborah" first published

August 24, 1855

Die Deborah, the most important German-Jewish newspaper in the U.S. in its time, debuted on August 24, 1855. Reform leader and editor Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise published Die Deborah as a German-language supplement to his English-language The Israelite (later The American Israelite). He designed it particularly for "the instruction and the intellectual entertainment of the ladies." Geared to recent female Jewish immigrants from German-speaking lands who adopted English more slowly than their male counterparts, Die Deborah featured a variety of articles on subjects thought to be of particular interest to women. In addition to serialized literature, it printed essays on Jewish religion, culture, and history, and debates about education. The newspaper also published didactic essays instructing women on proper care of the home and instruction of children.

Like many mid-to-late nineteenth-century publications, Die Deborah advanced a particular vision of womanhood. Based in middle-class culture, this vision portrayed women as inherently moral and religious. Women were also supposed to be devoted to the home, where their influence was the primary force shaping their children. Calling Jewish women "priestesses of the home," Die Deborah told women that it was their calling to ensure the moral standard of the family, to provide Jewish education to her children, and to set a good example of truth, gratitude, gentleness, order, and charity. Departing from a vision of Judaism that placed male learning at the center, Die Deborah put Judaism forward as a moral institution, with women's influence at the center.

As ideas about women's roles changed in the larger American culture, those changes were reflected in the pages of Die Deborah. Beginning in the 1880s, the ideal of domesticity which had placed women firmly in the home expanded into a new vision of women as "social housekeepers," extending their moral influence into the larger world. In Die Deborah, this new vision of womanhood brought an emphasis on Jewish women's historical accomplishments and support for women's professional careers. Reflecting women's wider sphere, the newspaper also began to feature an increasing number of articles written by women.

Although Die Deborah was a staple of middle-class German-Jewish life in the U.S. for several decades, its popularity declined as the German-born population gave way to an American-born generation that preferred to read in English. The newspaper ceased publication in 1902, just two years after the death of its founding editor Isaac Mayer Wise. The American Israelite, which had also been edited by Wise, took over some of the terrain of Die Deborah, publishing an increasing number of articles related to women's issues. Die Deborah remains a crucial tool for understanding the lives and attitudes of Jewish women, and their evolving status, over a half-century.

To learn more about Die Deborah, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: German Immigrant Period in the United States.

Source:Benjamin Maria Baader, "Die Deborah;" Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 320-322.

Union troops arrest Confederate spy Eugenia Levy Phillips

August 24, 1861

Born into an assimilated Jewish family in Charleston, SC, in 1819 or 1820 [sources differ], Eugenia Levy Phillips was raised by prominent and successful parents who mingled easily with Charleston's elite. Upon her marriage in the mid-1830s, she moved to Mobile, Alabama, where her husband, Philip Phillips, had a successful law practice. Philip Phillips served two terms in the Alabama State Legislature, then moved his wife and seven (soon to be nine) children to Washington, D.C., when he was elected to Congress in 1853. He declined to run for a second term, and instead went into private legal practice in 1855. Although a native Southerner, he remained opposed to Southern secession.

Eugenia Phillips, however, did not take her husband's opinions as her own. Like many Southern Jews, she was a strong supporter of the Confederate cause. While her younger sister Phoebe Levy Pember worked as a nurse in a Richmond military hospital (see This Week in History for August 18, 1823; and November 29, 1862), Phillips collaborated more directly with the Confederate military. Beginning in 1861, she aided Confederate spy networks and secretly passed material aid to Confederate troops. On August 24, 1861, Union troops raided the Phillips home; although they were unable to find direct evidence of treason, they placed Phillips under house arrest. At the intervention of Edwin Stanton, who later became Secretary of War, she was soon released and the family moved to New Orleans.

The Union army won control of New Orleans in early 1862, and Phillips was arrested in May after laughing during a funeral procession for a Union soldier. Although she maintained that she had been laughing at her children's antics and meant no disrespect, she was imprisoned with other Confederates on Ship Island, Mississippi. She defiantly told her husband not to intervene on her behalf, but he nonetheless secured her release several months later. The family moved to Georgia, where Phillips apparently toned down her outspoken support for the Confederacy, though without ever recanting her position. Phillips died in 1902.

