Naomi Bronheim Levine appointed director of American Jewish Congress

March 1, 1972

On March 1, 1972, Naomi Bronheim Levine was appointed Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress (AJCong), becoming the first woman to take the helm of a major American Jewish organization that included both men and women as members. Born in New York on April 15, 1923, Levine was educated at Hunter College and Columbia University and worked as a lawyer before joining the AJCong in 1951. She would remain there for more than two decades.

Levine began her work at the Congress as a lawyer for its Commission on Law and Social Action; from that position, Levine went on to become director of the AJCong Women's Division. These positions foreshadowed her involvement with civil rights and women's issues as executive director of the organization. Although she was considered a pioneer for women, Levine saw herself as caught somewhere between an older ideal of domesticity and a newer feminism. She told the New York Times that "women's lib is probably correct, but it's not my style." Although a Times profile published when Levine was appointed to the top post at the AJCong focused on her devotion to the traditional roles of wife and mother even as she built a path-breaking career, Levine had long been committed to progressive women's issues. From 1955 to 1971, she had owned and operated Camp Greylock, an all-girls summer camp that was later credited with contributing to the professional success of many of its alumnae.

Levine stepped down from her post at the American Jewish Congress in 1978, when she was appointed head of public relations, government relations, and fundraising at New York University. She stayed at NYU for over two decades, eventually becoming senior vice president for external affairs and raising over $2 billion. Her fundraising success allowed the University to transform itself from a local commuter school to a strong university with a national presence. During her tenure at NYU, Levine created the Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising and the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life. After retiring in 2000, Levine continued to chair the boards of both of these organizations. Upon her retirement, NYU President L. Jay Oliva called Levine "quite simply a spectacular human being."

See also: Philanthropy in the United States.

Sources:New York Times, March 2, 1972, November 1, 1979; www.scps.nyu.edu/about-scps/newsroom/experts/naomi-levine.html.

E.M. Broner publishes "The Telling"

March 1, 1993

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E.M. Broner's The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality Through Community and Ceremony was published March 1, 1993.

The Telling: The Story of a Group of Jewish Women Who Journey to Spirituality Through Community and Ceremony, by E.M. Broner, was released on March 1, 1993. The Telling is really two books in one: it includes both an account of the women’s seders, that, starting in 1976, Broner helped to organize in Manhattan, and also a copy of The Women’s Haggadah, the text that was created specifically for those seders.

The idea for The Women’s Haggadah was born in Israel in 1975, when Broner and Naomi Nimrod organized a seder that took women out of the kitchen and to the head of the table, and included women’s prayers and poems in their retelling of the Passover story. This prompted the two to write their own service for a feminist telling of the Passover story. The next year, in the spring of 1976, 13 women gathered in Broner’s New York City apartment for the first women’s seder. Among the attendees at this first seder were Gloria Steinem, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, and Phyllis Chesler. The Telling not only chronicles this first seder, but also the seder’s evolution through subsequent years, as the seder added guests, changed themes, and created new rituals.

The Women’s Haggadah, the text of these women’s seders, takes the traditional order of a Passover seder and views it through a feminist lens. The four questions have been altered to reflect Jewish women’s questions. The four sons have been changed to four daughters. The ten plagues have been transformed into the plagues that affect women today, such as false self-image, jealousy, and legal discrimination. Interspersed throughout the text are stories, songs, and poems about overlooked biblical Jewish women such as Miriam and Beruriah.

The Telling is only one in a long list of Broner’s works, all of which engage women’s experiences, and many of which explore combined Jewish and feminist themes. Her first book, Summer is a Foreign Land (1966), was quickly followed by the experimental Journal/Nocturnal (1968), Her Mothers (1975), and A Weave of Women (1978). More recently, Broner has written in an autobiographical strain, with Mornings and Mourning: A Kaddish Journal (1994) and Ghost Stories (1995), which describe her reactions to the deaths of her father and mother, respectively. Esther Broner, who began publishing under the name E.M. Broner when she felt that publishers were rejecting her work because of her gender, has also had success as a playwright and short-story writer. She has received an O. Henry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wonder Woman Foundation award “for courage in changing custom with ceremony.”

To learn more about E.M. Broner, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: Spirituality in the United States.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 188-189; lts.brandeis.edu/research/archives-speccoll/findingguides/xml/broner.html; Ranen Omer, '"O, My Shehena, Who Shall Live In Your Tent?": Gender, Diaspora, and the Ambivalence of Return in E.M. Broner’s A Weave of Women,' Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 23:1 (2002); Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA006.

Rosalie Silberman Abella spoke on "Identity, Diversity, and Human Rights" at Harvard

March 1, 2010

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Justice Rosalie Abella's life has been a series of "firsts": She was Canada's first Jewish woman judge and the country’s youngest ever. She was the first woman chair of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and the first woman in the British Commonwealth to become the head of a Law Reform Commission. In August 2004, she was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada, becoming the first Jewish woman to sit on the Canadian Supreme Court bench. Abella is shown here in a photograph taken in 1983.

Institution: Justice Rosalie Abella

In a talk at Harvard University on "Identity, Diversity, and Human Rights," Canada Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella shared her family's Holocaust story and explained how it informs her view of human rights.

The daughter of Auschwitz survivors, Abella was born in a displaced-persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1946. Her family’s experience led her to a passion for human rights and a career in law. At age 29, she became Canada’s youngest judge and the first to be sworn in while pregnant. In 2004, she became first Jewish woman to serve on the Canadian Supreme Court.

In her speech at Harvard, Abella noted the many laws, treaties, and conventions that emerged after World War II, all of which stated that the global community would not tolerate further human rights abuses. She went on to list the many human rights violations that have since occurred in direct contradiction to these promises, many of them without punishment or repercussions.

In her speech at Harvard, Abella called for a reconsideration of the rule of law, a concept she said has too often given legal sanction to human rights abuses. “We need the rule of justice,” she said, “not the rule of law.” She spoke in support of the “tools of justice” that aid rightfulness, including due process, a free press, the right of association, and protection for minorities.

Abella also questioned the United Nations’ ability to bring about justice, noting its repeated failure to enforce its values in the face of recurring human rights abuses. “We need more than the rhetoric of justice,” she said, asking, “Is the United Nations the best we can do?”

To learn more about Rosalie Silberman Abella, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Sources: Passionate advocate of human rights, The Harvard Gazette; Supreme Court of Canada.

Sophie Tucker records signature song

March 2, 1911

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Sophie Tucker. Image courtesy of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Sophie Tucker, the self-proclaimed "Last of the Red Hot Mamas," was born on January 13, 1884. As a young woman, Tucker sang in her parents' diner in Hartford, Connecticut, which catered to many show business professionals. In her early twenties, she moved to New York, where she sang in cafés until she broke into vaudeville in 1907. Although her producers originally insisted that she sing in blackface, she soon proved that she could entrance audiences without the caricatured "black" Southern persona they had constructed for her.

Tucker made her mark with a humorous sexiness, defying stereotypes of size, age, and Jewish women's sexuality. Though she claimed that she had "never sung a single song in my whole life on purpose to shock anyone," songs like "I May Be Getting Older Every Day (But Younger Every Night)" challenged prevailing codes of ethnic, gender, and class-based morality.

Although crowds across the U.S. and Europe loved Tucker's frank, humorous style, her most famous songs were probably the more sentimental "Some of These Days" and "My Yiddishe Momme." African-American composer Shelton Brooks wrote "Some of These Days" for Tucker in 1910, and it became her signature song. Toward the end of her career, she estimated that she had sung it over 45,000 times. On March 2, 1911, she recorded it on a 4-minute cylinder; later she used its title for the title of her autobiography. "My Yiddishe Momme" was written especially for Tucker by Jack Yellen in 1925. The song, which Tucker sang in both Yiddish and English, nearly set off an anti-Semitic riot during a 1932 French performance, and was later banned in Nazi Germany.

As vaudeville gave way to cinema, Tucker secured roles in several films, but she always preferred to perform before a live audience. Her film credits included Honky Tonk (1929) and Follow the Boys (1944). Broadway credits included Cole Porter's Leave It to Me (1938). Over her long career, she appeared on stages with Judy Garland, W.C. Fields, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, and Jack Benny. Throughout her life, Tucker used her earnings to support a variety of charitable causes, including synagogues, hospitals, the Negro Actors Guild, and two youth centers in Israel. Tucker died in New York City on February 9, 1966.

Sophie Tucker is one of the six Jewish funny women chronicled in the film, Making Trouble, produced by the Jewish Women's Archive. To learn more about Sophie Tucker, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Jewish Women in Comedy; Vaudeville in the United States; Jewesses with Attitude's "What Making Trouble means to me," "The return of the Red Hot Mama," "Red Hot Yiddische Mama," Don't Settle: 5 Life Lessons From Your Red Hot Mama"; Sophie Tucker in the Virtual Archive.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1416-1420; New York Times, February 10, 1966, pp. 1 & 31; www.jwmag.org/site/c.fhLOK0PGLsF / b.2440651 / k.A060 / Funny_Girls.htm; Tucker, Sophie from the Encyclopedia Britannica Online; Brian Rust, The Complete Entertainment Discography, From 1897 to 1942, 2nd edition (New York, 1989).

