Please wait...
Tag : Ruth Bader Ginsburg
December 21, 2020 by Helene Meyers
7 Jewish Feminist Highlights of 2020
Let’s face it—2020 has been a clusterf**k of a year, and I can’t wait to see it recede in the distance of my rearview mirror. While most Jews have observed Passover, the High Holidays, and Chanukah virtually, the national COVID fallout from Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s is likely to be heartbreaking, even more so given that a vaccine for most of us is just months away. The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor tragically reminded us that we must continue to fight to make the truth that Black Lives Matter self-evident. And among the many, many hits that democracy took this year was the ramrodding of Amy Coney Barrett into the Supreme Court seat that Ruth Bader Ginsburg honorably and notoriously held from 1993 until her death on erev Rosh Hashanah.
- No Comments
October 23, 2020 by admin
JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: 1933-2020
“Here in the Capitol, the lawmaking heart of our nation, in close proximity to the Supreme Court, we remember in sorrow that Hitler’s Europe, his Holocaust kingdom, was not lawless. Indeed, it was a kingdom full of laws, laws deployed by highly educated people—teachers, lawyers, and judges—to facilitate oppression, slavery and mass murder.”
RUTH BADER GINSBURG, remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004.
- No Comments
October 23, 2020 by admin
“To See Beyond the World You Are In”
To be born into a world that does not see you, that does not believe in your potential, that does not give you a path for opportunity, or a clear path for education, and despite this, to be able to see beyond the world you are in to imagine that something can be different, that is the job of a prophet. And it is the rare prophet who not only imagines a new world, but also makes that new world a reality in her lifetime. This was the brilliance and vision of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
RABBI LAUREN HOLTZBLATT [at memorial service]
- No Comments
October 23, 2020 by admin
“It Should Never Have Come Down to Her”
Ginsburg herself was never actually in a position to take care of us. She came to be widely adulated only in the period in which she was in the Court’s minority; she was issuing dissents—brilliantly lacerating, yes, but still dissents—from decisions that imperiled and weakened us.
…The notion that our survival depended on her survival was always flawed, and betrayed how ravenous many were for any thread of hope for quiet and functional institutional correction, rather than for the mass uprising and furious battle this moment calls for. Part of the fantasy was that if she could hang on we could get back to “normal,” but normal is long past broken.”
It should never have come down to her, even in our collective imagination.
REBECCA TRAISTER, “It Should Never Have Come Down to Her.” The Cut, September 2020.
- No Comments
October 23, 2020 by admin
“I Will Fight” •
On a pavement across the street from the Supreme Court, school teacher Amanda Stafford chalked the words carefully: “That’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.”
It was a quotation from Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a justice more renowned for her dissents than her majority opinions. As summer succumbed to the chill of autumn, thousands came to mourn her at a vigil outside the court in Washington.
“I wanted to show words that are empowering at a time when a lot of people are feeling worn out,” explained the 31-year- old woman from Virginia. “As a woman in a country getting ever more divided, it’s important to come out and make a stand for someone who made this her life’s work…. I called my closest girlfriends and we cried together. What is the state of American democracy that one single woman passing away feels like a harbinger of hopelessness?”
- No Comments
September 23, 2020 by Liba Vaynberg
We Are Still Being Called to Action
It turns out revelations can still be scheduled.
Even with empty theaters and bare music halls and staggered schooling and limited services and vacant pews, it turns out we can still be called to action. By now I should know that it’s built into the Days of Awe, those ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but every year I’m surprised. Every year, I’m stunned. And this year Ruth Bader Ginsburg died right as Rosh Hashana began.
- No Comments
September 22, 2020 by admin
RBG Taught Us to Be the “Singing Lady” in the Room
My daughter tugged my sleeve. “Ima, who’s this guy?” We were snuggling during the first weekend of high holidays and reading Apples and Honey, one of my kids’ favorite Rosh Hashana books. Usually she races through this sweet lift-the-flap story, eager to get to the next “door” (as she calls the flaps), but this time she lingered over an illustration of a man in kippah and tallit. He is holding a large book and standing at a lectern festooned with flowers; nearby stands another man, draped in a tallit and blowing a shofar.
- No Comments
July 27, 2020 by admin
To Be an RBG Biographer… •
Debbie Levy, author of two biographies of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for young readers, is interviewed by her bookseller son Ben Hoffman about how she went about interviewing RBG and writing the picture-book biography I Dissent, and the graphic-novel-style biography Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Journey to Justice, about her research and interviewing the RBG. youtu.be/RsvMmA_b4RY
- No Comments
December 18, 2019 by Helene Meyers
7 Jewish Feminist Highlights of 2019
(Photo by Joan Roth) Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Between impeachment hearings, an overstocked Democratic presidential field, intensifying attacks on abortion rights, continued governmental atrocities against immigrants, and hate crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions, 2019 has been quite the year (and that’s understatement!). But as Deborah Lipstadt wisely counsels in her book Antisemitism: Here and Now, we need “to balance the ‘oy’ with the ‘joy.’” In that spirit, I offer my annual seven Jewish Feminist Highlights (seven being the number associated with creation and blessing in the Jewish tradition).
- No Comments
September 26, 2018 by admin
Notorious RBG
This first-ever retrospective exhibition about trailblazing Supreme Court Justice turned-cultural-icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg is based on the New York Times bestselling book of the same name and created in partnership with its authors, Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. The exhibition explores the American legal system and civil rights movements through the lens of RBG’s personal experiences and public service. It tells the parallel stories of her remarkable life and her efforts to expand “We the People” to include those long left out of the U.S. Constitution’s promises. October 19, 2018–March 10, 2019 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. skirball.org.
- No Comments