See also: Eugenia Levy Phillips in the Virtual Archive; See Ship Island On the Map.

Sources:www.geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Quarter/2926/Women%5Fin%5FAlabama%5FHistory.html; www.aboutfamouspeople.com/article1041.html; www.jewish-history.com/civilwar/eugenia.html.

"Women Strike for Equality"

August 26, 1970

Ten thousand women marched down New York's Fifth Avenue on August 26, 1970, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment, which granted women the right to vote. Far from a simple celebration, the march was part of a "Women's Strike for Equality" organized by veteran feminist leader Betty Friedan. Friedan had called for the strike in a March 20 speech in Des Plaines, Illinois, and had planned the day's events with a coalition of both veteran and younger feminist women.

The march featured placards with slogans like "Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot," "End Human Sacrifice—Don't Get Married," and, more simply, "Women Demand Equality." Among the groups participating were the National Organization for Women, the Young Women's Christian Association, the National Coalition of American Nuns, Feminists in the Arts, and Women Strike for Peace. The women marching, and participating in the day's other actions, were diverse, but they presented three clear demands, repeated in every media account of the strike. The Strike movement demanded free abortion on demand, free 24-hour community-controlled child care centers, and equal opportunity in jobs and education.

Events over the course of the day gave additional weight to these demands. In New York's City Hall Park, women staged a demonstration day-care center. Another group of women visited targeted companies and presented satiric "awards" for under-employing women and for creating degrading images of women. Similar events took place in other cities. Boston women marched in academic gowns with a banner reading "Veritas [Harvard University's motto] is a feminine noun." Pittsburgh women sponsored a day-long conference on women's rights. And women in several cities gathered signatures and staged rallies and marches advocating Senate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.

In New York, the speakers at the evening march included a battery of Jewish women long active in the feminist movement. Congressional candidate Bella Abzug, writer Gloria Steinem, and former Miss America Bess Myerson Grant, then the city's Commissioner of Consumer Affairs, joined Friedan on the platform. Although Jewish women would later struggle with anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism within the American feminist movement, the 1970 strike was emblematic of the crucial role that Jewish women played in forming and advancing that movement.

Although businesses and retail stores reported little effect from the strike, the New York City mayor, New York State governor, and President Nixon all issued proclamations officially recognizing the day. Organizers were also pleased at the number of African-American women participating; the feminist movement had been largely a white, middle-class phenomenon. Despite some heckling from men and from reactionary women's groups, Friedan declared the day's events a success "beyond our wildest dreams."

See also: On Jewesses with Attitude, The Lessons of Women's Equality Day and Women Strike for Equality -- Then and Now; This Week in History for August 26, 1980, "Three generations of activist Seaman family mark 10th anniversary of Women's Strike for Equality."

Sources:New York Times, August 23, 1970; August 26, 1970; August 27, 1970; August 30, 1970; Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago, 1993).

Three generations of activist Seaman family mark 10th anniversary of Women's Strike for Equality

August 26, 1980

When women and men paraded down New York's Fifth Avenue on August 26, 1980, to mark the tenth anniversary of Women's Strike for Equality and the sixtieth anniversary of women's right to vote, three generations of Seaman family women were among them. Sylvia Seaman, her daughter-in-law Barbara Seaman, and Barbara's daughter Elana Seaman represented three generations of feminist activism.

Sylvia Seaman, born in 1900, first marched for suffrage in 1915. When the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote, in 1920, she joined the celebrations. While at Cornell University, she was once arrested for wearing pants in public. It was also at Cornell that she began writing, publishing several novels co-authored with her roommate, Frances Schwartz, under the pseudonym Francis Sylvin. In 1965, following her own radical mastectomy, she wrote Always a Woman: What Every Woman Should Know About Breast Cancer. It was the first book on the subject written by someone outside the medical community. In 1979, she published How to Be a Jewish Grandmother, a humorous collection of anecdotes and advice. She remained active in the feminist movement, as one of the leaders of the 1970 march commemorating the 50th anniversary of women's suffrage, and giving public addresses before such groups as the National Organization for Women. Sylvia Seaman died of breast cancer in 1995.