Shulamit Ran's "Verticals" premieres

March 2, 1983

The New York Times called Shulamit Ran's Verticals "rhapsodic and intriguing" when it was premiered by pianist Alan Feinberg at New York's Merkin Concert Hall on March 2, 1983. By then, Ran was already an established composer with several critically acclaimed works to her credit.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1949, Ran earned scholarships from The Mannes College of Music in New York and from the America Israel Cultural Foundation that together allowed her to move to the U.S. at age 14. In Israel and at Mannes she studied both piano and composition. Although her early training was in piano, she has written music for solo flute, cello, clarinet, and violin as well as chamber music, works for orchestra, and even an opera.

In 1969, Ran wrote Hatzvi Israel Eulogy for mezzo-soprano, flute, harp, and string quartet; it premiered at New York City's Town Hall. The following year, when Ran was still just 22, she wrote a Concert Piece for piano and orchestra; it was premiered the following year by Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Ran herself performed the solo piano part, which the Cleveland Plain Dealer later called "extremely brilliant." Ran's most celebrated work is her 1990 Symphony, which won both the Pulitzer Prize for music (1991) and the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award (1992). She was the second woman ever to receive the Pulitzer for music.

Ran's other works have also garnered critical acclaim. She has won awards from the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition (1977), the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, she has received commissions from the Eastman School of Music, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Chamber Music America, and other groups. The Lyric Opera of Chicago commissioned her first opera, Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk), which opened to critical success in 1997. A German translation premiered at the Bielefeld Opera in 1999.

In 1990, Maestro Daniel Berenboim appointed Ran to be Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She was the first woman to be appointed composer-in-residence with a major U.S. symphony, and she held the position for seven seasons. In addition, she served as composer-in-residence with the Lyric Opera of Chicago from 1994 to 1997. Currently, Ran is Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1973.

See also: Music: Palestine and Israel.

Sources:New York Times, March 6, 1983; music.uchicago.edu/people/faculty/ran.shtml; www.presser.com/Composers/info.cfm?Name=SHULAMITRAN; www.composersrecordings.com/linernotes/80554.pdf; digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3176769/.

Lynn Gottlieb publishes "She Who Dwells Within"

March 3, 1995

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Cover of She Who Dwells Within by Lynn Gottlieb

Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb's She Who Dwells Within, which she describes as "a practical guide to nonsexist Judaism," was published on March 3, 1995. Drawing on Gottlieb's own experiences as well as on traditional and feminist midrash (stories that comment on Biblical texts), the book combines thoughtful essays on gender and Judaism with new rituals for the important moments in Jewish women's lives. The title is taken from a translation of the word Shekhinah, traditionally understood as the feminine manifestation or aspect of God.

Born in Pennsylvania, Gottlieb earned her B.S. at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before studying at Hebrew Union College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. While in New York, she became involved in early Jewish feminist circles. Because JTS did not at the time admit women to its rabbinical program, Gottlieb was privately ordained in 1981 by three rabbis, becoming the first woman ordained within the Jewish Renewal movement.

Even before her ordination, Gottlieb had found a niche as a rabbi, serving as the spiritual leader of a deaf congregation in Hollis, New York. She later incorporated sign language, along with music and storytelling, into her unconventional pulpit work and touring performances. Following her ordination, Gottlieb helped to build Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, NM, at the request of a group of unaffiliated Jews there.

Gottlieb remained at Nahalat Shalom for over two decades, building a community that emphasized work for peace, nonviolence as a spiritual practice, earth-based spirituality, interfaith work, and music. She has been particularly active in building ties between the Jewish and Muslim communities, as a co-founder of the Muslim-Jewish Peace Walks and by giving joint lectures with Muslim leaders.

In 2004, Gottlieb left her Albuquerque congregation and moved to California to pursue her interfaith work as director for Interfaith Inventions Peace Camp, an organization that seeks to bring together children and adults of diverse faiths to promote understanding and respect.

In 2007, Lynn Gottlieb was listed as one of the "Top 50 Rabbis in America" by Letty Cottin Pogrebin in the Washington Post. Pogrebin's list was written in answer to a similar list published in Newsweek that only included 5 women.

To learn more about Lynn Gottlieb, visit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: Spirituality in the United States; Feminist Theology; Ritual: A Feminist Approach.

Sources:Lynn Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within, (San Francisco, 1995); http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Gottlieb.html; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA030, "Top 50 Rabbis in America," Washington Post April 29, 2007.

Hilde Bruch publishes "The Importance of Overweight"

March 4, 1957

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Hilde Bruch's collected works published in 1973, Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within, is still considered a definitive work on the subject.

When The Importance of Overweight was published on March 4, 1957, Hilde Bruch was already a leading childhood obesity researcher. Her work was among the first to bring the dangers of excess weight in children to public attention. Born in 1904 and raised in a small German town, Bruch originally wanted to become a mathematician. An uncle convinced her that medicine was a more practical career for a Jewish woman, and she earned her doctorate in medicine at the University of Freiburg in 1929. After giving up her academic career for private practice in response to anti-Semitism within the university, Bruch fled Germany altogether in 1933, immigrating to England. After a year in London, she moved to the United States, where she began working at Babies Hospital in New York City.

Bruch began researching obesity in children in 1937. Her work in this area would prove to be groundbreaking. Yet she left this research in 1941 to study psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University. Returning to New York in 1943, she established a private psychoanalytic practice and joined the faculty at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. While at Columbia, she published Don't Be Afraid of Your Child: A Guide for Perplexed Parents (1952).

In New York, and at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where she joined the faculty in 1964, Bruch's research increasingly focused on the underlying causes of anorexia nervosa. She published both scholarly and popular articles on eating disorders, schizophrenia, and psychoanalysis, and continued to see patients until her 80th birthday. Her collected work, published as Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within in 1973, is still considered a definitive work on the subject. Bruch died in Houston in December, 1984.

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

See also: "Fat Talk," Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 192-193; Joanne Hatch Bruch, Unlocking the Golden Cage: An Intimate Biography of Hilde Bruch, M.D. (Carlsbad, CA, 1996).

Brothel-keeper Polly Adler jailed

March 5, 1935

When Polly Adler died in 1962, she was probably America's best-known brothel keeper. She had come a long way from her hometown of Yanow, Belarus. Born in 1900, Adler studied with her village rabbi and initially hoped to attend the gymnasium (high school) in Pinsk, but her father had other plans. In 1912, he sent her to live with friends in western Massachusetts, where she did housework to earn her keep while attending school to learn English. When World War I cut off communication with her family, including the monthly stipend her father had been sending, she moved in with cousins in Brooklyn.

At 17, Adler was raped by the foreman in the shirt factory where she worked. After an argument with her relatives over her subsequent abortion, she moved out on her own in Manhattan, where she continued to work in a factory. In 1920, Adler fell in with a bootlegger, who paid for an apartment where Adler, in return, secured women for the gangster's friends. It was the beginning of a long career managing prostitutes. She was arrested for the first time in 1922, ending her alliance with the bootlegger. After her release, Adler attempted to open a legitimate lingerie business, but it soon failed.

Following that failure, Adler returned to her career as a madam, opening a series of bordellos in New York City that catered to upper-class clients. Eventually, she opened an establishment in Saratoga Springs, New York, a popular summer retreat. In addition to New York's fashionable upper crust, her clients included gangster Lucky Luciano. Although she was frequently arrested, the charges were usually dropped; she went to jail only once. A police raid on March 5, 1935, resulted in a sentence of 30 days imprisonment, of which Adler served 24 days. Although her arrests and her connections with the underworld were well known, Adler managed to maintain a glamorous image that lasted until her final arrest in 1943. When the last set of charges was dropped, Adler gave up her business and retired to Burbank, California, where she finally completed high school and then enrolled in Los Angeles Valley College. In 1953, she published a best-selling memoir, A House is Not a Home, which was later made into a movie. She lived in Los Angeles until her death on June 9, 1962.

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

See also: "The best goddamn madam in all America," Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources:Polly Adler, A House Is Not a Home (New York, 1953); Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 16-17; New York Times, March 20, 1935; May 11, 1935; June 11, 1962; September 2, 1964; Chicago Tribune, September 22, 1964.

Lyricist Dorothy Fields inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame.

March 8, 1971

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Dorothy Fields and Arthur Schwartz work on score of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn."

Photo by Walter Albertin, 1951. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection.

