Israeli and American Jewish women read Torah at the Western Wall

December 1, 1988

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Participants in Orthodox women's tefillah groups that wish to maximize women’s participation in communal prayer while remaining within the halakhic parameters of the Orthodox community meet regularly to conduct prayer services for women only. Here the Israeli multi-denominational Women of the Wall group holds a prayer service in Gan Miriam, Jerusalem.

Photographer: Joan Roth

Israeli and American women joined together and attempted to pray as a group at the Western Wall for the first time on December 1, 1988. More than 70 women attended the women's service, which included a Torah reading, at the remnant of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem often called the Western or the Wailing Wall. These women had gathered for the first International Congress for the Empowerment of Jewish Women and decided to go pray as a group at the Wall. Bonna Haberman, one of the women present on that day, suggested that a women’s prayer group meet at the Wall every Rosh Hodesh (the Jewish new moon observance). Local Congress attendees followed through, and the group Women of the Wall was born.

Since that first service, Women of the Wall has gathered to pray at the Western Wall every Rosh Hodesh. From the very first gathering, the group has confronted hostile responses including physical assaults and thrown stones, chairs, and dirty diapers.

Assertion of their right to pray together as women out loud and to conduct a public Torah service has led not only to physical struggles but also to a protracted legal confrontation. While members of the ultra-orthodox community attempted to pass laws that would entail a seven-year prison sentence for women who conducted Torah services at the Wall, the Israeli Supreme Court mandated in April 2003 that authorities needed to make some provision for women to conduct services in the Wall area. In the summer of 2004, the government opened an alternative prayer space adjacent to the ancient Temple wall uncovered by archaeologists, but far removed from the area called the Wailing Wall. Although Women of the Wall has reluctantly moved its Torah service to this space, the women continue to use the traditional prayer plaza for the rest of their Rosh Hodesh worship.

To learn more about Women of the Wall, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Women of the Wall: Keeping the faith for 21 years and What the Women of the Wall Want on Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources: Phyllis Chesler and Rivka Haut, eds., Women of the Wall, pp. 274-275, 354-355, 388-389; Brenda E. Brasher, “Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site,” Nashim, Fall 2003, p. 241; Jerusalem Post, August 17, 2004, www.jpost.com.

Newly dedicated Newport Synagogue introduces an open-view women's gallery

December 2, 1763

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Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island is known to be the oldest synagogue in the United States. It is the only synagogue building in the United States to survive from the Colonial era.

A new synagogue, dedicated in Newport, Rhode Island on December 2, 1763, introduced an important innovation in synagogue design. The women’s gallery of this traditional synagogue featured a low balustrade that offered women an open view of the rest of the sanctuary.

Women’s galleries in other “new world” and “old world” synagogues generally were constructed with high or opaque barriers meant to keep women out of the sight of men within the sanctuary. The change in Newport represented less a reform of traditional practice than a reflection of colonial American expectations for female religious expression.

The strong presence of women in colonial American churches was an important way in which women demonstrated the religious piety expected of them by their society. Observing the behavior of their non-Jewish neighbors, colonial American Jewish women seemed to understand that it was more important that they be seen in the space of public worship than had been the case in their previous communities. Early American synagogue records suggest that unmarried young women both attended and asserted their presence in the synagogue.

The open gallery layout of the Newport synagogue demonstrates a changing consciousness of what women’s synagogue role should be. Moreover, the open plan was imitated by most of the early American synagogues that followed Newport.

In 1824, Rebecca Touro petitioned the Rhode Island state legislature to preserve the synagogue. At the time of her petition, no Jews were living in Newport. Now known as Touro Synagogue, the Newport building is the only synagogue building in the United States to survive from the Colonial era. Designated as a National Historic Shrine by the U.S. National Park Service in 1947, the colonial-era Touro Synagogue remains as a functioning Orthodox synagogue in the midst of modern-day Newport.

See also: Jewish Women "On the Map" - Touro Synagogue.

Sources: Karla Goldman, Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Cambridge, MA, 2000); www.tourosynagogue.org.

Los Angeles film debut of Anzia Yezierska's "Hungry Hearts"

December 3, 1922

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Picture of author Anzia Yezierska with an article in the Lima News of July 3, 1922.

In her short stories and novels, author Anzia Yezierska focused on the challenges faced by young Jewish women trying to navigate between their immigrant families and their desire to become part of America. After a long period of struggling to attain a public voice, Yezierska published Hungry Hearts, a book of short stories, in 1920. Once the book found public attention, it attracted interest from Hollywood. The silent movie Hungry Hearts opened in New York City on Thanksgiving, 1922, and in Los Angeles on December 3.

The Goldwyn Company paid $10,000 for the film rights and brought Yezierska to Los Angeles as a $200 per week screen writer. This was the first financial security Yezierska had ever experienced. Despite the excitement of finally being rewarded for her work as a writer, Yezierska was overwhelmed by her portrayal in the popular press as a “sweatshop Cinderella.” She also felt unable to draw upon authentic immigrant experience while ensconced in Hollywood luxury. She returned to New York after a few months.

The film Hungry Hearts is notable for its attempts to portray the struggle of immigrant life and for its street scenes that were actually filmed on the Lower East Side. Still many reviewers and Yezierska, herself, objected to the sentimentality of the final script and to a tacked-on happy ending (described by the New York Times as “incredible and mushy”).

In Hungry Hearts and her later stories and novels (e.g. Breadgivers, 1925), Yezierska was the first author to present the struggles of immigrant women to a broader American audience. Persea Books began publishing reprints of Yezierska's work in 1975.

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

See also: This Week in History for September 13, 1925, "New York Times" reviews Yezierska's "Bread Givers"; Go & Learn: Primary Documents and Lesson Plans, Immigration and Generations: Anzia Yezierska's Children of Loneliness; Anzia Yezierska's papers in the Virtual Archive.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, December 3, 1922; New York Times, November 27, 1922; Louise Levitas Henriksen, Anzia Yezierska, A Writer’s Life (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988).

Tehilla Lichtenstein becomes leader of Society of Jewish Science

December 4, 1938

On December 4, 1938, Tehilla Lichtenstein first took the pulpit as the leader of the Society of Jewish Science in New York City, giving a sermon entitled “The Power of Thought.” Her topic reflected the Society’s idea, borrowed from Christian Science, that God’s healing power lies within each individual. With this service, Lichtenstein became the spiritual leader of the Congregation of Jewish Science in New York—the first woman to serve as the spiritual leader of any American Jewish congregation.

Born in Jerusalem in 1893, Lichtenstein had left doctoral work in English at Columbia University to marry Morris Lichtenstein, a Reform rabbi, in 1920. Together, the Lichtensteins established the Society of Jewish Science in 1922.

The Lichtensteins hoped to create a variant of Judaism that could offer the spiritual sustenance that they believed too many Jews were finding within Christian Science. They showed that through Judaism, as through Christian Science, one could emphasize spirituality, the goodness of God, and the effectiveness of prayer. Unlike Christian Science, Jewish Science did not deny the benefits of modern medicine. Rather, it attempted to harmonize Judaism with science. They believed that their program of meditation, affirmation and visualization would reveal that in its essence, Judaism was the highest of healing sciences.

During the early years of the Society, Tehilla Lichenstein ran the Society religious school where she taught Hebrew and Bible and edited its monthly journal, the Jewish Science Interpreter. When Morris Lichtenstein died in 1938, Tehilla became the spiritual leader of the Society. Illustrating her view of Judaism as a practical religion, Lichtenstein’s early sermons included the topics “Seven Rules for Happy Living” and “When is War Justified?”. Although some of Lichtenstein’s teachings drew on her own experiences as a wife and mother and focused on interpersonal relationships, she also gave sermons taking up such issues as Soviet foreign policy and anti-Semitism in post-war America.

In addition to her regular sermons, Lichtenstein continued to edit the Interpreter, taught classes in Jewish Science, and trained members of the Society to become spiritual healers. In the 1950s, she hosted a weekly radio program. She continued to preach from the pulpit until 1972, and remained the leader of the Society until her death in 1973.