Barbara Seaman is best known as the author of The Doctor's Case Against the Pill and as a founder of the National Women's Health Network. Educated at Oberlin College and trained as a journalist, she began reporting on women's health in 1960. Contributing articles to the New York Times, Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, and such mainstream publications as Family Circle and Ladies Home Journal, she revealed that women lacked the necessary information to make decisions about their own health. Her first book, The Doctor's Case Against the Pill, published in 1969, revealed the health risks of the birth control pill; it sparked Senate hearings and ultimately led to the placement of warnings on oral contraceptives. The Pill was the first prescription drug to carry a warning. When the book was reissued in a 25th-anniversary edition, Science magazine credited it with creating a "blossoming in women's health research." In addition to writing four additional books on women's health, other books, and myriad articles and book chapters, Seaman was deeply involved with the National Women's Health Network (NWHN), which she helped found in 1975. NWHN works to educate women about their health, the health care system, and health policy, and to change American health policy and the health care system to make them more accessible and responsive to women. Barbara Seaman died of lung cancer on February 27, 2008.

Elana Seaman, just 20 years old in 1980, was already active in the women's movement by the time she marched with her mother and grandmother in the Women's Strike for Equality. A junior at Bard College, she had volunteered at the Coalition for the Medical Rights of Women in San Francisco, and hoped to find a job in a women's health center after her graduation. While her grandmother told the New York Times that women were still "left high and dry in 1980" on issues such as the Equal Rights Amendment, Elana Seaman was more hopeful, noting that "there's always been progress and retrogression" in the several American women's movements. The Seaman women marching together in New York represented those changes and the long history of women's activism in America.

To learn more about Sylvia Seaman, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

To learn more about Barbara Seaman, visit We Remember and Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: This Week in History for August 26, 1970, "Women Strike for Equality."

Sources:New York Times, August 25, 1980, January 11, 1995, June 25, 2000, March 1, 2008; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1223–1224; www.nwhn.org/about/index.cfm?content_id=75&section=About; www.nwhn.org/about/; www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=1566; jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA062; jwa.org/discover/weremember/seaman/.

Death of Hadassah activist Alice Seligsberg

August 27, 1940

Alice Lillie Seligsberg was a social worker and Zionist who helped to found Hadassah: The Women's Zionist Organization of America. Born on August 8, 1873, Seligsberg was raised in New York City, where she earned a B.A. at Barnard College in 1895. She did graduate work at Columbia University and in Berlin, and then began a career working with poor children and orphans in New York. She worked at the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, and then established Fellowship House, an institution that found homes for poor and orphaned children; she served as president of the House from 1913 to 1918. From 1922 to 1936, she was Executive Director of the Jewish Children's Clearing Bureau, which also worked to place children in appropriate settings. Fellowship House and the Clearing Bureau were later merged into the New York Association for Jewish Children.

In tandem with her professional life, Seligsberg was active in Jewish and Zionist activities. In 1913, she joined the first board of directors of Hadassah: The Women's Zionist Organization of America, then only a year old. In 1917, she helped to organize a large medical effort of nurses, doctors, and supplies sent to Palestine under Hadassah auspices. When the group's business administrator suffered a heart attack, Seligsberg joined the mission. In Palestine, she helped the unit to open hospitals in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Tiberias, Safed, and Haifa; begin a campaign to eradicate malaria; and establish a nurses' training school. She was also asked, in 1919, to become Executive Director of the Palestine Orphan Committee. In this position, Seligsberg established group homes for children who had lost or been separated from their parents during the First World War.

Returning to the U.S. in 1920, Seligsberg founded Junior Hadassah, then served as national president of Hadassah in 1921 and 1922. In 1925, she became senior advisor of Junior Hadassah; she would hold that position for 15 years. Under Seligsberg's leadership, Junior Hadassah devoted its energies to work for war orphans, and then to projects for children in Palestine more generally. Among the group's notable successes was the revitalization of the Youth Aliyah village of Meier Shefeyah. The hospital there was named in Seligsberg's honor.