The ten people inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame in its first induction ceremony on March 8, 1971, included some of the most well-known names in American music: Duke Ellington, Ira Gershwin, and Alan Jay Lerner. The only woman in the group was Dorothy Fields, who over half a century wrote lyrics to more than 400 songs. Born in 1904 and raised in New Jersey, Fields was the daughter of Lew Fields, half of the well-known Weber and Fields vaudeville team. Though Lew Fields discouraged his daughter from pursuing a theater career, Dorothy Fields eventually became one of Broadway and Hollywood's most prolific lyricists.

Fields got her start writing songs for revues at New York City's Cotton Club. Collaborating with Jimmy McHugh, she wrote the lyrics for "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," "On the Sunny Side of the Street," "I'm in the Mood for Love," and "Don't Blame Me," all in 1928. Shortly thereafter, she was asked to write lyrics for a song Jerome Kern was adding to the score of the film Roberta. The song, which became "Lovely to Look At," was the beginning of a long collaboration between Fields and Kern. In 1936, they won an Academy Award for the song "The Way You Look Tonight," from the film Swing Time.

Fields also collaborated with such well-known composers as Irving Berlin and Cy Coleman, and with her brother, Herbert Fields. In all, Fields wrote lyrics for 19 Broadway musicals and 25 films. Among the musicals for which Fields wrote songs are Annie Get Your Gun, Sweet Charity, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Up in Central Park, and Seesaw. She died of a heart attack on March 28, 1974.

In a field in which the names of Jewish men from George and Ira Gershwin to Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim are ubiquitous, Fields made her mark with some of the American musical theater's most memorable songs. A recent New York Times article quoted Sondheim's observation that Fields "wrote the way people talked... she did not distort syntax very often, the way Lorenz Hart and Ira Gershwin did." According to this article, many of today's prominent lyricists cite Fields as "one of the best practitioners of the art."

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

See also: This Week in History for July 15, 1904, "Birth of Broadway lyricist Dorothy Fields"; Jewish Women and Jewish Music in America.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 433-435; New York Times, March 29, 1974, January 7, 2007.

Ruth Mosko Handler unveils Barbie Doll

March 9, 1959

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Four first edition Barbie dolls from 1959, displayed in Prague's Toy Museum.

Photo by Сергей Бережной.

At the International American Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959, inventor Ruth Mosko Handler unveiled one of the most loved, emulated, and criticized toys of the 20^th century. The Barbie Doll, named after Handler's 15-year-old daughter, and modeled after a sex toy called Lilli, which Handler had seen on a trip to Germany, rocketed the Mattel company to nearly overnight success and became an icon of American culture.

Although Barbie has been roundly condemned by feminists as promoting an unrealistic body shape to young girls, Handler originally conceived the doll as a way for girls to imagine their futures as adult women. "I believed it was important to a little girl's self-esteem," she later said, "to play with a doll that has breasts." The development of the doll was also influenced by Handler's daughter's preference for adult paper dolls over the baby dolls that then dominated the toy market.

Although it was Mattel's first big success, the Barbie Doll was not the beginning of Handler's career as an inventor. While working at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, Handler first went into business with her husband producing picture frames. Mattel, named for Handler's husband and a business partner, was incorporated in 1945. In its early years, the company produced a toy ukulele and toy guns; it was among the first to market toys directly to children, sponsoring a year's run of the Mickey Mouse Club television show. After the runaway success of Barbie, the company added Ken, named after Handler's son, and later additional dolls named for Handler's grandchildren.

After losing a breast to cancer in 1970, and leaving Mattel in 1975, Handler turned her attention to helping other breast cancer survivors. Unhappy with the available breast prostheses, she invented her own, which she sold through a new company called Nearly Me.

Handler received numerous awards for her accomplishments. The Los Angeles Times named her "Woman of the Year" in Business in 1967, the United Jewish Appeal named her its first "Woman of Distinction," and the Toy Industry Hall of Fame inducted her in 1985.

Ruth Mosko Handler died in 2002. Although often a subject of satire and social criticism, Barbie lives on, with more than 100 million sold annually. Professional outfits and ethnic Barbies have updated the original, but the grown-up doll continues to entrance both young girls and older collectors.

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

See also: Go & Learn Primary Documents and Lesson Plans, Tefillin Barbie: Considering gender and ritual garb; Jewesses with Attitude, "Happy 50th Birthday, Barbie," "Barbie wears a tallit?" and Babe Ruth.

Sources:Ruth Mosko Handler, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story (Stamford, CT, 1994); www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/handler.htm; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 591-592; M.G. Lord, Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll (New York, 1994); Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1967, December 15, 1967; New York Times, April 29, 2002.

Lillian Wald celebrates 26th birthday by opening settlement house

March 10, 1893

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Born into a successful merchant family in Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 10, 1867, and raised in Rochester, New York, Lillian Wald is remembered today as the founder of public health nursing and an influential pioneer in the settlement house movement of the early twentieth century.

Trained as a nurse at the New York Hospital, Wald began medical school at the Women's Medical College in New York, but was soon sidetracked into what would become her life's work. During a class project organizing a course in home nursing for immigrant families, Wald discovered the dire need for basic health care among tenement dwellers. She left medical school, in 1893, in order to bring affordable health care to the needy of the Lower East Side. Together with her friend Mary Brewster, she founded the organization that became the Visiting Nurse Service.

The Nurses' Settlement opened on Jefferson Street on Wald's 26th birthday, March 10, 1893. Two years later, in 1895, she moved her enterprise to Henry Street. In both locations, the settlement was dedicated to public health nursing, a term Wald coined to describe an organic relationship between health care and broader community needs. In the first year, the settlement cared for 4,500 patients.

Recognizing the interconnectedness of illness and poverty, Wald expanded the activities of the settlement over time. The renamed Henry Street Settlement House offered boys' and girls' clubs; classes in arts, crafts, homemaking and English; and vocational training. Health care remained important, with over 26,000 patients cared for by 100 Henry Street nurses in 1915.

While running Henry Street, Wald also became involved in broader social welfare and political activities. In 1904, she helped found the National Child Labor Committee; she also spearheaded the campaign for a national Children's Bureau within the Department of Labor, which was created in 1912. She supported the Women's Trade Union League, worked on the New York Commission on Immigration, helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and campaigned for women's suffrage. She was also active in peace work, becoming a leader in the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Ill with heart disease, Wald retired from Henry Street in 1933, and died in 1940. Her tireless work on behalf of the poor, children, and women has been well recognized. She won the gold medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences in 1912, and New York City's distinguished service certificate in 1937. She was elected to the Hall of Fame of Great Americans at New York University in 1965, and inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, NY, in 1993.

Wald's greatest monument is in the continuing work of the institutions she founded. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which traces its origins to Wald and Brewster, offers regular care to 115,000 patients. Still in its original buildings on the Lower East Side, the Henry Street Settlement today serves its racially diverse neighborhood through AIDS education, domestic violence prevention, literacy training, advocacy for the homeless, and programs for youth and seniors.

To learn more about Lillian Wald, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and JWA's Women of Valor exhibit.

See also: Lillian Wald poster; Teach: Primary Sources and Lesson Plans, Letter from Emma Goldman to Lillian Wald, 1904 and Lillian Wald’s Sketches of the Henry Street Settlement, 1934.
See the location of the Henry Street Settlement at On the Map.

Sources: Clare Coss, ed. Lillian D. Wald: Progressive Activist (New York, 1989); Doris Groshen, Always a Sister: The Feminism of Lillian D. Wald (New York, 1989); www.henrystreet.org; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1446-1449; jwa.org/exhibits/wov/wald/ Beatrice Siegel, Lillian Wald of Henry Street (New York, 1983); www.vnsny.org/community/our-history/lillian-wald/.

Opening of "Too Jewish?" an exhibit featuring work of artist Helène Aylon

March 10, 1996

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Helène Aylon patiently awaits her interview in the Conservation Studio at SFMOMA. Her 1979 painting from the "Breakings" series sits behind her.

Photo by Peter Samis.

Helène Aylon's The Liberation of G-d was first shown in the New York Jewish Museum's Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities exhibit, which opened on March 10, 1996. The work, which took six years to create, was made by covering every page of the five books of the Torah with transparent parchment, on which Aylon marked problematic passages with a pink pen. The marked passages were mostly those considered degrading to women, but also included negative references to homosexuality. This work was accompanied by commentary on the marked passages from a spectrum of Jewish scholars and rabbis. Liberation was typical of Aylon's work in combining Jewish and social justice themes.

Born in 1931, Aylon was raised in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and married young. It was only when her husband, a rabbi, died of cancer in 1961 that she began to paint. At the same time, she changed her name (from Fisch) and turned away from Judaism. Her first works were abstract paintings made by pouring linseed oil onto plexiglass. Later, she turned from painting to sculpture, creating installations and performances. In the 1980s, her work increasingly commented on issues of social justice and world peace. The 1985 Current, two sacs en route consisted of small sacs of seeds floating down Japanese rivers toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki to mark the 40^th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of those cities. The piece was videotaped, and in 1995 was shown on the Sony Jumbotron in New York's Times Square. Another piece from the 1980s, The Earth Ambulance, featured pillowcases filled with earth "rescued" from nuclear weapons sites around the world.