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

See also: Tamar De Sola Pool; Tehilla Lichtenstein in the Virtual Archive.

Sources: Doris Friedman, Applied Judaism: Selected Jewish Science Essays by Tehilla Lichtenstein (New York, 1989); Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 850-851; New York Times, December 3, 1938, December 10, 1938, December 17, 1938; Ellen Umansky, From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews (New York, 2005).

Stanford wins NCAA College Cup with help from Jewish soccer star, Camille Levin

December 4, 2011

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Photo by Rick Bale/Stanford Athletics.

After four straight trips to the women’s soccer Final Four, Stanford finally brought home the NCAA College Cup with the help of senior Camille Levin, a Jewish woman from Newport Coast, CA in a December 4, 2011 game against Duke. Levin set up the winning goal scored by her teammate, midfielder Teresa Noyola. The New York Times wrote that “Levin had one of the strongest games of her career and was arguably the best player on the field today for either side.”

Camille Levin is a graduate of the Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School in Irvine, CA, where she was an NSCAA All-American in 2006 and 2007. A member of the Cal-South Olympic Development Program '90 state team, in 2009 she played for the United States under-20 national team in a key match against Germany.

A psychology major at Stanford, Levin was known as a competitive player, a strong finisher, and perhaps the team’s best tackler. Considered Stanford's most versatile player, she was named to the NCAA College Cup All-Tournament team in 2010.

On winning the College Cup, Levin said, “It's been a long journey; it's been a lot of hard work and everybody was dedicated to it from the staff to the athletic trainer to every single player on this team… I don't think there are words to describe how great a feeling it is to win this last game.”

See also: Sports in the United States.

Sources: Women's soccer quotes, goduke.com; At College Cup, A Crowning Moment for Stanford Girls, New York Times; Long-Awaited Victory for Jewish Soccer Star, The Forward; Camille Levin's profile, GoStanford.com.

Birth of essayist and suffragist Nina Morais Cohen

December 6, 1855

Nina Morais Cohen; the daughter of Sabato Morais, a prominent Orthodox rabbi and a leading exponent of traditional Judaism—established her own strong voice as an advocate for women’s rights within Judaism and American society. Born on December 6, 1855, in Philadelphia, where her father served the congregation Mikveh Israel, Nina Morais grew up very involved in her father’s work and concerns. As a young woman she published widely on the subject of women’s rights and roles in Judaism in both the Jewish and secular press.

After her marriage to attorney Emanuel Cohen in 1885, she moved to Minneapolis, where she became a local leader in the woman suffrage movement and in the Jewish community. She participated in the 1893 Jewish Women’s Congress in Chicago and returned to Minneapolis to found a local section of the newly formed National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) in 1894. She served as section president until 1907. For 13 years, she drew upon her extensive Jewish education to lead study sessions for local NCJW members in her home on Saturday afternoons.

To learn more about Nina Morais Cohen, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Source: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 248-249.

Dr. Rosalyn S. Yalow becomes first American-born woman to receive Nobel Prize in science

December 8, 1977

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Dr. Rosalyn S. Yalow was the first woman born and educated in the United States to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.

On December 8, 1977, Rosalyn Yalow became the first American-born and American-trained woman to receive a Nobel Prize in science when she accepted the Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work in the development of radioimmunoassay, a technique that allows scientists to measure minute amounts of hormones and other substances in human blood.

Born in 1921 and raised in the Bronx, Yalow planned to become a teacher until, at 17, she read a biography of Marie Curie and found her role model. Yalow studied physics at Hunter College, then took a position as a secretary at Columbia University’s medical school. No graduate school would admit her to a physics program, because faculty felt that there would never be job opportunities for a Jewish woman physicist. She hoped to use her staff position to take classes at Columbia and work toward a degree that way. However, in 1941, the University of Illinois relented and admitted her. She was the only woman and one of only three Jews, among 400 faculty and teaching assistants. Later, she married one of those Jews, Aaron Yalow.

Moving back to New York after graduate school, Yalow took a position at the Bronx V.A. Hospital, where she remained for over 30 years. Following her interest in nuclear medicine, she joined forces early on with physician Sol Berson; their research partnership lasted 22 years, until Berson’s death in 1972. Together, they discovered a way of measuring insulin in human blood. Along the way, they disproved some major tenets of medicine, including the idea that molecules like insulin were too small to produce antibodies. The technique of radioimmunoassay that they developed soon became a widespread tool for measuring all kinds of hormones and diagnosing many conditions that had previously been difficult to test for or treat.

After Berson’s death, Yalow continued her work, publishing hundreds of papers and giving lectures around the country and the world. In 1976, she became the first woman ever to win the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. The following year, she won the Nobel Prize. Though Yalow made a point of saying that she was not “a feminist in the ordinary sense,” and that she had kept a kosher home for her husband and raised two children, she also spoke out for women in science. At the Nobel awards dinner in Stockholm, she told attendees that “we still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home...we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage, and determination to succeed, and we must feel a personal responsibility to ease the path for those who come afterward.” For a woman who had been told she would never find a job in physics, Yalow had gone a long way toward opening up that path. Dr. Rosalyn S. Yalow died on May 30, 2011 at the age of 89.

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

See also: Remembering Dr. Rosalyn S. Yalow, Nobel Prize winning scientist and mother and Jewish women and the Nobel prize, Jewesses with Attitude; Hunter College; Rosalyn S. Yalow in the Virtual Archive.

Sources: New York Times, November 29, 1977, December 22, 1977, April 9, 1978; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1517-1520.

Empire State Building lights up to celebrate NCJW

December 8, 2003

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The Empire State Building was illuminated by the organization’s colors of blue and green, on the nights of December 8 and 9, 2003, as a special tribute to the 110th anniversary of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). Image courtesy of Wired New York.

The Empire State Building offered a special tribute to the 110th anniversary of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), when it was illuminated by the organization’s colors of blue and green, on the nights of December 8 and 9, 2003.

The illumination marked the founding of the Council at the Jewish Women’s Congress held at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The New York section of NCJW took a strong role in its early years sending volunteers to Ellis Island to look after the welfare of single Jewish women who arrived alone in the New World. Today, with 90,000 members, NCJW continues to advance Jewish values by working for social change, acting nationally to improve the quality of life for women, children, and families, and to advance individual rights and freedoms.

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

See also: This Week in History for February 28, 1935, May 9, 1894, September 4, 1893, and November 15, 1896.

Source: www.ncjw.org/html/News/PressReleases/031204/.

Dr. Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori wins Nobel Prize

December 10, 1947

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Biochemist Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori (1896-1957) and her husband Carl Ferdinand Cori (1896-1984) were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1947 for their work on how the human body metabolizes sugar. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.

Dr. Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori (1896–1957) became the first Jewish woman, as well as the first American woman, to win a Nobel Prize in the sciences when she received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine on December 10, 1947. She won the prize jointly with her husband, Dr. Carl F. Cori, and Bernardo A. Houssay. The scientists were honored for their research in identifying the “Cori Cycle” which explains how the body converts carbohydrates into sugars that supply muscles with energy. This research was particularly important in leading to the understanding and treatment of diabetes.

Dr. Gerty Cori was born in Prague. Encouraged by her family, she enrolled at the Medical School of the German University of Prague, receiving her Doctorate in Medicine in 1920. Together with her husband, Cori immigrated to the United States and became a citizen in 1928. Carl took a position at the State Institute for the Study of Malignant Diseases in Buffalo, NY, and Gerty was hired as an assistant pathologist. The Coris persisted in working together despite the discouragement of many institutions that sought to hire only Carl. In 1931, they moved to St. Louis where Carl became the chair of the pharmacology department at Washington University School of Medicine. Gerty was offered a position as a research assistant.

When Carl was made chair of a new biochemistry department in 1946, Gerty was finally promoted to full professor. They won the Nobel Prize the following year. In 1952, President Truman appointed her to the Board of Directors of the National Science Foundation.