Alice Seligsberg died on August 27, 1940. Hadassah immediately announced that $10,000 would be allocated to carry on emergency child welfare projects in her name. Hadassah also allocated $25,000 to build a memorial to Seligsberg in Palestine. That memorial, a medical clinic named for her, was dedicated by Henrietta Szold on October 15, 1940.

To learn more about Alice Lillie Seligsberg, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for February 24, 1912 "Founding of Hadassah: The Women's Zionist Organization of America"; Building the "Yishuv" - Henrietta Szold, 1860–1945 and Letter from Henrietta Szold to Alice Seligsberg, October 8, 1931."; Alice Lillie Seligsberg in the Virtual Archive; Rose Viteles.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 571-583, 1227-1228; New York Times, August 29, 1940.

New Torah scroll presented to the Beth El Synagogue in New Orleans

August 27, 2006

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Hayley Fields and Jackie Gothard. Photo by Donna Matherne.

The first female President of this 104-year-old Orthodox congregation, Jackie Gothard had presided over the burial of seven Torah scrolls damaged beyond repair when the synagogue was flooded. Two weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, volunteers with an Israeli charity rescued seven Torah scrolls from the synagogue. Soldiers from a California unit brought a rabbi and other volunteers to the wrecked synagogue by inflatable boat and accompanied them inside as they waded through waist-high water to retrieve the boxed scrolls, which were later buried in the Beth Israel Cemetery.

Jackie Gothard was determined there would be a Yom Kippur Service, scarcely six weeks after the storm struck. She relied upon the generosity of her good friends, the Patel brothers, Hindu immigrants from India who had built a motel on land purchased from the Gothards. The Patels moved their employees out of a conference room they were sleeping in so that Beth Israel could set up for the High Holiday service. So it was that on October 12, 2005, the Beth Israel community began again. Five years later, Beth Israel has sold its ruined building, recruited a young rabbi from New York, and is holding services in a borrowed space while it nears the end of a Capital Campaign for a new sanctuary.

Its Torahs have been replaced. The first new scroll came courtesy of an energetic Los Angeles teenager, Hayley Fields, who formed a non-profit called “Every Minute Counts.” By selling watches with this phrase engraved on it for $5.00 a piece, she raised $18,000 to purchase a new Torah for Beth Israel. On August 27, one year after the storm, she and her family came to New Orleans to present the scroll to congregation.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, Jackie Gothard was not the only female leader in the Jewish communiy. All but one synagogue and many of the Jewish communal organizations had female presidents. During the months after the storm, women played a critical role in beginning the long process of stitching the community back together.

To learn more about the experience of the Gulf Coast Jewish Community during and after Hurricane Katrina, visit the “Katrina’s Jewish Voices” collection.

See also: "Katrina's Jewish Voices" goes live; On Jewesses with Attitude: Katrina's Jewish Voices, Katrina at 2, Rosh Hashana and Hurricane Katrina: Reflections from Bluma Rivkin of New Orleans, Katrina's Jewish Voices Four Years Later, The Jewish Community's Finest Moment, A Charitable Role Reversal for the Jews of Katrina, and Katrina's Jewish Voices and Women's Stories.

Sources: ZAKA Rescue and Recovery Torah Removal; Beth Israel Torah Dedication; Katrina's Jewish Voices.

Launch of the Jewish Women's Archive's Virtual Archive

August 28, 1997

On August 28, 1997 Boston's Jewish Advocate ran a story entitled "Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) set for launch into cyberspace," which outlined JWA's origin, mission, and work, and announced a new chapter in the organization's history. JWA was a young organization, just two years old, when the launch of its "virtual archive" was announced in the Advocate article. The goal of the virtual archive is to identify and link existing materials and archives around the country. JWA's founding director Gail Twersky Reimer explained that although Jewish women's letters, diaries, personal papers, and more exist, "most material is not readily identifiable and needs to be resurfaced." She envisioned the virtual archive as a gateway for scholars and the public to gain access to otherwise-hidden resources.