In the 1990s, Aylon began to focus her work on Jewish themes. Like The Liberation of G-d, these works highlighted gender inequities in Judaism. My Notebooks (1998) suggested a 1950s Orthodox girls' school classroom, with empty notebooks covering the walls to symbolize the absence of women's voices in the traditional texts taught to girls like Aylon. My Bridal Chamber (2001) focused on the laws of niddah—the ritual impurity of women during menstruation—and mikveh (ritual bath). Not surprisingly, many of these works caused considerable controversy. Although a critic for Art in America called The Liberation of G-d "an incisive and elegant deconstruction of Jewish texts," some visitors to the Jewish Museum called it "absolute garbage" and "disgusting" in the Museum's comment book. Similarly, reactions to My Bridal Chamber ranged from angry to enthusiastic, with at least one visitor calling it "offensive" while the curator saw it as "very healthy" and affirming.

Undeterred by the controversy her work creates, Aylon continues to create pieces that call attention to injustice and sexism, particularly within Judaism. The Digital Liberation of G-d (2004), exhibited in San Francisco, recreated the original Liberation with the addition of an interactive computer terminal where viewers can read the passages Aylon highlighted and add their own comments. Aylon's works are in the permanent collections of The Jewish Museum, the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, and elsewhere. In 2002, she was awarded the National Foundation for Jewish Culture's Visual Arts Award.

To learn more about Helène Aylon, visit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: Jewesses with Attitude, "Happy Earth Day"; Jewish Women in Environmental Activism.

Sources: New York Times, 28 August 1992, 8 March 1996, 19 July 2001; cms.jewishculture.org/publications/jcn/jcnsp03.pdf; Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed., Too Jewish?: Challenging Traditional Identities (New York, 1996); Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA002.

Rachel Adler receives National Jewish Book Award

March 11, 1999

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Feminist theologian Rachel Adler elaborated upon her novel approach to Jewish law in her work Engendering Judaism, in which she both identified Judaism's goal as the "creation of a better world" and delineated the way in which an "inclusive Judaism" would enable both women and men to achieve this messianic goal.

Institution: Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles

Rachel Adler was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought on March 11, 1999. The award recognized Engendering Judaism: A New Theology and Ethics, which set forth a new model for integrating modern feminism with traditional Jewish theology.

Adler's work applies feminist theory to traditional Jewish texts. In perhaps her most radical integration of modern feminism and traditional Judaism, Adler's last chapter proposes a new marriage ceremony based on the Jewish laws of partnership. Adler suggests that rather than fighting for the inclusion of gay and lesbian Jews in the traditional Jewish wedding ritual, progressive Jews should question and replace the traditional ceremony which is about a groom taking ownership of his bride.

The book, while considered radical by some critics, was hailed as a groundbreaking contribution by others. The Journal of the American Academy of Religion called it "not only the most sophisticated and important book in the field of Jewish feminist thought but a study that can serve as a model for all feminist theological writings."

Adler is Professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at the School of Religion, University of Southern California and the Rabbinical School at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. In addition, she serves on the editorial boards of Tikkun, Shofar, and Nashim, and as a member of the academic board of the Institute for Progressive Halacha.

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

See also: Feminist Theology.

Sources:www.huc.edu/news/adleraward.html; www.jewishpub.org/product.php?isbn=9780827605848; Rachel Adler, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (Philadelphia, 1998); Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA001.

Public health pioneer Margaret Arnstein appointed dean of Yale School of Nursing

March 13, 1967

Born in New York City in 1904, Margaret Arnstein grew up in a family deeply involved in social health and welfare projects. Her uncle, Herbert Lehman, would serve as a U.S. Senator from New York. Her father was president of Mount Sinai Hospital and also New York City's welfare commissioner. Both parents were involved with the Henry Street Settlement, where they befriended nursing pioneer Lillian Wald. Perhaps with this inspiration, Margaret resisted her parents' desire for her to become a doctor and chose a career in nursing.

After graduating from Smith College in 1925, Arnstein earned nursing and public health degrees from New York Presbyterian Hospital, Columbia University and the Johns Hopkins University. She spent eight years in the New York State Department of Health Communicable Disease Division. Believing that nurses should be involved in health policy and research in addition to direct care, Arnstein pioneered innovative nursing research at the Department. Arnstein taught public nursing for a few years at the University of Minnesota, but returned to New York where, as a state nursing officer during World War II, she organized emergency community squads that would be called into action in the case of epidemics or enemy attacks.

In 1943, Arnstein expanded her own horizons through public health work with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, serving as the chief nurse of its mission in the Balkans. From her role in developing nursing services for war refugees, she joined the U.S. Public Health Service in 1946, directing aspects of its public health nursing programs, and becoming head of its nursing division in 1960. During her years with the Public Health Service, she remained involved with international initiatives, directing the first International Conference on Nursing Studies.

After a few years as a professor of public health at the University of Michigan, Arnstein became dean of the Yale University School of Nursing on March 13, 1967. As dean, she brought Yale's nursing school into the forefront of nursing education. Arnstein's lifetime of work was well recognized in her later years. In 1966, she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Rockefeller Public Service Award. In 1971, she received the Sedgewick Memorial Medal, the American Public Health Association's highest honor. Arnstein died of cancer in 1972.

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

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 65-66; New York Times, September 28, 1937, August 23, 1942, September 25, 1943, March 14, 1967, October 9, 1972.

"New York Times" reviews "Our Bodies, Ourselves"

March 13, 1973

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Cover of the 1973 edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, courtesy of www.ourbodiesourselves.org.

In 1969, a group of women began meeting in the Boston area to discuss women's health issues. They began the research and writing of a 138-page newsprint booklet, combining first-person accounts and careful research, titled "Women and Their Bodies," which they published in 1970. In 1971 the group was legally incorporated as the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. Of the 12 women participating in this incorporation, nine were Jewish, including Esther Rome, Paula Doress-Waters, Joan Ditzion, and Nancy Miriam Hawley.

The first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves appeared in 1971, and an expanded mass-market version was published by Simon and Schuster in 1973. Like the prototype booklet, Our Bodies, Ourselves combined women's authentic voices with solid medical information gathered from published research and an understanding that women's health issues involved social, economic, and political factors as well as narrowly defined medical ones. It was the first book to address women's health issues frankly, in common-sense language, and from the perspectives of women themselves. It was also timely, appearing just as abortion was becoming legal and soon after the birth control pill became widely available, sparking a revolution in American sexual mores. The book was an instant hit. Though condemned by some public figures as pornographic, and banned from some schools, the first edition sold more than 350,000 copies. A New York Times review published on March 13, 1973, called the book "lucidly informative;" the (male) reviewer added, "I don't see how any sensible woman-even an antifeminist one-could fail to be enlightened" by it.

Our Bodies, Ourselves pioneered what became an international women's health movement. Today, the book is in its eighth edition (2005, subtitled A New Edition for A New Era). To date, it has sold (in all editions) more than four million copies and been translated and/or culturally adapted into 19 languages and Braille.

To learn more about Our Bodies, Ourselves co-editor, Esther Rome, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

To learn more about Nancy Miriam Hawley, visit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: Jewesses with Attitude, Our Bodies, Ourselves: The Manual and The Mystery and Who’s your women’s health hero?; Health Activism, American Feminist.

Sources:New York Times, March 13, 1973, June 27, 1995, June 22, 1997; www.bwhbc.org; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1162-1163; Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America (New York, 1997), p. 282; communications to JWA from Judy Norsigian and Sally Whelan, February 2006; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA034.

Yiddish actress Sara Adler honored for 50 years on the stage

March 14, 1939

Born in Odessa in 1858, Sara Adler became an actress who helped to change the face of Yiddish theatre in America. Although she made her stage debut at age eight, she initially studied voice at the Odessa Conservatory and appeared as a between-acts singer for the Jewish Theater Circle. Deciding on a theater career, she learned Yiddish and joined a Yiddish theater troupe. A Russian ban on Yiddish theater prompted the troupe to move to London, and then to America in 1883.

In the U.S., Adler became the leading actress in a Yiddish theatre troupe. The group's manager, actor Jacob Adler, became her second husband in 1891. At the time, Yiddish theater was dominated by vaudeville acts and melodrama. Jacob Adler changed that when he staged a Jacob Gordin drama called Siberia in 1891. This performance is considered the beginning of serious Yiddish theater. Adler went on to stage Der Yidisher Kenig Lear [The Jewish King Lear], in which Sara Adler played the role of Teitele for over 30 years.

