Madeleine May Kunin

Content type
Collection

Madeleine Kunin

Project
DAVAR: Vermont Jewish Women's History Project

Ann Zinn Buffum and Sandra Stillman Gartner interviewed Madeleine Kunin on May 1, 2006, in Burlington, Vermont, as part of DAVAR's Oral History Project. Kunin shares her journey from Switzerland to the United States, her career in journalism, her involvement in Vermont politics as the first woman governor, and her role in education under the Clinton administration.

To Life! Celebrating Vermont's Jewish women

Leah Berkenwald

Ann Zinn Buffum came to JWA through “midnight web searches” for family history.  She was surprised to discover that Madeleine May Kunin, the first woman Governor of Vermont, was the only Vermonter to be featured on jwa.org.  “Surely there were other women in our state, small as it is, who had interesting and accomplished lives,” she writes in To Life!, the book that accompanies the gallery exhibit. With her mission in mind, she enlisted Sandra Stillman Gartner, a writer, actor, and active member of the Rutland Jewish Center community, to create DAVAR: The Jewish Women’s History Project.

Madeleine May Kunin

Madeline Kunin broke ground as the first woman governor of Vermont and the only woman to serve three terms as governor, before making history again as ambassador to Switzerland and facilitating compensation from Swiss banks to Holocaust survivors.

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