To learn more about Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Jewish women and the Nobel prize, Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources: New York Times, October 24, 1947, October 27, 1957; www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_69.html.

Birth of author Grace Paley

December 11, 1922

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The cover of Grace Paley: The Collected Stories by Grace Paley. Virago 1998, Paperback.

Grace Paley, author, feminist and “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist,” was born on December 11, 1922 in the Bronx. She wrote three highly acclaimed collections of short fiction including Later the Same Day (1985) and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), as well as three poetry collections, and her fiction appeared in many prominent periodicals. She taught at City College of New York, Sarah Lawrence College, and Dartmouth.

Raised in a socialist family by parents who had been arrested by the Russian czarist regime, Paley's progressive stances and concern for the underdog often emerged in her writing. Her political activism as an adult began with her work with the PTA at her children's school. She maintained an active and long-term involvement in anti-war, anti-nuclear, and feminist movements. Her more controversial activities included a visit to North Vietnam in 1969 and her role in co-founding the Jewish Women's Committee to End the Occupation of the Left Bank and Gaza in 1987.

Paley received many grants and awards including a Senior Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature in 1987. In 1986, Governor Mario Cuomo named Paley as the first official New York State Writer. Paley passed away on August 22, 2007.

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

See also: Fiction in the United States; This Week in History for March 19, 1970 - Grace Paley arrested at Vietnam protest; Living the Legacy document - "Traveling" by Grace Paley; Remembering Grace Paley, Thinking of Grace, and Grace Paley, z”l, Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources: www.myjewishlearning.com/culture/literature/Overview_Jewish_American_Literature/ Into_The_Literary_Mainstream/Literature_Paley_Norton.htm; www.albany.edu/writers-inst/paley.html; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1026-1028; jwa.org/weremember/paley.

Paula Ackerman becomes "spiritual leader" of Temple Beth Israel of Meridian, Mississippi

December 12, 1950

On December 12, 1950, Paula Ackerman became the interim "spiritual leader" of Temple Beth Israel in Meridian, Mississippi after her husband, who was the congregation's rabbi, passed away. Paula Herskovitz had married Rabbi William Ackerman in 1919. As a rebbitzin, Paula Ackerman was an active partner, not only teaching in the Hebrew school and helping out with the sisterhood, but also taking her husband's place in the pulpit whenever he was absent or ill. Ackerman was also a member of the board of the Reform movement's National Federation of Temple Sisterhoods (NFTS) and chairman of NFTS's National Committee on Religious Schools.

After Ackerman's husband died on November 30, 1950, the synagogue's president asked the 57-year-old Ackerman if she could "carry on the ministry until they could get a rabbi." Ackerman wrote in a letter to a friend, "I also know how revolutionary the idea is—therefore it seems to be a challenge that I pray I can meet. If I can just plant a seed for the Jewish woman's larger participation—if perhaps it will open a way for women students to train for congregational leadership—then my life would have some meaning."

Concerns among national Reform leaders about Ackerman's lack of proper ordination and rabbinic education were mostly expressed privately. Many understood the importance of Ackerman's example in showing that a woman could serve in a rabbinical role. She steered Beth Israel for the next three years, leading weekly and holiday services, officiating at weddings, confirmations, and funerals, and participating in meetings of Mississippi rabbis. Eventually, Beth Israel did find a man to serve as their rabbi. In 1962, however, when the rabbi of Ackerman's childhood synagogue, in Pensacola, Florida, suddenly quit, Ackerman agreed to return temporarily to the rabbinical role to hold that congregation together as well. Paula Ackerman died in Thomaston, GA on January 12, 1989.

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

See also: Rabbis in the United States; Jewish Women "On the Map" - Congregation Beth Israel.

Source: Pamela Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination, 1889-1985, (Boston, 1998), pp. 120-126.

Lillian Hellman's "The Children's Hour" is banned in Boston

December 14, 1935

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The Children's Hour by Lillian Hellman remains a significant milestone in the representation of gay themes in American letters and an important piece of the contemporary American theater repertoire.

Calling it "indecent," Mayor Frederick Mansfield banned Lillian Hellman's first play, The Children's Hour, from being staged in Boston, in a decree issued on December 14, 1935. Showcasing the destructive power of lies, the play depicts the experiences of the headmistresses of a girls' boarding school, who are ruined by a malicious rumor that they are lovers.

Although the play was also banned in London, The Children's Hour had opened on Broadway in 1934 to critical and popular success. One reviewer called it both "a venomously tragic play" and "one of the most straightforward, driving dramas of the season." The scandal associated with the play's lesbian theme was reflected in a 1936 film remake, These Three, for which a screenplay written by Hellman transformed the play's rumor of lesbianism into a rumored love triangle centered around a man. Another film version, starring Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine in 1961, restored both the lesbian-rumor theme and the original title. The play remains a significant milestone in the representation of gay themes in American letters and an important piece of the contemporary American theater repertoire.

Hellman, whom the New York Times has called "one of the most important playwrights of the American theater," was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on June 20, 1905. Her parents both came from wealthy German-American Jewish families. After her high school graduation and three years at New York University, Hellman took a job reading manuscripts at a Greenwich Village publishing house. After a year, she left to marry writer Arthur Kober and move to Hollywood. Although their marriage ended in 1932, the move proved a good one for Hellman. She worked reading scripts and was soon writing them herself.

Other significant Hellman plays include The Little Foxes (1939), Another Part of the Forest (1947), and The Autumn Garden (1951), all loosely based on her mother's family, and the two anti-fascist plays Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944). Watch on the Rhine and Toys in the Attic (1960) each won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award.

If her later plays were less controversial than The Children's Hour, Hellman's offstage life was even more so. From 1930 to 1961, she lived off and on with writer Dashiell Hammett, with whom she was active in left-wing literary circles. Hellman became known as a pro-Stalinist, and in 1948, she was blacklisted from Hollywood as Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunt began. Called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, she offered to speak about her own activities but refused to name names or speak about the activities of others. In a line perhaps more famous than those from any of her plays, she wrote to the committee that "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." It was considered a brave statement at the time, but Hellman was later criticized for never explicitly condemning Stalinism.

During a decade on the blacklist, Hellman wrote stage adaptations of four plays, including the book for the operetta "Candide," with music by Leonard Bernstein. She wrote no new plays after 1960, but did publish three volumes of memoirs. The first of these, An Unfinished Woman, won the National Book Award for 1969. Hellman died on June 30, 1984.

To learn more about Lillian Hellman, visit Jewish Women: A Contemporary Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Theater in the United States; Film Industry in the United States; Lillian Hellman in the Virtual Archive.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 618-620; New York Times, November 21, 1934, December 15, 1935, July 1, 1984.

Dramatization of Anne Frank's diary broadcast on the radio

December 14, 1952

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Perhaps the most famous child and most famous memoirist to have been a victim of World War II, the young Anne Frank did not survive the Holocaust—but her diary did. With more than fifty language translations and more than thirty million copies sold, The Diary of Anne Frank today remains at the center of discussions of antisemitism, Holocaust memory, national guilt and responsibility, Jewish identity, acculturation, literature, drama, child psychology, and even historical revisionism, but above all, as the symbol of a young girl's belief in humankind's innate goodness and her hope for a better future.

Institution: Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Soon after the 1952 publication of the English translation of Anne Frank's war-time diary of her family's hidden life in Nazi-controlled New Amsterdam, her story found its way to the American airwaves. A televised dramatization of the diary, written by Morton Wishengrad, appeared on NBC television's Frontiers of Faith in November. Jewish journalist Meyer Levin who had visited the concentration camps after the war had contacted Anne's father Otto Frank to request the rights to create a play based on the diary. On December 14, a radio drama written by Levin, called "Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl," appeared on The Eternal Light series, produced by the Jewish Theological Seminary on the NBC network. In 1955, a stage version written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett appeared on Broadway.