Over the next three decades, Sara Adler created many of the most important women's roles in Yiddish theater, winning great public acclaim. The Adlers were able to achieve financial success in New York. Over these decades, Adler also gave birth to five children, all of whom went on to successful theater careers of their own. Her daughter Stella became a noted actress, director, and teacher of acting. Sara Adler continued to perform actively until 1928, and then occasionally appeared until she turned 80. Her 50 years of work on the stage were celebrated in a gala event at the National Theater on March 14, 1939, during which she performed the third act of Tolstoy's Resurrection. Adler died in New York on April 28, 1953.

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

See also: Yiddish Theater in the United States.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 18-19; New York Times, March 14, 1939.

Ezrat Nashim presents manifesto for women's equality to Conservative rabbis

March 14, 1972

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Ezrat Nashim’s “Call for Change,” presented to the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement on March 14, 1972. From the personal archive of Paula Hyman. (Click "Full Image" to see transcript.)

A small New York study group, founded in 1971 to study the status of women in Judaism, presented Conservative rabbis with a manifesto for change at the Rabbinical Assembly convention on March 14, 1972. Adopting the name Ezrat Nashim (the name for the women's section of a synagogue, which can also be translated as "help of women"), early members of the group included many founding pioneers of Jewish feminism such as Martha Ackelsberg, Dina Rosenfeld, Arlene Agus, Elizabeth Koltun, and Paula Hyman.

Ezrat Nashim was started from within the countercultural New York Havurah by a small group of young, well-educated Jewish women, most educated within the Conservative movement. Their 1972 manifesto, entitled "Jewish Women Call for Change," demanded that women be counted in the minyan (prayer quorum), be allowed full participation in religious observances, be allowed to initiate divorce proceedings and be counted as witnesses under Jewish law, and be admitted to rabbinical and cantorial schools. Recognizing that many of the traditional restrictions on women's participation in Jewish ritual stem from their exemption from many mitzvot (commandments) incumbent upon men, the document also asked that women be considered bound equally with men in the fulfillment of mitzvot.

Denied their request to address the Rabbinical Assembly, Ezrat Nashim did have their “call” included in the packets distributed to the rabbis, and they invited those rabbis' wives who were attending the convention to a special meeting on March 14. The New York Times, which printed an extensive account of the group's efforts, reported that the call had been well received at the convention. However, the Conservative movement did not act on the recommendations immediately. When the Jewish Theological Seminary finally voted to admit women to the rabbinical school, in 1983, Ezrat Nashim members celebrated the decision for recognizing "the compelling moral claim of women's equality as well as the changed status of women in the modern world."

Like other Jewish feminist groups, Ezrat Nashim drew on a combined legacy of dedication to Judaism and involvement in the second wave of American feminism. Sensitized to women's second-class status within traditional Judaism, and educated in political activism through the women's movement, these women turned their considerable intelligence and energy toward changing gender norms within their own religious tradition.

Although today's Jewish feminists continue to work for further change, the ordination of women rabbis and cantors within Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Judaism, and the growth of bat mitzvah, baby naming, and other ceremonies for girls in all American denominations, demonstrate the impact of Ezrat Nashim and similar groups.

To learn more about Ezrat Nashim, visit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: Jewish Feminism in the United States; This Week in History for March 14, 1977, "New York Times reports on naming ceremonies for Jewish girls"; "Jewish Feminism, Then and Now", Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 694-698; New York Times, June 12, 1972; Ezrat Nashim documents: "Jewish Women Call For Change," "To All Women at the R. A. convention", provided by Paula Hyman, Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA039.

"New York Times" reports on naming ceremonies for Jewish girls

March 14, 1977

Noting that the new Reform Jewish prayerbook, published in February 1977, included a naming ceremony for baby girls for the first time, and that Ezrat Nashim a small feminist activist collective, was about to publish a booklet entitled “Blessing the Birth of a Daughter: Jewish Naming Ceremonies for Girls,” the New York Times reported on March 14, 1977, that such ceremonies were becoming common in all branches of Judaism.

While Jewish boys had always been welcomed into the world with a brit milah (a ceremony for circumcision) on the eighth day of life, no parallel ceremony for baby girls had existed until American Jewish feminists began to invent them. As the Times reported, naming ceremonies (often called simchat bat, or rejoicing in a daughter) violated no strictures of traditional Judaism, so women could blend Judaism and feminism in new rituals without creating conflict with rabbinic authorities.

As Paula Hyman explained, speaking for many women, “as feminists … we believe that egalitarianism must begin at birth.” Many naming ceremonies—which differ from synagogue to synagogue and family to family—express a belief in egalitarianism also by giving prominent roles to mothers and grandmothers, whereas the father traditionally takes the lead in a brit milah.

Rabbi Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, now a well-known supporter of Jewish Orthodox feminism, told the Times that he saw the boom in naming ceremonies as evidence of a larger change in the relationship between Jewish feminists and tradition. While previously, he said, Jewish feminists were turning their backs on religion, “now they are demanding the expression of feminism in religious life.” In this sense, the profusion of naming ceremonies can be categorized with the growth in women’s Passover seders around the same time, as an effort to transform tradition in ways that keep its integrity yet bring women fully into the ritual circle. Today, girls’ naming ceremonies are common enough not to elicit any notice from the media, whether performed at home or in a synagogue, from a printed text or a newly imagined one.

To learn more, visit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

See also: This Week in History for March 14, 1972, "Ezrat Nashim presents manifesto for women's equality to Conservative rabbis."

Sources: New York Times, March 14, 1977; Maralee Gordon contribution to Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA028.

Creation of New York Female Hebrew Benevolent Society

March 15, 1820

On March 15, 1820, just a year after Rebecca Gratz established the country's first Female Hebrew Benevolent Society in Philadelphia, Richa Levy led a group of women that established a Female Hebrew Benevolent Society at New York's Shearith Israel congregation. At that time, Shearith Israel was the only synagogue in New York City.

Although women had long been involved in individual acts of generosity toward their neighbors in need, the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society hoped to work collectively as an organized body "for relief of indigent females and their families." As Richa Levy, the first director of the Society, wrote to synagogue trustees, the Society's primary focus was on helping impoverished women, but they hoped also to "occasionally give assistance to families whose situation may render them objects of charity."

In order to raise funds for their charity, the women of Shearith Israel gained permission to receive "offerings" at synagogue services. In addition, they augmented their funds by holding dinner-dances at which men spoke of the Society's goals between a dinner and festive dancing. One such ball, on December 2, 1847, raised $1,350 for the Society.

The Society was formally incorporated in 1854, at which time its purpose was defined as "to afford the aged and indigent female members of said congregation a comfortable residence, support, employment, medical and other necessary care." In 1870, the Society merged with the formally all-male Hebrew Relief Society, and ceased to exist as an independent organization.

See also: Rebecca Gratz in Women of Valor and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Source: David and Tamar de Sola Pool, An Old Faith in the New World: Portrait of Shearith Israel, 1654-1954 (New York, 1955).

Judith Kaplan celebrates first American Bat Mitzvah ceremony

March 18, 1922

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"No thunder sounded. No lightening struck," recalled Judith Kaplan Eisenstein of her history-making 1922 Bat Mitzvah ceremony, the first in America. She is pictured here at her second Bat Mitzvah ceremony, where she was honored by a number of prominent Jewish women, including Betty Friedan and Letty Cottin Pogrebin.

Institution: The Ira and Judith Kaplan Eisenstein Reconstructionist Archives, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College

Judith Kaplan, at age 12, became the first American to celebrate a Bat Mitzvah on March 18, 1922. Judith was the oldest daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. Believing that girls should have the same religious opportunities as their brothers, Rabbi Kaplan arranged for his daughter to read Torah on a Shabbat morning at his synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism.

The Kaplan Bat Mitzvah marked a turning point for Conservative Judaism in America. Always torn between tradition and modernity, the movement struggled for many decades with women's roles in the synagogue. Judith Kaplan herself did not read from the Torah scroll, as modern Bat Mitzvah celebrants do; instead, she read a passage in Hebrew and English from a printed Chumash (the first five books of the Bible) after the regular Torah service. Still, Rabbi Kaplan's innovation gained followers. By 1948, about a third of Conservative congregations had conducted Bat Mitzvah ceremonies. By the 1960s, Bat Mitzvah was a regular feature of Conservative congregational life; today it is a mainstay in synagogues from Reform to Modern Orthodox.

After her ground-breaking Bat Mitzvah, Kaplan Eisenstein (she married Ira Eisenstein who became Kaplan's successor in leading the Reconstructionist movement) went on to a successful career in Jewish music. After studying at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Julliard School) in New York, she attended the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) Teachers Institute and Columbia University's Teachers College, where she earned an M.A. in music education in 1932. She later earned a Ph.D. in the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR).