As Reimer told the Advocate, documenting existing collections is only part of JWA's mission. JWA was also working to create new materials, primarily by conducting oral history interviews with elderly women from the congregation of Temple Israel in Boston. This project, called "Women Whose Lives Span the Century," led to an art exhibit of works based on the interviews; the exhibit took place at the Jewish Community Center in Newton, MA.

Reimer also told the Advocate that JWA was engaged in long-term planning to assemble the resources to fulfill its mission. The article reported that that mission had been recently refined to focus on archival and educational work. In the years since the launch of the Virtual Archive, JWA has been at the forefront of collecting and disseminating that information. Through Women of Valor web exhibits and posters; curriculum materials; oral history projects in Baltimore and Seattle; Women Who Dared events honoring local Jewish activists; an exhibit on Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution; Katrina's Jewish Voices; the Jewesses with Attitude blog; and the This Week in History feature which you are reading now, JWA has led the way in putting Jewish women's history firmly "On the Map."

Source:The Jewish Advocate, 28 August 1997; Jewish Women's Archive, jwa.org.

First CAJE Conference

August 29, 1976

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CAJE logo

On August 29, 1976, the first Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education began at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Organized by Cherie Koller-Fox and Jerry Benjamin, at the time both students at the Harvard School of Education, the conference brought together educators seeking new approaches to Jewish education and new ways of organizing the profession.

Koller-Fox and Benjamin organized the Conference at a time of great shifts in the field. An older generation of Jewish educators was beginning to give way to a younger generation raised after the Holocaust. The younger generation also differed from previous generations in that women, who had long been active educators within their local communities, became increasingly numerous and prominent as educational leaders at the national level. Some of this shift reflected women's growing access to rigorous, high-level Jewish study.

The influx of new teachers, many of them strongly influenced by the 1960s counterculture, led to demands for a less top-down organization within the profession and for new approaches in the classroom. In Koller-Fox's words, the conference sought to "communicate that there was a wide range of choices available in Jewish pedagogy." The 1976 conference was so successful that the following year, in Rochester, NY, a permanent organization called the Coalition for Alternatives in Jewish Education (CAJE) was formed.

In addition to bringing together Jewish educators of all ages for learning, networking, and reflecting on their work, annual CAJE conferences have served as launching grounds for the careers of several prominent Jewish women. Both singer/songwriter Debbie Friedman and storyteller Peninnah Schram were first introduced to broad audiences at CAJE. Friedman is still a frequent performer at the annual conference.

In 1987, CAJE changed its name to the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education, reflecting the fact that what had once been "alternative" ideas had entered the mainstream of Jewish pedagogy. The annual conference attracts approximately 1500 participants, of whom 75% are women. The Coalition claims 4000 members, who come from all Jewish denominations and many kinds of educational settings. The annual conference was not held in 2009 due to the dramatic economic downturn of the time. One month later, CAJE announced that, due to past debts and the economic crisis, it would close its doors at the end of February 2009. In its final months, CAJE worked with the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA) to ensure that the needs of Jewish educators will continue to be met and that the legacy of CAJE would be preserved. In late 2009, a group of Jewish educators founded New CAJE to build on the legacy of CAJE and held their first conference in August of 2010.

To learn more about CAJE, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Teaching Profession in the United States; newcaje.org.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 199-200; www.caje.org.

Louise Glück Named Poet Laureate

August 29, 2003

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Louise Glück was named poet laureate of the United States on August 29, 2003.

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This photo is in the public domain.

Louise Glück was named poet laureate of the United States on August 29, 2003. Born in New York City in 1943, Glück was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, and published her first book of poetry, Firstborn, in 1968. She has since published nine more books of poetry and one volume of essays, Proofs and Theories (1994).