Anne's account, depicting the spirit with which she continued to hope for the future and for humankind despite her family's desperate situation, struck a chord with American audiences, particularly with young girls and teenagers. Her diary and its various dramatizations exposed many people for the first time to the personal side of the destruction of European Jewry.

The Broadway play won a Tony Award in 1955 and was later portrayed in film in 1959. A 1995 restaging of the Broadway play included previously deleted sections of the diary, including political and religious references. Since its first release, the Diary of Anne Frank has sold more than 30 million copies and has been published in more than 60 languages. For over 50 years, the story of Anne Frank, who died in 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at age 15, has provided many people with a sense of personal connection to an often ungraspable tragedy.

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

See also: This Week in History for April 4, 1960, Shelley Winters wins Academy Award for her role in "The Diary of Anne Frank"; Jewesses with Attitude, Why the Anne Frank video is so unsettling and A sex scene for Anne Frank?; We Remember Ruth Nussbaum.

Sources: Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary (Berkeley, CA, 1995); J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, eds., Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton, NJ, 2003), pp. 192-193; www.annefrank.com.

Birth of poet Muriel Rukeyser

December 15, 1913

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Muriel Rukeyser was a challenging poet whose work mixed together radical politics and a spiritual quest. Born on December 15, 1913, Rukeyser grew up in a middle-class home in New York City that for her was marked by silences and the absence of books. Through poetry, Rukeyser sought to experience and depict the richness and messiness of life that was missing in her childhood home.

Her father's bankruptcy during the Great Depression cut short her college education, but in 1935, at the age of 21, she won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Theory of Flight. Her poetry brought her much success and much criticism. Embracing left-wing politics, she covered the second Scottsboro Boys trial and the Spanish Civil War. She traveled to North Vietnam and Korea and was jailed for protesting the war in Vietnam. She confronted the red-baiting of the McCarthy era and the strictures of conventional sexuality.

Her poem "Letter to the Front" (1944) presented the challenge of modern Jewish identity with these words:

To be a Jew in the twentieth century
Is to be offered a gift. If you refuse,
Wishing to be invisible, you choose
Death of the spirit, the stone insanity.
Accepting, take full life.

Rukeyser died on February 12, 1980.

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

See also: This Week in History, January 31, 1938, Muriel Rukeyser publishes second book of poems and May 8, 1942, Poet Muriel Rukeyser receives $1000 literary award; Poetry in the United States; Jewesses with Attitude, Muriel Rukeyser: Daring to Live for the Impossible and Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry; Jewish Women "On the Map" - Muriel Rukeyser's Poem "Rune" and Muriel Rukeyser plaque outside the New York Public Library; Muriel Rukeyser in the Virtual Archive.

Source: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, p. 1191-1193.

Janet Jagan elected president of Guyana

December 15, 1997

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Guyana national flag.

On December 15, 1997, Janet Jagan was elected President of Guyana, making her the first American-born woman to be elected president of any country. Although she had been involved in the country's governance for over half a century, she was only elected president after her husband's death. Jagan is considered by many in Guyana to be the mother of the nation. A documentary film, Thunder in Guyana, has been made about her life.

Jagan was born Janet Rosenberg in Chicago in 1920. In 1943, she married Cheddi Jagan, a Guyanese dental student. When Janet Jagan was 23, the couple moved to the then-colony of British Guiana, hoping to advance the country's progress toward independence. Together, in 1950, the couple founded the People's Progressive Party, the colony's first modern political party. In 1953, Guyana held its first universal election under colonial rule. Janet Jagan was elected minister and deputy speaker of parliament, the first woman to hold those positions. Although Cheddi Jagan was elected prime minister, his government was deposed after 133 days by the British who claimed that the Jagans and the party were seeking to turn Guyana into a communist state. Both Janet and Cheddi Jagan were at times jailed and placed under house arrest.

Cheddi Jagan was elected as prime minister in both 1957 and 1961, but intervention by the U.S. and Britain kept him out of office until free and fair elections were held in 1992. He was again elected to lead Guyana, and served as Guyana's president until his death in 1997. Following Cheddi Jagan's death, Janet was elected as President, a position she held until resigning due to ill health in August 1999. She died in 2009 at age 88.

See also: Jewesses with Attitude, Remembering Janet Jagan, President of Guyana.

Sources: www.guyanafilm.org/synopsis_alt.htm; www.jagan.org; Jewish Women's Archive, Re://collections, Spring 2004, pp. 4-5.

Lesléa Newman publishes groundbreaking children’s book, Heather Has Two Mommies.

December 16, 1989

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The cover of Lesléa Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies, the groundbreaking children's book about a little girl with lesbian parents.

Lesléa Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies is the first children’s book about a family with two moms. The idea for the book came from a conversation on the street in Northampton, a town in western Massachusetts with a thriving lesbian community. An acquaintance stopped Newman on the street and said, "Listen. Somebody needs to write a book I can read to my child about a family like ours: a family with two moms and a daughter." Newman took up the challenge and wrote a story about Heather, a girl with “two elbows, two earlobes, two kneecaps, and two mommies.”

Finding a publisher for Heather Has Two Mommies proved difficult. Mainstream children’s book publishers were not interested in a book aimed at lesbian families, and lesbian publishers were not interested in doing children’s books. In December of 1989, Newman and her friend Tzivia Gover, a new lesbian mom, decided to publish the book themselves under the auspices of “In Other Words,” Tzivia Gover's desktop publishing business.

Lesléa Newman had published three books for adults and used her mailing list to raise funds for Heather Has Two Mommies. She asked people to pay $10 in advance for each copy and promised to return the money if the book did not get published. Word traveled quickly, and by the time the first 4,000 copies were printed, half were already sold. Soon independent feminist bookstores, such as the New Words in Cambridge, MA, were clamoring for Heather. Six months later, Sasha Alyson, the publisher of Daddy’s Roommate, a book about a child with a gay father, approached Newman and in 1990, Alyson Publications published a second edition of Heather Has Two Mommies.

When Heather became an Alyson Publications title, the book began to attract attention. Supporters dubbed Newman an "honorary lesbian mother," while detractors called her "America's most dangerous writer." Controversy erupted in a number of cities as communities divided over whether or not Heather Has Two Mommies had a place in public schools and libraries. In 1993, New York City Chancellor of Education Joseph Fernandez commissioned the Rainbow Curriculum to celebrate diversity. The inclusion of Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate in the curriculum caused an uproar. People who advocated removing the book prevailed, and Chancellor Fernandez lost his job over his support of the books’ inclusion.

In May 1998 in Wichita Falls, TX, a number of individuals and special interest groups organized to remove Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate from the public library. Reverend Robert Jeffress, Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, checked out both of the library’s copies of the books and refused to return them. He later destroyed them, saying he would reimburse the library on the condition that they not be replaced. Over 300 people signed a petition to the library calling for the books to be moved out of the children’s section into a special, “adults only” section that consisted of the two books and no others. The American Civil Liberties Union got involved, and although the books were eventually moved back to the children’s section, the incident deeply divided the town.

Heather Has Two Mommies continues to raise controversy today. Every September, the American Library Association and other organizations against censorship sponsor Banned Books Week and release a list of the most challenged titles. Heather Has Two Mommies has been on this list every year since its publication. In spite of the opposition, Heather Has Two Mommies is still beloved by parents who are grateful for this resource to teach young children about diversity and inclusion. It is also cherished by a generation of children who are grateful to have grown up with a book that represented their own families.

Lesléa Newman is the author of 60 books and has received many literary awards including Poetry Fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Highlights for Children Fiction Writing Award, the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement, and three Pushcart Prize Nominations. Nine of her books have been Lambda Literary Award finalists. After publishing Heather Has Two Mommies, Newman continued to write children's books about lesbian and gay families, including Felicia's Favorite Story, Too Far Away to Touch, Saturday Is Pattyday, Mommy, Mama, and Me, Daddy, Papa, and Me, and coming soon, Donovan's Big Day, a picture book about a little boy whose two moms get married. She is also the author of many books for adults that deal with lesbian identity, Jewish identity, and the intersection and collision between the two including A Letter to Harvey Milk, The Reluctant Daughter, In Every Laugh a Tear, and Every Woman's Dream. Currently Lesléa Newman is a faculty mentor at the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in Writing Program.