Kaplan Eisenstein taught music pedagogy and the history of Jewish music at JTS, HUC-JIR, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College for many years. She also created the first Jewish songbook for children, Gateway to Jewish Song (1937). Her other published works include Festival Songs (1943) and Heritage of Music: The Music of the Jewish People (1972). In 1987, she created and broadcasted a 13-hour radio series on the history of Jewish music. In 1992, at age 82, Kaplan Eisenstein celebrated a second Bat Mitzvah, surrounded by leaders of the modern Jewish feminist movement. This time, she read from a Torah scroll. Kaplan Eisenstein died on February 14, 1996.

To learn more about Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: JWA's Go & Learn lesson plan "Taking Risks, Making Change: Bat Mitzvah and Other Evolving Traditions"; "Bat Mitzvah Revolutions and Evolutions", Jewesses with Attitude; Highlighted Judiths; Conservative Judaism in the United States.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 126-128, 370-371; New York Times, March 19, 1992, February 15, 1996.

Writer Grace Paley arrested at Vietnam protest

March 19, 1970

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

On March 19, 1970, writer and activist Grace Paley was arrested with 181 other individuals for protesting the Vietnam draft in an act of mass civil disobedience. It was neither the first nor the last time she would be arrested for social protest. Acclaimed for her short stories, Paley is also well known for her activism in a range of social causes.

Born in New York in 1922 to Ukrainian socialist parents, Paley was raised in a family committed to social change. Both her parents had been arrested in Ukraine for participating in workers' demonstrations. However, by the time Paley was born, they were comfortably middle-class thanks to her father's successful medical practice. Paley herself became involved in politics as an extension of her work with the Parent-Teacher Associations at her children's schools.

Beginning with local activism, Paley came to make connections between local and national and, increasingly, global concerns. In the 1960s, hers was a prominent voice in the feminist movement. In that decade and the next, she was also a key figure in the antiwar movement. The New York Times described her as the "stage director" of the 1970 New York City draft board protests. In 1978, she was arrested with three other writers for unfurling a banner reading "No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—U.S. or U.S.S.R." on the White House lawn. She also made a series of controversial trips to North Vietnam (1969), Chile (1972), and the Soviet Union (1973). Her commitment to visiting world trouble spots to call for peace continued with visits to Nicaragua and El Salvador in 1985 and to Israel in 1987.

While engaged in public activism, Paley was also writing. Her first short story collection, Little Disturbances of Man, was published in 1959. A reviewer praised the volume for its "all-too-infrequent literary virtue—the comic vision." A second collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, appeared in 1974. This collection was more explicitly political, containing stories about Vietnam protests, abused runaway teens, and a subway tragedy. Later the Same Day, Paley's third story collection, appeared in 1985. She has also published three volumes of poetry and a book of essays, articles, and lectures. In all her writing, political concerns are mixed with personal ones, as her characters and narrators struggle to work out both domestic and national power struggles and find their own roads to happiness.

Paley's work has received critical acclaim from the very beginning. After the success of Little Disturbances of Man, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship (1961) and a National Endowment for the Arts Award (1966). These were followed by a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for short story writing (1970) and a PEN/Faulkner Prize for fiction (1986). She taught for 22 years (1966-1988) at Sarah Lawrence College, and has also taught at Columbia, NYU, Syracuse University, and Dartmouth. Paley died in August 2007 at the age of 84.

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

See also: This Week in History for December 11, 1922, "The Birth of Grace Paley"; "Grace Paley, z''l", "Thinking of Grace" and "Remembering Grace Paley", Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1026-1029; New York Times, 19 April 1959, 20 March 1970, 2 February 1979, 19 April 1998; The Guardian (London), 30 October 2004; Jewish Women's Archive remembrance by Annelise Orleck, jwa.org/weremember/paley.

Elena Kagan confirmed by U.S. Senate as first woman Solicitor General of the United States

March 19, 2009

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

On March 19, 2009, the U.S. Senate confirmed Elena Kagan as Solicitor General of the United States. By a 61 to 31 vote, Kagan became the first woman Solicitor General in U.S. history.

Kagan studied history at Princeton University, earned a Masters of Philosophy at Oxford and her law degree Magna Cum Laude at Harvard in 1986, where she was the supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. She began her academic career at the University of Chicago Law School in 1991, becoming a full professor in 1995. She served on the faculty appointments committee and earned the graduating students' award for teaching excellence in 1993.

From 1995 to 1999 Kagan served in the White House as Associate Counsel to President Clinton, then as Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. She was Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council from 1997 to 1999, where she played an important role in the executive branch's formulation, advocacy, and implementation of law and policy in a number of areas. In 1999, Elena Kagan returned to Harvard and in 2003 she became the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law and Dean of Harvard Law School. During her six-year deanship, Kagan oversaw impressive growth, including a reform of the curriculum, an expansion of the faculty, a major public service initiative, and the design and construction of a new building.

She also published a number of important books, including Presidential Administration (2001) and Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine (1996).

In July 2009, Martha Minow succeeded Elena Kagan as Dean of Harvard Law School becoming the second Jewish woman to hold that position.

In 2010, President Obama nominated Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court. On August 5, 2010, Elena Kagan was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and joined Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the second Jewish woman to become a Supreme Court Justice. 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 at the same time.

See also: "Justice Elena Kagan Confirmed, Jewish Women Rock the Bench!" Jewesses with Attitude; This Week in History for July 1, 2009, "Martha Minow appointed Dean of Harvard Law School"; Nina Totenberg’s December 2009 profile of Elena Kagan on National Public Radio, "Solicitor General Holds Views Close To Her Chest".

Sources: "Elena Kagan named next dean of Harvard Law School" Harvard University Gazette, April 3, 2003; www.law.harvard.edu/news/spotlight/public-service/elena-kagan-.html; www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/index.html?id=112.

Senda Berenson officiates at first collegiate women's basketball game

March 22, 1893

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Portrait of Senda Berenson, the founder of women’s basketball.

Senda Berenson, the "Mother of Women's Basketball," officiated at the first women's basketball game on March 22, 1893, at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Born in Lithuania and raised in Boston, Berenson was weak and delicate as a child. An athletic career would have seemed unlikely for the woman whose poor health rendered her unable to complete her training at the Boston Conservatory of Music. But in 1890, she entered the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics, in a bid to improve her strength and health. There, she trained in anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, and was hired by Smith College upon her graduation in 1892.

Berenson, the director of the physical education department at Smith, first heard about a new game called "Basket Ball" soon after her arrival in Northampton. Invented as a class exercise for boys, the game—like most team sports—was considered too strenuous for girls, who were instead encouraged to participate in individual sports like swimming, archery, and horseback riding. Berenson observed the game being played in nearby Springfield, and met its inventor, Dr. James Naismith, who encouraged her to adopt the game as exercise for her female students.

At the first basketball game on March 22, 1893 (some sources cite March 21), Smith freshmen were pitted against Smith sophomores, with no male spectators allowed. With rules intended to avoid the roughness of the men's game, the new game became a hit, and soon swept the country. By 1895, there were hundreds of women's basketball teams, and these teams helped open the door to other team sports programs for women. Berenson wrote the first official rulebook for women's college basketball, as well as a number of articles on the new sport. She continued to edit the rules until the 1916-17 season, and many of the rules she developed remained standard until the 1980s. Berenson died in 1954. Over 30 years later, in 1985, she was the first woman to be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA.

Senda Berenson's brother was the noted art critic Bernhard Berenson.

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

See also: Sports in the United States.

Sources:www.hoophall.com/halloffamers/bhof-senda-berneson.html; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 137-139; Joan Hult and Marianna Trekell, eds., A Century of Women's Basketball: From Frailty to Final Four (Reston, VA, 1991); Guide to Senda Berenson Papers, Sophia Smith Collection (clio.fivecolleges.edu/smith/berenson/).

Judith Leiber handbags featured in First Lady museum exhibit

March 22, 2005

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The Judith Leiber handbag has evolved into an American icon of fashion and design, a coveted status object for celebrities, socialites and collectors.

Institution: The Judith Leiber Company

When the New-York Historical Society opened its "First Ladies of New York and the Nation" exhibit on March 22, 2005, four handbags created by Judith Leiber were among the unusual items on display.

Born in Hungary on January 11, 1921, Leiber was the first woman to become an apprentice and then master in the Hungarian handbag guild. Having survived World War II in hiding, she met her husband—an American soldier—on the streets of Budapest as the Allies were liberating the city. A GI Bride, she moved to the United States and began working as a pattern maker and later foreman at a handbag company before launching her own company in 1963. Leiber's small firm quickly grew, and she soon opened a factory to produce her designs.

Today, Leiber's handbags, still made in the United States by skilled artisans, are cherished by celebrities and collectors alike. In 1953, throngs of guests and reporters turned out to see the Judith Leiber bag carried by Maimie Eisenhower at her husband's inauguration; every first lady since Nancy Reagan has carried one.