Glück's selection as poet laureate was hailed by fellow poets. David Lehman, editor of the Best American Poetry series, called her "a real intellect in poetry" and "someone of principle and integrity." Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, in announcing the appointment, commended her "strong, vivid, deep poetic voice." That strong voice has set Glück's work apart from that of other contemporary poets. Her poems are characterized by precise, evocative language, spare but powerful. In an editorial praising Glück's appointment, Andrew Johnston wrote that "her poems send you out into the world a little colder but wide awake."

In addition to exactness of language, Glück's poems are characterized by frequent classical allusions. In Meadowlands (1996), for example, she tells the story of a disintegrating late-20th-century marriage in parallel with snippets from the story of Odysseus and Penelope. In The Triumph of Achilles (1985), some poems deal directly with Greek tragedy, while others are, as one reviewer put it, "charged with [a] mythic overlay." In Averno (2006), she rewrites the legend of Persephone in eighteen linked poems.

In addition to the recognition of the poet laureate position, Glück has received numerous other awards honoring particular publications. Achilles won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Vita Nova (1999) won the Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize. The Wild Iris, considered her best work, won both a Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award. A Village Life (2009) was shortlisted for the 2010 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Glück has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, she was announced as the new judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. In 2008, Glück was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry.

Glück is Adjunct Professor of English and Rosencranz Writer in Residence at Yale University.

Sources:Boston Globe, August 29, 2003; New York Times, December 22, 1985, August 4, 1996, November 4, 2003; www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/82; www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/gluck/about.htm; www.yale.edu/english/profiles/gluck.html; www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374107424.

Rabbi and military chaplain Bonnie Koppell Profiled

August 31, 1990

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Rabbi Bonnie Koppell

On August 31, 1990, in the midst of the build-up to the first Persian Gulf War, the Omaha, Nebraska, Jewish Press profiled Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, the first female rabbi to serve in the U.S. military. Koppell joined the U.S. Army Chaplaincy Corps in 1979, while still a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. After a poster promoting the program caught her eye, she signed up for a six-week stint at Fort Hamilton, New York, thinking that "it sounded like a different way to spend the summer."

Rabbi Koppell served as the chaplain for the 112th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Huachaca in Arizona, and in other postings. In 1991, she was placed on active duty at 5th Army Headquarters near San Antonio, Texas. In 2003, the Army sent her to Germany for a month, to the headquarters of the United States Army Europe. She served a year of active duty in support of Operation Noble Eagle in 2005. She spent Hanukah with Jewish service members in Kuwait and Afghanistan, and she was deployed to Iraq in 2006, bringing Passover seders to soldiers in Baghdad and Taji.

While fulfilling her reserve duty obligations through weekend training, Koppell also served for many years as the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Shalom, and later as the rabbi to the Temple Chai community, both in Phoenix, AZ. She told reporters that both the military and the synagogue had accommodated her dual career. For instance, the military had released her from Saturday training in honor of her Shabbat observance, and had also let her split her Sundays between training with the army and running Sunday School programs in Phoenix. Similarly, her congregation filled in for her while she was on duty with the Army in faraway places. Koppell saw the congregation's lay leadership in her absence as an expression of patriotism.

Koppell, who holds the rank of colonel, has been appointed Command Chaplain of the 63rd Regional Support Command. She has received many awards and citations from the Army, including a National Defense Service Medal (1992) and a Meritorious Service Medal (2002). She also received an award for Outstanding Volunteer Service (2000) and the Global War on Terrorism medal (2005). She received her Doctor of Divinity degree in 2006, and was invited to offer the opening prayer at a White House meeting of Jewish leaders with the President of the United States in 2007. She recently returned from a Passover trip to Kuwait in 2010.

To learn more about Rabbi Bonnie Koppell, visit In Focus: Jewish Women in the Military: Chaplains: Bonnie Koppell.

See also: Rabbi Bonnie Koppell's website; On Jewesses with Attitude: "A Filmmaker, a Rabbi, and Iraq" and "Taking Stock on Veteran's Day".

Sources:The Jewish Press (Omaha), August 31, 1990; Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, August 1, 2003, June 24, 2005; jwa.org/discover/inthepast/infocus/military/chaplains/koppell.html; www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/bonniekappell.html; www.azrabbi.com.