See also: Jewish Women and GLBT Pride; The "fine madness" of discovering Lesléa Newman; A chat with Lesléa "Heather Has Two Mommies" Newman and A toast to Heather! on Jewesses with Attitude.

Read Lesléa Newman's contributions to the blog here.

Sources: www.lesleanewman.com; Banned Books Week: Heather Has Two Mommies; Court: No Teacher Speech Rights on Curriculum; "Happy Birthday Heather".

Amy Sheridan earns her wings

December 18, 1979

Amy Sheridan earned her bars as a Warrant Officer One at the United States Army Aviation Center in Fort Rucker, Alabama, on December 18, 1979. Staying true to the stringent requirements of the U.S. Army Warrant Officer career path, a pilot was an “officer first, and an aviator second.” So the next day, Amy Sheridan earned her wings as an aviator for the US Army, making her the first American Jewish woman to gain aviator status in any branch of the Armed Services. One of the first woman pilots, and the first Jewish woman pilot, to fly for the U.S. Army, Amy Sheridan had embarked on an extraordinary 22-year career as a Chief Warrant Officer 4 (CW4).

While Jewish women like Selma Cronan had flown as members of the Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS), they were technically civilians. The WASPS were allowed to pilot aircraft when flying domestically but, since they were not officially members of the military, they could not be in command overseas. CW4 Sheridan was the first woman to achieve this when she began commanding helicopters for the VII Corps Aviation Company in Stuttgart, Germany.

Amy Beth Sheridan grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. She was in her second year at the American College in Jerusalem when the Yom Kippur War began in 1973. She stayed in Israel for a few months, helping with the war effort and singing in a band before returning to the Boston area.

While working at the Colonnade Hotel in downtown Boston, CW4 Sheridan saw an advertisement for careers in aviation. She struck up an agreement with the head of a flight school; she would handle the paperwork; he would give her flying lessons. It took only one flight and CW4 Sheridan was hooked: “When I was focused on flying, nothing could get in the way.”

In 1976, Amy Sheridan volunteered for the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), which became part of the regular army in 1978. She joined out of patriotism but also because she saw the military as a way to finish her education.

Sheridan began working her way up the Army ladder, earning her crewmember badge and becoming a crewchief in 1977. As a crewchief, Sheridan was responsible for maintaining and servicing military aircraft. One of the only women in her position, she encountered some resistance: “There were not [a lot of] men who had been used to working alongside women, especially in such a technical, mechanical field.” One summer, she and another woman were towing airplanes when one landed and suddenly veered into the dirt. Initially, no one would talk to the women about the incident. Later, they were told they had to wear heavier covering over their t-shirts because the pilots were “distracted.” Sheridan said, “That was a miserable, hot, Georgia summer. It was rough.”

When CW4 Sheridan learned that the Army was letting women fly planes, Ray Trott, a maintenance pilot in Shop 4 at Fort Benning, encouraged her to try to enter Warrant Officer Flight Training. First, she had to pass the Flight Aptitude Scholastic Training (FAST) test. In 1977 and 1978, women needed a score of 110 on the FAST, 10 points higher than men who desired to attend flight school.

Assigned to flight training at the Army Aviation Center “school house” in Fort Rucker, Alabama, CW4 Sheridan experienced harassment both as a woman and as a Jew. She was given a hard time about taking time off for Jewish holidays and attending services at the nearest synagogue 18 miles away on Friday nights. Despite the friction it caused, Sheridan tried to stay active in Jewish life. There seemed to always be someone in the unit who considered her taking a day off for Yom Kippur to be “inconvenient,” so she volunteered to work every Christmas and Easter for the next 20 years.

CW4 Sheridan spent over 20 years piloting helicopters and airplanes in the Western Hemisphere, Europe, and Asia. She was involved in every major post-Vietnam conflict. CW4 Sheridan continued her career at places such as Land Southeast NATO, Turkey and the United States Military Academy at West Point. While stationed in Korea, she served as the aircraft commander of the first all-woman reconnaissance flight crew in military history.

Amy Sheridan retired from the Army as a Chief Warrent Officer 4 in 1999. She decided against becoming a commercial pilot since a career in commercial aviation would mean starting all over again as one of a few women in a male-dominated field. She ultimately chose to use a Masters degree she had earned during her years in the Army and work in the education field. Today, CW4 Sheridan is a teacher at both pre- and post secondary levels as well as a special needs advocate, school guidance counselor, and prison facilitator. In 2004, Sheridan was injured in an automobile accident caused by a drunk driver. While she herself is physically unable to fly, she delights in inspiring young women to pursue careers in aviation.

The following clips of JWA’s interview with Amy Sheridan can be found on Youtube.

Deciding to become a Chief Warrant Officer and Pilot
"Knuckle-dragger"
On Harassment and Sexual Assault in the Military

See also: Jewesses with Attitude, "Amy in the sky", Remembering Jewish women's stories on Veteran's Day, and Veteran's Day: Discover stories of Jewish women in the military.

Sources: Interview with Amy Sheridan, December 7, 2009; “Military Service Binds Together Veterans” East Valley Tribune, November 10, 2009.

Birth of "writer's writer" Hortense Calisher

December 20, 1911

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The daughter of a Southern Jewish perfume-maker and a German immigrant, author Hortense Calisher was born on December 20, 1911 in New York City. She has written about her own family in three memoirs. The most recent, Tattoo for a Slave (2004), traces the history of her father's family from before the Civil War to her own lifetime.

Calisher graduated from Barnard College, where she studied English and philosophy, in 1932. After working briefly for the New York Department of Public Welfare, Calisher got married, moved to the suburbs, and occupied herself mainly with raising two sons. Her first published short story, "The Middle Drawer," composed while walking her son to school, appeared in the New Yorker in 1948. This story, which won the O. Henry Award, drew upon themes from Calisher's own life. Most of Calisher's stories, published in seven short-story collections, along with 15 novels including False Entry and Sunday Jews, feature Jewish characters, but their ethnic identity is usually part of the background rather than the centerpiece of the narratives.

Calisher published her first book of short stories, In the Absence of Angels, in 1951, and her first novel, False Entry, in 1961. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow twice and a National Book Award Finalist three times. Though popular fame has eluded her, she has been lauded as a "writer's writer" with a wide imaginative and formal range, and has been both praised and criticized for her intricate plot and rich character development.

Calisher lived in New York City and was the past president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and of PEN. She died at the age of 97 on January 13, 2009.

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

See also: This Week in History for July 10, 1948 "Hortense Calisher debuts in the New Yorker"; Autobiography in the United States; Jewish Women On the Map - Rockland County, New York.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 201-202; www.harcourtbooks.com/bookcatalogs/bookpage.asp?isbn=0151009309&option=authorbio; "Hortense Calisher, Author, Dies at 97," The New York Times January 15, 2009.

The Klezmatics' performance of Aliza Greenblatt's work, set to music by Woody Guthrie

December 20, 2003

Jewish contributions to American music have long been recognized, with the list of well-known songwriters featuring Broadway composers and lyricists like Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim. A less well-known contributor was Aliza Greenblatt, the poet and songwriter whose work inspired some of the songs of her famous son-in-law, Woody Guthrie, and grandson, Arlo Guthrie.

Born in Bessarabia in 1885, Greenblatt settled in Philadelphia in 1900, where she worked in the garment industry. In 1900, she married fellow immigrant Isidore Greenblatt; the couple's daughter Marjorie later married Woody Guthrie. While raising her five children, Greenblatt also became active in Zionist causes. After the 1917 Balfour Declaration, she founded the Atlantic City branch of the Zionist Organization of America; later she was active in Hadassah and the Jewish National Fund. She also served as national president of Pioneer Women (now Na'amat).