Although she retired from designing handbags in 1998, many of Leiber's most famous lines, including the classic beaded Chatelaine, are still in production. They are among the few luxury goods still made by hand in the United States. The Judith Leiber line has also been extended to include shoes, eyewear, and gloves. Leiber bags have been featured in numerous art exhibitions and are included in the collections of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., among others.

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

See also: Highlighted Judiths.

Sources:bushlibrary.tamu.edu/exhibits/2004-fashioning_art/; www.nyhistory.org/web/default.php?section=exhibits_collections&page=exhibit_detail&id=6542122; www.judithleiber.com.

The "New York Times" reports on Barbra Streisand's Broadway debut

March 23, 1962

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The immensely talented trailblazer Barbra Streisand has done it all. She co-directed and co-produced Yentl (1983), in which she both acted and sang in the star role as a young woman who so loved studying the Talmud that she assumed a male identity in order to attend a yeshivah.

Institution: American Jewish Archives

"The evening's find is Barbra Streisand, a girl with an oafish expression, a loud irascible voice and an arpeggiated laugh. Miss Streisand is a natural comedienne," proclaimed the March 23, 1962, New York Times review of the Broadway musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale.

By the time Streisand made her Broadway debut in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, she had already developed a loyal following as a singer. In performances at the Lion Club, one of New York City's premier gay clubs, and in other clubs around the country, the young Streisand developed her trademark outsider persona, impromptu one-liners, and theatrical delivery that brought audiences to their feet.

Streisand's performance as Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It for You Wholesale was so successful that the role was expanded for her, with new songs added. Despite national acclaim for her performance, she was considered too Jewish, too eccentric, too unattractive, and too marked by her Brooklyn upbringing for a record contract. Streisand established a permanent claim on American pop culture, however, with the premiere of Funny Girl on Broadway on March 26, 1964. A New York Times review reported that her impersonation of comedian Fanny Brice had "knocked New York on its ear." Streisand, the reviewer noted, "at the tremulously tender age of 22" was "Broadway's newest star." When Columbia Records released The Barbra Streisand Album in 1964, it remained on the charts for 18 months. Streisand's movie debut in a film version of Funny Girl in 1968, won Streisand an Oscar and cemented her place among the stars of American theatre and film.

After Funny Girl, Streisand went on to star in 15 more movies, including Funny Lady, The Way We Were, Yentl, and The Prince of Tides, the latter two of which she also directed. Not all of Streisand's projects have been successful. Hello, Dolly! and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever were box-office flops, and The Mirror Has Two Faces was reviewed unfavorably. However, Streisand's successes have vastly overshadowed these missteps. She has won ten Golden Globe Awards, eight Grammy Awards, Emmy Awards, Oscars, and a special Tony award, and has sold more records than any singers except the Beatles. Her 49 gold albums are exceeded only by Elvis.

Saying that "I have enough money, thank God, and the only reason I want it is to give it away," Streisand has been generous to a variety of causes. Through the Streisand Foundation, she has supported Jewish charities in the U.S. and in Israel, environmental projects, AIDS education and care, and Democratic politicians. As importantly, Streisand has changed the face of the female movie star. Never afraid to be emphatically Jewish and herself, she has opened the door to other actresses who look more ethnic than the Hollywood mainstream. She has also challenged Hollywood's gender norms, directing three of her own movies, and insisting on total control of all her projects.

Streisand has also spoken out through her television work. Her company, Barwood Films, has made television dramas about gun control and about military harassment of gay and lesbian Americans. Her humanitarian and political work has been recognized by the AIDS Project Los Angeles, which honored her with its Commitment to Life Award in 1992, and by the ACLU, which gave her its Bill of Rights Award. In 2004, she was awarded the Humanitarian Award from the Human Rights Campaign.

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

See also: Theater in the United States; "The 'fury of the kooky, odd-looking girl," Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources:www.barbrastreisand.com; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1349-1353; New York Times, March 26, 1962.

Triangle Waist Factory fire

March 25, 1911

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Front page from Yiddish newspaper, Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Stick).

Institution: U.S. Library of Congress

Approximately 500 workers were making ladies blouses at the Triangle Waist Company's factory near Washington Square in Lower Manhattan when fire broke out on March 25, 1911.

The 10-story building lacked adequate fire escapes, firefighting equipment was unable to reach the top floors, and—most tragically— doors had been locked to prevent unauthorized breaks from work. Some of the workers, unable to reach an exit, jumped from the windows in a futile effort to save themselves. The fire did its work in less than 40 minutes. By the time it was out, 146 died and many more were injured. Most of the dead were recent immigrant Jewish and Italian women between the ages of 16 and 23.

Just two years before, the Jewish owners of the Triangle Waist Company had been among the targets of the strike known as the "Uprising of the 20,000," which had sought union recognition through the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Although some firms agreed to settle with their workers, Triangle did not and remained an anti-union shop.

In the wake of the Triangle fire, the Jewish community and women leaders in the labor movement sprang into action. The Women's Trade Union League (WTUL), a cross-class coalition that worked as an ally of the ILGWU, organized a public meeting at the Metropolitan Opera House on April 2. There, Rose Schneiderman, one of the leaders of the 1909 strike, called upon all working people to take action. Three days later, several hundred thousand people turned out for a funeral procession for the seven unidentified victims of the fire.

Under pressure from the ILGWU, the WTUL, and others, New York State established a Committee on Safety in the wake of the fire. In addition, the state legislature set up a Factory Investigating Committee, which drafted legislation designed to increase protection of workers. The recommendations included automatic sprinkler systems and occupancy limits. Over 30 new labor and safety laws were passed in the three years after the fire.

Even as these regulations went into effect, the site of the Triangle fire remained a rallying point for labor organizing. Some survivors, galvanized by their experience, went on to lifetimes of labor activism. Frances Perkins, who witnessed the fire, later became Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt. She said that the Triangle fire was the beginning of the New Deal. The last survivor of the fire, Rose Rosenfeld Freedman, died in 2001 at age 107.

Learn more about the Triangle Waist Factory fire in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for November 22, 1909 "Clara Lemlich sparks Uprising of the 20,000"; "We Have Found You Wanting": Labor Activism and Communal Responsibility," Go & Learn: Primary Documents and Lesson Plans; List of resources on the Triangle fire.

To see the locations related to the fire, visit the online walking tour.

On the Jewesses with Attitude blog: Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, Imagining the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, We have found you wanting, The new "Triangle Fire" film: What was missing, Discovering my grandmother's Triangle story, 100 years of coming together on the Lower East Side, The picnic that saved my grandmother's life, and The Top 11 Labor History Landmarks in New York City.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1409-1412; Dave von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America (New York, 2003); www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/; Jacqueline Jones et al., Created Equal (New York, 2003).

Rabbi Janet Marder becomes president of Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR)

March 26, 2003

When Rabbi Janet Marder was named president of the Reform Movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) on March 26, 2003, she became the first woman to lead a major rabbinical organization and the first woman to lead any major Jewish co-ed religious organization in the United States.

Marder was ordained in 1979 by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). After graduate work in comparative literature at UCLA, she became the rabbi of Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles, the first gay and lesbian synagogue to be recognized by the Reform movement. At Beth Chayim Chadashim, Marder founded an AIDS-education program for the Jewish community, called NECHAMA.

After five years as a pulpit rabbi, Marder became the director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations Pacific Southwest Council in 1988. For 11 years, she supervised congregations in Nevada, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and southern California. She returned to the pulpit in 1999, as senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, CA. With approximately 1300 families, Beth Am is one of the largest congregations in the U.S. to be headed by a female rabbi. Marder continued in this position during her two-year CCAR term.

In her presidential installation sermon on March 29, 2003, Marder spoke about the need to develop and sustain progressive Judaism in Israel, and about "developing an inner life—about personal prayer, about seeking the Holy One, and quiet hours inside a book, and the solitude that is essential for a life of clarity and integrity." Her term as CCAR President ended in 2005.

See also: Reform Judaism in the United States; "Top 50 Rabbis,"Jewesses with Attitude.

Sources:www.betham.org/staff.html; Los Altos Town Crier, April 2, 2003.

Dr. Sabina Zimering's memoirs come to the stage

March 27, 2004

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Hiding in the Open by Sabina Zimering, published in 2001 by North Star Press.

On March 27, 2004 at the age of 81, Dr. Sabina Zimering sat in the audience at the Great American History Theatre in Saint Paul, MN and watched the remarkable story of her own survival in Nazi Europe unfold on stage. Zimering was 16 years old when Hitler’s army invaded her native Poland. At first, she and her family were allowed to remain in their hometown of Piotrkow, a section of which the Germans had turned into a Jewish ghetto. Zimering, her parents, and her younger sister and brother were forced to share cramped quarters in a neighbor's apartment. Hunger and disease were endemic in the ghetto.

