Week of February 25

<< Previous Week  —  Next Week >>

February 25, 1936

Labor activist Rose Pesotta organizes in Akron, Ohio

February 28, 1935

Death of NJCW & Jewish Chautauqua organizer Texan Jeanette Miriam Goldberg

March 1, 1972

Naomi Bronheim Levine appointed director of American Jewish Congress

March 1, 1993

E. M. Broner publishes "The Telling"

March 2, 1911

Sophie Tucker records signature song

March 2, 1983

Shulamit Ran's "Verticals" premieres

 

February 25, 1936

Labor activist Rose Pesotta organizes in Akron, Ohio

In 1936, in the midst of nationwide union organizing drives, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) sent veteran organizer Rose Pesotta to Akron, Ohio, to aid striking workers at the Goodyear Rubber factory. She arrived on February 25, in the midst of the Goodyear strike. Although ostensibly there to rally the workers' wives and daughters to the union cause, Pesotta made a point of visiting strikers, singing union songs with them, and ultimately convincing them to approve a negotiated settlement with Goodyear.

Although successful with rubber workers and later with the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Pesotta's organizing "home" was with garment workers and the ILGWU. As a young immigrant woman working in New York shirtwaist factories, she joined the ILGWU in 1913. Just two years later, she helped to form the union's first education department, and in 1920 was elected to the executive board of her local union chapter. She left the shop floor to become a full-time organizer in the late 1920s, after helping the union through struggles with communist opponents. After spearheading a Dressmakers General Strike in Los Angeles, Pesotta was elected as a vice-president of the ILGWU in 1934, where she was one of the first women on the national executive board.

During this period, Pesotta was active in the anarchist movement, editing the anarchist paper The Road to Freedom. She was also a key member of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, which sought to defend two Italian-immigrant anarchists who were convicted and executed for robbery and murder. Through her anarchist work, Pesotta also established a strong friendship with the radical leader Emma Goldman.

Saying that one woman vice president was insufficient to represent the women and girls who made up 85% of the ILGWU's membership, Pesotta resigned from the general executive board in 1944 and returned to work as a factory operative. In her later life, Pesotta published two volumes of memoirs and worked briefly for the Anti-Defamation League. She died of cancer on December 4, 1965.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1044-1046; Elaine Leeder, The Gentle General: Rose Pesotta, Anarchist and Labor Organizer (Albany, NY, 1993).

Print, email, or bookmark this entry.

^ Back to top of page

February 28, 1935

Death of NJCW & Jewish Chautauqua organizer Texan Jeanette Miriam Goldberg

Born in 1868 to Russian immigrant parents, Jeannette Miriam Goldberg grew up in Jefferson, Texas, at that time the sixth-largest town in the state. She was raised amidst a vibrant and successful Jewish merchant community. After completing her education at Vassar College and New York's Rutgers Female Institute, she returned to Texas as a teacher in both religious and secular schools.

Like many professional women of her era, Goldberg took volunteer work seriously, becoming the education chairman of the Texas Woman's Council and lecturing before the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs. In 1898, she organized Texas's first chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) in the East Texas town of Tyler. Though this chapter began with just seven women, she reported that it was "large in zeal and enthusiasm." Goldberg went on to organize NCJW chapters in Waco, Dallas, and Fort Worth. In 1902, she was elected a national director of the Council; in this role, she traveled around the country organizing Council chapters and bringing energy to small congregations.

Seeing Goldberg's success as an organizer, the Jewish Chautauqua Society (JCS) hired her as a field secretary in 1905. She later became the Society's executive secretary. In this role, Goldberg created study circles and correspondence classes for religious school teachers, enabling the mostly female participants to develop professionally while also building a sense of community. Under Goldberg's leadership, the JCS—the goal of which was to encourage the study of Judaism among both Jews and non-Jews—also founded religious schools in regions as varied as North and South Dakota and southern New Jersey.

Though she lived in Philadelphia, where the JCS was headquartered, for the last 30 years of her life, Goldberg always identified herself as a Texan. When she died on February 28, 1935, she was eulogized as "a modern Miriam" and a "high priestess" of Judaism.

Source: Hollace Ava Weiner, "The Jewish Junior League: The Rise and Demise of the Fort Worth Council of Jewish Women, 1901-2002," (MA thesis, University of Texas, Arlington, 2004).

Print, email, or bookmark this entry.

^ Back to top of page

March 1, 1972

Naomi Bronheim Levine appointed director of American Jewish Congress

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."

Sources: New York Times, March 2, 1972, November 1, 1979; www.nyu.edu/nyutoday/archives/15/05/Stories/Levine.html.

Print, email, or bookmark this entry.

^ Back to top of page

March 1, 1993

E. M. Broner publishes "The Telling"

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 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.”

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.

Print, email, or bookmark this entry.

^ Back to top of page

March 2, 1911

Sophie Tucker records signature song

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.

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); Sophie Tucker is one of the six Jewish funny women chronicled in the film, Making Trouble, produced by the Jewish Women's Archive.

Print, email, or bookmark this entry.

^ Back to top of page

March 2, 1983

Shulamit Ran's "Verticals" premieres

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.

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/.

Print, email, or bookmark this entry.

^ Back to top of page

<< Previous Week  —  Next Week >>