Between 1935 and 1966, Greenblatt published five volumes of Yiddish poetry and an autobiography, Baym Fentster fun a Lebn [At the Window of a Life]. She died in New York in 1975. Although European Yiddish culture was all but destroyed by the Second World War, Greenblatt's work was widely published during her lifetime in Yiddish newspapers across the United States and in Israel.

In her later years, Greenblatt lived across the street from the Guthries in the heart of Brooklyn's Jewish community. In an attempt to make peace with Isidore, who was unhappy that Marjorie had married a non-Jew, Woody Guthrie began studying Judaism and sent his son Arlo to a Hebrew tutor. Arlo later set some of Greenblatt's works to music. These, along with Jewish-themed songs written by Woody Guthrie, were performed for the first time by The Klezmatics in a December 20, 2003, performance at New York City's 92nd Street Y entitled "Holy Ground: The Jewish Songs of Woody Guthrie." The songs were released on a CD, Happy Joyous Hanukkah, the following year. On December 4, 2008, Woody Guthrie's daughter, Nora Guthrie, was honored at "Stand Up, Sing Out," a benefit concert for the Boston Workmen's Circle featuring anniversary performances by The Klezmatics and A Besere Velt (A Better World), the largest Yiddish Chorus in the world.

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

See also: Marjorie Gurthrie; Autobiography in the United States; Yiddish: Women's Poetry.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 552-553; The Forward, 12 December 2003; The Jewish Week (New York), 19 December 2003; Moment, October 2004; www.klezmatics.com/shop_happyjoyous.php.

Deportation of Emma Goldman as a radical "alien"

December 21, 1919

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Emma Goldman's controversial views led to numerous arrests. This mugshot was taken when she was wrongly implicated in the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901.

Institution: The Emma Goldman Papers, University of California, Berkeley, and the U.S. Library of Congress

On December 21, 1919, Emma Goldman, along with 248 other radical "aliens," was deported to the Soviet Union on the S.S. Buford under the 1918 Alien Act, which allowed for the expulsion of any alien found to be an anarchist.

Emma Goldman, born in Kovno, Lithuania (then Russia) in 1869, came to the United States in 1885 at age 16. By the time of her deportation, she had made a name for herself as a leading anarchist, public speaker, and crusader for free speech, birth control, and workers' rights.

Goldman first became interested in radical politics in Russia, where she came into contact with populists and political organizers. In the U.S., she was disappointed to learn that instead of streets paved in gold, workers were subject to gross economic inequality and inhumane working conditions. A defining moment for Goldman came in 1886, when eight anarchist radicals were convicted and condemned to death, on flimsy evidence, for setting off a bomb at Chicago's Haymarket rally that caused a riot in which several police officers were killed. Convinced of the defendants' innocence, Goldman resolved to learn all she could about anarchism, and soon became active in the anarchist movement.

Unfortunately for Goldman, the decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were difficult ones in which to be an anarchist in America. Federal anti-anarchist laws restricted Goldman's ability to give public speeches and subjected her to frequent harassment and arrests. Still, she had a profound influence on American political activism. Giving hundreds of talks across the country, she became renowned as an inspiring and controversial orator. Mother Earth, the journal she founded in 1906 and ran until 1917, provided an outlet for the writings of radical thinkers. Roger Baldwin, who heard Goldman speak on free speech in 1908, went on to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Margaret Sanger, a prominent birth control activist, looked on Goldman as her mentor.

Although Goldman was not a pacifist, she believed that governments had no right to wage war, and actively opposed U.S. involvement in World War I. She argued that the war was an imperialist venture that aided capitalists at the expense of workers. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, her anti-draft activism was considered a threat to national security, and she spent 18 months in federal prison. On her release, Goldman was immediately re-arrested on the order of the young J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the Justice Department's General Intelligence Division. Hoover persuaded the courts to deny Goldman's citizenship claims, thus making her eligible for deportation under the 1918 Alien Act, which allowed for the expulsion of any alien found to be an anarchist.

At first excited by the chance to see the workers' republic of Soviet Russia, Goldman was soon disillusioned by the Bolshevik regime. Barred from returning to the U.S., she spent the last two decades of her life wandering through Europe and Canada, giving speeches on radical politics. When she died in Toronto in May 1940, her body was returned to Chicago, where Goldman was buried near the Haymarket anarchists who had first inspired her.

To learn more about Emma Goldman, visit Women of Valor and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for September 27, 1919, "Emma Goldman released from jail and then reimprisoned" and July 19, 1908, "Emma Goldman's "What I Believe'"; Jewish Women On the Map: Emma Goldman's Grave and Emma Goldman mural at Ahawath Yeshurun Shar'a Torah synagogue; Go & Learn: Primary Sources & Lesson Plans Letter from Emma Goldman to Lillian Wald, 1904; Jewesses with Attitude "If Emma Goldman used Google"; Patriotism and Dissent; Birth Control Movement in the United States; Emma Goldman in the Virtual Archive; Emma Goldman poster; Video: If Emma Goldman used Google...

Sources:Jewish Women's Archive, jwa.org/exhibits/wov/goldman/; Emma Goldman Papers, sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/;Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 526-530;.

Zionists celebrate Henrietta Szold's 75th birthday

December 21, 1935

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What was perhaps most astonishing about Henrietta Szold was the breadth of her activities. Teacher, translator, essayist, organizer, politician, administrator and humanist, she will always be remembered for founding Hadassah, the largest women's, and largest Jewish, volunteer organization in America.

Institution: Jewish Theological Seminary of America

The 75th birthday of the pioneering Zionist Henrietta Szold on December 21, 1935, was celebrated with a radio address broadcast across the United States. It included addresses by the President of Hadassah, Rose Jacobs, and by the President of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann. Hadassah chapters hosted local celebrations and numerous Shabbat sermons across the United States were reportedly devoted to Szold's life story and achievements.

Born in Baltimore, Szold founded Hadassah and became its first president in 1912, arguing that "women will work better when there are only women in the group." Hadassah women's activism energized American Zionism. By 1935, Hadassah had over 38,000 members in chapters across the U.S. and was actively involved in supporting Youth Aliyah, a program that rescued young German Jews from Nazism and settled them in Palestine under Szold's leadership and personal supervision.

One result of her success was that Szold herself became a symbol of the Zionist dream and of the commitment and vision that animated Hadassah. When she was in her 70s and 80s, Hadassah leaders in the United States craved visits from Szold both for the inspiration that she provided and so that they might honor her in ways that could benefit the organization financially. The official Hadassah celebration of its founder's 75th birthday occurred in New York on December 22, with an event attended by over 1,000 women at Temple Emanu-El. Although Szold, who had moved to Palestine in the 1920s, was in the United States for her birthday, she stayed with her sister in Baltimore and did not attend the New York celebration. Had she been there, she would have heard the nation’s most prominent rabbi, Stephen S. Wise, praise her as a "semi-mythical figure beyond criticism, beyond detraction, beyond envy, beyond blame, and, because of her humility, beyond our praise. She is Judaism's Jane Addams—a transcendent spirit who touched the lowly only to lift them up."

To learn more about Henrietta Szold, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and the Women of Valor exhibit.

See also: This Week in History, July 28, 1893, Henrietta Szold helps to create American Jewish culture and February 13, 1945, Death of Henrietta Szold; Jewish Women in Travel; Go & Learn: Henrietta Szold on Saying Kaddish; Primary Sources: Speech Given by Henrietta Szold at Hadassah Convention, 1937; Henrietta Szold poster; Video: If Henrietta Szold used Google...

Sources: jwa.org/exhibits/wov/szold/; New York Times, Dec. 23, 1935, Dec. 22, 1935; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 571-583 and 1368-1373.