Then, in 1942, the Germans began emptying the ghettos of Jews and shipping them off to death camps. In an effort to save her daughters from Hitler's Final Solution, Zimering’s mother enlisted the help of family friends, two Polish Catholic sisters named Danka and Mala Justyna. Zimering and her sister Helka would use Danka and Mala's identity cards, pose as Catholic Poles, escape to Germany, and "hide" in the open.

The daring plan worked. For three years, until the end of the war, Zimering and her sister worked as maids in a German hotel—one frequented by Nazi officers. "A lot of luck," Zimering later reflected. "I was a teenager, and when you are a teenager, nothing is impossible." Zimering's brother Nathan also survived the war, though he saw their father die in Buchenwald, two days before liberation. Zimering later learned that her mother had died in Treblinka. "[Of] our extended family of 50 to 60 people…a total of seven were all who had survived," told Zimering.

Soon after the war's end, Zimering enrolled in the recently reopened Munich Medical School. One of the few women (and Jews) in her class, Zimering excelled in her studies. However, she found the presence of many of her classmates unnerving. "I had a hard time looking at row after row of young Germans, especially the men," she recalled. "I didn’t want to know which of them had been soldier and which had been Gestapo."

After receiving her medical degree in 1950, Zimering immigrated to America to join her brother and sister, and her future husband Rueben, whom she had met while they were both students in Munich. The two married that same year and settled in Minneapolis. Before she could practice medicine in the US, Zimering had to learn English and earn her Minnesota medical license. She remembers being pregnant with her first child and anxiously having to sit through the exam for her medical license on the baby's due date. Fortunately, the baby, the first of six children for Zimering and her husband, was a healthy daughter who arrived ten days after her due date.

Zimering passed her exam and received her license to practice medicine. For ten years, she worked part-time as a doctor for the Student Health Service at the University of Minnesota. When her children were school-aged, Zimering took a full-time job in ophthalmology with the Student Health Service. After another ten years, she moved into private practice, and found the challenge of winning the confidence of her patients (many of whom were hesitant to be treated by a woman doctor) to be extremely rewarding. Zimering even used her ability to speak Polish to connect with the many Eastern European patients in her practice.

Zimering practiced medicine for 42 years. "The early struggles of living in a new country, learning a new language, and overcoming the obstacles for women doctors are now a distant memory," she reflected after retiring in 1996. It was in that year that Zimering, urged on by her children, began to pen her memoirs. Published as Hiding in the Open in 2001, the memoir was adapted for the stage by playwright Kira Obolensky. When it premiered in March of 2004, Zimering was there to watch. The critically acclaimed play was brought back to the stage for a second time by the History Theatre in February 2010.

See also:The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies' web page on Sabina Zimering; the website of the History Theatre in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Sources: Graydon Royce, "War Stories," Star Tribune, March 2004; "Sabina Zimering," CommunityCelebration.org; "When Few Were Women," Minnesota Medicine, March 2002.

Judy Holliday wins Academy Award for best actress

March 29, 1951

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Judy Holliday played a not-so-dumb blond in both the Broadway and the film versions of Born Yesterday. She is shown here in the 1950 film, with William Holden (right) and Broderick Crawford.

Institution: American Jewish Archives

Bette Davis, Gloria Swanson, and Anne Baxter were all in the running. When the Academy Award for best actress was announced on March 29, 1951, however, the Oscar went to young comedian Judy Holliday, for her performance as Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday. Holliday had created the Billie Dawn role on Broadway in 1946. On both stage and screen, Holliday played the ex-showgirl girlfriend of a corrupt tycoon who is trying to mold her to his will. In the end, Holliday's seemingly dumb-blonde character manages to overturn her boyfriend's plot to corrupt the federal government. The New York Times called her performance "not only funny but also human and moving."

Holliday's acting career was brief but impressive. Born in 1921, she grew up in New York City. She was brought up mainly within her mother's extended and socialist-leaning family. Her father was an active Zionist leader as well as the president of the American Federation of Musicians from 1929 to 1937.

After graduating at the top of her class at the Julia Richman High School, she got her start in the theater as a member of the Revuers, a group that played clubs in New York's Greenwich Village. Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who would go on to great fame as a musical-comedy writing team, were also members of the troupe. Holliday's first Broadway role was as a prostitute in Kiss Them for Me (1945), for which she won the Clarence Derwent Award for best supporting actress. During this period, Hollywood producers convinced the actress to change her last name from Tuvim. She chose Holliday because of its relationship to holy days, one of the Hebrew meanings of Tuvim.

Despite her success on stage in Born Yesterday, Harry Cohn, the producer of the film version, wanted to find a more glamorous and well-known star for the movie role, reputedly dismissing Holliday as "that fat Jewish broad." The efforts of director George Cukor and stars Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey to spotlight the young actress in a supporting role in Adam's Rib (1949) finally convinced Cohn of Holliday's marketability.

One year after receiving her Academy Award, Holliday got caught up in the McCarthy-era investigations of Hollywood and was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Internal Security subcommittee in 1952. Transcripts reveal that she used her "dumb blonde" persona to deflect the committee's attempts to implicate her or get her to name names. She was not accused of being a Communist, but the taint of the investigation kept her off of television and radio for a number of years. Holliday's contract with Columbia studios continued, however, and she appeared in a series of films including The Marrying Kind (1952) and It Should Happen to You (1954). Holliday returned to Broadway in 1956 in the hit musical Bells are Ringing, written by her friends Betty Comden and Arthur Green, with music by Comden, Green, and Jules Styne, and directed by Jerome Robbins. Holliday played a wish-fulfilling telephone operator, a role for which she earned the New York Drama Desk Award and the Tony Award (chosen over Ethel Merman and Julie Andrews). Holliday also starred in the film version of the musical in 1960.

A diagnosis of breast cancer in 1960 limited Holliday's future work. She died in 1965, at age 43.

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

See also: Film Industry in the United States; Theater in the United States; Jewish Women in Comedy; Highlighted Judiths.

Sources: Gary Carey, Judy Holliday: An Intimate Life Story (New York, 1982); William Holtzman, Judy Holliday (New York, 1982); Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 647-649; New York Times, March 30, 1951, June 8, 1965; jwa.org/discover/comedy/holliday.html; The Judy Holliday Resource Center: www.wtv-zone.com/lumina/judy/main.html.

Hadassah president Irma Levy Lindheim challenges American Zionist leadership

March 30, 1928

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In her role as Hadassah president from 1926 to 1928, Irma Levy Lindheim presented the case for Palestine in speeches throughout the U.S. Later, becoming more radical, she withdrew from Hadassah but worked with the organization repeatedly in her passionate zeal for Jewish identity.

Institution: Hadassah, The Women's Zionist Organization of America

Irma Levy Lindheim served as the third president of Hadassah, the American women's Zionist organization, from 1926 to 1928. During her presidency, Hadassah was in frequent conflict with the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which wanted to control and dispense the funds raised from the Hadassah membership.

On March 30, 1928, Lindheim declared that the administration of the ZOA was "not an effective instrument for the achievement of world Zionist aims for the upbuilding of Palestine." In so doing, she asserted her opposition to the leadership of ZOA President Louis Lipsky. Although Lindheim was careful to note that she spoke as an individual and that Hadassah had no quarrel with the World Zionist Organization led by Chaim Weizmann, she came under attack for her comments from both ZOA leadership and other Hadassah members.

The Hadassah-ZOA conflict had roots dating back to 1918, when Hadassah (founded in 1912) first joined the umbrella organization, giving up some of its organizational independence. Seven members of the Hadassah board had been expelled in 1920 when the organization's Central Committee refused to raise money for the ZOA fund Keren Hayesod. Despite Hadassah's loss of autonomy, the organization's membership steadily increased even as general ZOA membership declined.

Following Lindheim's declaration, the national board of Hadassah voted "no confidence" in Lipsky on April 22, 1928. In retaliation, the Zionist National Executive Committee, meeting on May 27, 1928, threatened to discipline the women's organization. This conflict helped to establish Hadassah's independence from the male Zionist establishment. Lindheim, however, declined a second term as Hadassah president.

Lindheim remained an active Zionist after stepping down from the Hadassah president's chair, touring the U.S. to speak on behalf of the Zionist labor organization Histadrut and the labor Zionist groups Hashomer Hatzair and Poale Zion. In the 1930s, she parted ways with Hadassah, defining herself as further to the political left. After 1933, Lindheim split her time between Palestine/Israel and the U.S. In Israel, she helped to found several kibbutzim; in the U.S., she created educational programs to counter assimilation and to help mothers develop Jewish identity in their children. Lindheim died in California in 1978.

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

See also: This Week in History for October 30, 1933, "Irma Lindheim became a member of Kibbutz Mishmar Haemek"; Zionism in the United States.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 571-583, 856-858; Irma Lindheim, Parallel Quest (New York, 1962); New York Times, March 31, 1928, April 1, 1928, May 28, 1928, April 11, 1978.