National debut of "Ding Dong School"

December 22, 1952

Ding Dong School, created by and starring Frances Horwich, was one of the first television shows to offer quality educational programming for young children. It appeared locally on the NBC affiliate in Chicago beginning in the fall of 1952. National syndication began on December 22, 1952. The Chicago Tribune estimated that 2.4 million preschoolers and their mothers were watching the daily program by January 1953. Ding Dong School ran nationally for four years, until December 1956. It continued on a Chicago station for two more years and ran in syndication until 1965.

Equipped with an old-fashioned brass school bell and simple props, Horwich—whom viewers knew as "Miss Frances"—addressed her young audience directly, asking questions, telling stories, and leading them in simple games and activities. Through crafts and movement, she encouraged children to participate rather than watch passively. Her respect for children's abilities was a crucial aspect of Horwich's philosophy and of her program. In a 1966 interview, she commented that "too many programs on television rob children of their own ideas, without giving them a chance to create and think for themselves."

Horwich, who left her position as head of the education department at Roosevelt College to appear on the show, became NBC's Supervisor for Children's Programming in 1955. Ding Dong School won a Peabody Award in 1952; the citation called the show "simple, sincere, and unpretentious." The Chicago Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences honored Horwich with a "Silver Circle" award for lifetime achievement in June, 2001. She died in Scottsdale, Arizona, later that month, at age 94.

To see the rest of the episode, view Part 2 and Part 3 on Youtube.

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

See also: "Jewish Women On the Map" - Frances Horwich Historical Marker.

Sources:Chicago Daily Tribune, January 1, 1953, January 24, 1954, April 25, 1953; www.peabody.uga.edu; www.richsamuels.com/nbcmm/dds.html; magazine.uchicago.edu/0110/class-notes/deaths-print.html; www.chicagoemmyonline.org/past-silver-circle-honorees.php.

Death of pioneering nutritionist Frances Stern

December 23, 1947

Frances Stern, social worker, nutritionist, educator, and pioneering dietician, died on December 23, 1947. Stern was a leading exponent of the idea that adequate nutrition was a crucial element of 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. 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 August 23, 1914, "Dietician Frances Stern connects nutrition to social welfare"; Jewesses with Attitude, "Nutrition and Social Welfare: What Would Frances Stern Do?; Jewish Women On the Map - Frances Stern Nutrition Center; Frances Stern in the Virtual Archive.

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; nutrition.tufts.edu/1177953850925/Nutrition-Page-nl2w_1177953851896.html.

The "New York Times" profiles Kosher food matriarch Regina Margareten at age 95

December 24, 1957

Born in Hungary on December 25, 1862 [some sources say 1863], Regina Margareten came to the U.S. as a young bride in 1883. With her husband and her parents, she helped to open a grocery store on New York’s Lower East Side. The first year in New York, the family members baked Passover matzo for themselves. The second year, they made enough to sell in the store, and the matzo business soon became the family’s sole occupation.

After Regina’s husband died in 1923, she was formally named treasurer of Horowitz Brothers & Margareten Company and became one of the company's directors. She held these positions for the rest of her life. Margareten also acted as the company’s quality control department, tasting every batch of matzo. By 1932, Horowitz Brothers & Margareten Company was using 45 thousand barrels of flour and grossing over one million dollars per year.

As she continued her work well past a usual retirement age, Margareten became an object of interest to the media. The New York Times profiled her in 1942, when she celebrated her 80th birthday, and again at her 91st. At 80, she was described as the “gayest dancer at [the] party;” at 91, the Times called her “a sturdy, mentally alert little woman.” On December 24, 1957, the Times ran one last profile, the day before Margareten’s 95th birthday. The article noted that she was still at her desk at 8:30 every weekday morning, staying there until 7pm each day during the busy months before Passover.

In addition to her work at the business, Margareten was the matriarch of an extended family of over 400 members. Her obituary, which described her as the “matriarch of the Kosher food industry,” also reported that she was a member of over 100 charitable organizations. Throughout her life, she played an important role in the family business, working in her office daily until two weeks before her death in 1959 at age 96.

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

Sources:www.Jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Margareten.html; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 890-891; New York Times, December 14, 1942, December 27, 1954, December 24, 1957.

Pauline Newman organizes influential New York rent strike

December 26, 1907

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Pauline Newman worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union for more than seventy years—first as an organizer, then as a labor journalist, a health educator and a liaison between the union and government officials. In this photograph she is on the right with three other women attending a labor conference in 1947.

Institution: The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

On December 26, 1907, months of organizing work by 16-year-old Pauline Newman culminated in the start of the largest rent strike New York City had ever seen. One reason for the strike's success was Newman's enlistment of neighborhood housewives. While working-class activists like Newman had to work during the day, the impassioned housewives that they organized could go from tenement to tenement to convince others to strike. Thus, the success of the strike depended both on shop floor networks of teenaged girls and on networks of neighborhood housewives and mothers.

The strike, involving 10,000 families in lower Manhattan, lasted only until January 9, but about 2,000 families succeeded in having their rents reduced. More importantly, the strike attracted the attention of leading figures in the settlement house movement who suggested capping rents at 30% of a family's income. Although their suggestion was not implemented, it introduced the idea of rent control to New York politics. The idea stayed alive into the 1930s, when rent control was finally implemented in New York City.

Newman's leadership of the strike began a lifetime of activism. It brought her to the attention of the Socialist party, which ran her as a candidate for secretary of state of New York the following year (despite the fact that women did not yet have the vote in New York). She used the opportunity to call for woman's suffrage. Newman also began organizing female garment workers and was a key organizer in the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000.

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

See also This Week in History, November 22, 1909, Clara Lemlich sparks Uprising of the 20,000; Jewesses with Attitude, Labor Day; Feminism in the United States.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 993-996; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995).

Premiere of the musical "Show Boat," based on a novel by Edna Ferber

December 27, 1927

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Edna Ferber was a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and playwright. This image is a portrait of Ferber taken after she won the state oratory contest and graduated from high school.

When Edna Ferber published Show Boat in 1926, she was already an established writer, with eleven books, two stage plays, and a Pulitzer Prize (for So Big, 1925) to her credit. But when the musical adaptation of the novel opened on Broadway on December 27, 1927, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and music by Jerome Kern, it was unlike any earlier production. Combining music and dance with fully formed characters and serious themes, Show Boat departed from both operetta and the musical comedy revue, establishing a new style of American musical.

Ferber's work in Show Boat and in later novels grew from a keen eye and a gift for observation of the world around her. Raised in often precarious economic circumstances in small towns in Iowa and Wisconsin, Ferber used her novels to explore America's range of distinctive and evocative regional cultures. She always identified with the lives of ordinary working people, believing that they had "a kind of primary American freshness and assertiveness." She tried to communicate those qualities and do justice to the lives of working folks in all of her writing.

Ferber's work also drew on the oppression she felt she had experienced as both a woman and a Jew. Subjected to anti-Semitism as a child, she felt she had gained strength from facing her tormentors. Similarly, she believed that women's experience of social limitations led them to develop special strengths. Many of her early works featured strong women overcoming social obstacles to achieve professional success. Show Boat, which tackled the theme of interracial marriage, also addressed the issue of social constraints.

After its successful Broadway debut, Show Boat ran for 572 performances, and was later made into a film twice. Revival performances continue to entertain audiences across the country.

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

See also: Jewish Women "On the Map" - Edna Ferber's hometown and Edna Ferber plaque; Fiction, Popular in the United States; Edna Ferber in the Virtual Archive.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 415-417; Marion Meade, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties (New York, 2004); Joseph Swain, The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey (Lanham, MD, 2002); Edna Ferber, A Peculiar Treasure (New York, 1939).

Lyricist Betty Comden's first hit, "On the Town," opens on Broadway

December 28, 1944

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Betty Comden.
Photo courtesy of the New York Public Library.

On the Town, which was lyricist Betty Comden's first hit when it opened on December 28, 1944, was also the first big success for her three collaborators: her co-lyricist Adolph Green, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins. Comden and Green also acted in the show, which featured the hit song "New York, New York." The musical, which followed a day in the lives of three sailors on leave in New York, ran for 462 performances on Broadway before going on tour.

This success marked the beginning of Comden and Green's long career working together on Broadway and in Hollywood. When MGM turned On the Town into a movie with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in 1949, it was the first feature-length musical to be filmed on location.

In 1953, Comden and Green worked again with Bernstein, creating the show Wonderful Town, which won a Tony Award for Outstanding Musical. Collaborating in a decades-long partnership, Comden and Green wrote lyrics and librettos for numerous additional Broadway musicals and movies, including Singin' in the Rain (1952), Peter Pan (1953), Auntie Mame (1958), Say Darling (1958), and The Will Rogers Follies (1991). Their work garnered five more Tony Awards and two Academy Award nominations. In 1991, Comden and Green were awarded Kennedy Center Honors.

Adolph Green died in 2002, and Betty Comden died on November 24, 2006, at the age of 89, but musicals defined by the Green/Comden collaboration remain in continuous production in local productions and off and on Broadway.

Learn more about Betty Comden in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia and We Remember.

See also: This Week in History for March 29, 1951, "Judy Holliday wins Academy Award for best actress"; Film Industry in the United States; Theater in the United States; Autobiography in the United States; Jewish Women and Jewish Music in America.

Sources: Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com/title/tt0041716/trivia; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 269-270; www.leonardbernstein.com/comdenandgreen/; New York Times, January 11, 1946; jwa.org/weremember/comden.

Ayn Rand delivers manuscript of "The Fountainhead" to her publisher

December 31, 1942

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Book cover of the 25th Anniversary edition of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (delivered to her publisher on December 31, 1942), was the first of Rand's novels to win a wide following for the philosophy she called Objectivism. She explained that:

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

The Fountainhead illustrated this philosophy for the public through the tale of an architect who sticks to his artistic convictions against massive social opposition. Although it failed to win over critics, it eventually became a best-seller and was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper in 1949. Together with Atlas Shrugged (1957), The Fountainhead has become one of the central texts of an Objectivist movement that emphasizes capitalism, individualism, and the pursuit of individual ambition.

Although her idea that altruism is bad and selfishness good would seem to contradict traditional Jewish values, Rand's promotion of individual ambition was typical of Russian Jewish immigrants of her generation. Rand herself came from Russia to the United States at age 21, drawn by the conditions depicted in American movies and eager to leave Stalinist Russia. Jobs as a screenwriter and script reader in Hollywood supported her writing and also introduced her to husband her Frank O'Connor.

Literary critics and philosophers have never taken Rand seriously, but her works have garnered popular acclaim and devoted followers. Her four novels have together sold over 25 million copies, and Objectivist discussion groups and Internet sites abound. Ayn Rand died in 1982.

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

See also: This Week in History for May 6, 1943, Publication of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead"; Jewish Women "On the Map" - Ayn Rand's grave, Early Workplace of writer Ayn Rand, and Ayn Rand quote at Epcot Center, Walt Disney World.

Sources: www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_aynrand_timeline; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1124-1126; www.objectivistcenter.org.

Death of Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, widow of Wyatt

December 31, 1944

Josephine Sarah Marcus, born to German Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, NY, in 1861, grew up in San Francisco. Enchanted by a performance of Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, she ran away from home at age 18 to join the theatre. On tour in Tombstone, Arizona, she met and married Wyatt Earp, then a deputy U.S. Marshal for the Arizona Territory.

In 1881, Wyatt Earp won lasting fame when he and his brothers fought a gun battle with their political rivals the Clanton gang at the O.K. Corral. Fleeing indictment for murder in the aftermath of the shootings, Wyatt and Josephine moved to Colorado.

The marriage of Wyatt and Josephine lasted another 48 years until Wyatt's death in 1929. During their married years, Wyatt and Josephine moved frequently around the American West, following gold, silver, and copper mining, until they settled in Southern California. There, they invested in real estate and racehorses, wrote Wyatt's autobiography, and drafted a screenplay based on his exploits. After Wyatt's death, Josephine contributed to published and film portrayals of Wyatt's life, helping to establish an enduring American legend.

Josephine Marcus Earp died on December 31, 1944, and was buried beside her husband in a Jewish cemetery in Northern California, where Wyatt's and Josephine's graves are, today, the primary local tourist attraction.

To learn more about Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Jewish Women "On the Map" - Josephine and Wyatt Earp's Grave; Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp in the Virtual Archive.

Source: www.ajhs.org/publications/chapters/chapter.cfm?documentID=279.

Maxine Frank Singer steps down as head of Carnegie Institution

December 31, 2002

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The President of the United States recognized Maxine Singer's important contributions to biochemistry and molecular biology, her leadership of the Carnegie Institute and her science education initatives, by awarding her the National Medal of Science “for her outstanding scientific accomplishments and her deep concern for the societal responsibility of the scientist.”

Institution: Carnegie Institution

Maxine Frank Singer, a leading biochemistry researcher and advocate of science education, stepped down after 15 years at the helm of the Carnegie Institution on December 21, 2002.

After earning degrees from Swarthmore (1952) and Yale (1957), Singer joined the National Institutes of Health as a postdoctoral fellow, later becoming a staff member. She was appointed chief of the National Cancer Institute's Biochemistry Lab in 1980, a position she held until 1987. In 1988, she became president of the Carnegie Institution, a major national scientific research center based in Washington, DC.

At the Carnegie Institution, Singer created the Carnegie Academy for Science Education, which trains elementary school teachers in science. Reflecting her concern about the lack of women and members of racial minorities in scientific fields, she also created a weekend science school for elementary-age students. Among her other accomplishments at Carnegie was a $50 million capital campaign that financed Carnegie's participation in the building of two giant optical telescopes at the Institution's campus in Chile, as well as other capital improvement projects.

Singer's own research interests have ranged widely within biochemistry, but have included significant work on recombinant DNA. Partly as a result of her interest in mammalian DNA, Singer has long taken an active interest in issues of science policy and ethics. Beginning in 1973, she helped to organize a series of conferences that addressed both the promises and the perils of human DNA research. She has also spoken out about U.S. public policy, advocating national investment in the human genome project but cautioning against overspending on biomedical research in space.

Singer has served on the boards of the Whitehead Institute, Johnson & Johnson, Yale, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Singer was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1979 and to the Pontifical Academy of Science in 1986. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science in recognition of her illustrious career in biochemistry. The award citation noted "her outstanding scientific accomplishments and her deep concern for the societal responsibility of the scientist."

To learn more about Maxine Frank Singer, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for June 23, 1992, "Biochemist Maxine Frank Singer receives National Medal of Science" and Science in Israel.

Source: carnegieinstitution.org/singer/default.html.

Amanda Simspon became first transgender presidential appointee

December 31, 2009

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Amanda Simpson is believed to be the first transgender presidential appointee. She was appointed by President Obama to the Bureau of Industry and Security at the U.S. Department of Commerce on December 31, 2009.

President Barack Obama named Amanda Simpson to the position of Senior Technical Adviser in the Bureau of Industry and Security at the U.S. Department of Commerce. She is the first transgender woman appointed by any administration and the first transgender individual to hold an executive branch position.

Simpson, who is an experienced flight instructor and test pilot with degrees in physics, engineering, and business administration, spent 30 years in the aerospace and defense industry. While working at Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson, AZ, she made a six-year transition from male to female and successfully lobbied to add gender identity and expression to the company’s corporate employment policy.

Simpson has long been an advocate for LGBT issues, serving on the boards of various equal rights organizations, including the National Center for Transgender Equality. She told ABC News, “I’m truly honored to have received this appointment and am eager and excited about this opportunity that is before me. And at the same time, as one of the first transgender presidential appointees to the federal government, I hope that I will soon be one of hundreds, and that this appointment opens future opportunities for many others.”

See also: Jewish Women and GLBT Pride.

Sources: Amanda Simpson, Transgender Candidate, Appointed To Commerce Post, The Huffington Post; First Transgender Presidential Appointee Fears Being Labeled 'Token' ABC News.