Week of October 13

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October 13, 1891

Birth of Judge Jennie Loitman Barron

October 13, 1986

Rita Levi-Montalcini wins the Nobel Prize

October 15, 2003

Tovah Feldshuh stars in "Golda's Balcony"

October 16, 1955

Esther Lederer becomes Ann Landers

October 17, 1988

Gertude Elion wins Nobel Prize

October 18, 1948

Molly Goldberg makes her television debut

October 18, 2004

Celebrating 350 years of Jewish women in America

October 19, 1854

Ernestine Rose presides over national women's rights convention

 

October 13, 1891

Birth of Judge Jennie Loitman Barron

Judge, lawyer, and suffragist, Jennie Loitman Barron, was born on October 13, 1891 in Boston’s West End. Barron attended Boston University where she earned her BA, LL.B, and LL.M. degrees and was active in Boston University’s League for Equal Suffrage. Barron started her own law firm after graduation and created a new firm with her husband Samuel Barron, Jr. when they married four years later.

Barron was elected president of the Massachusetts Association of Women Lawyers and campaigned for uniform marriage and divorce laws, as well as for women’s right to serve on juries. She also worked to mobilize women to exercise their newly established right to vote.

Barron began her thirty-five year career as a judge in 1934 when she was appointed by the governor as a special justice of the Western Norfolk District Court. In 1937, she was named to be an associate justice of the Boston Municipal Court. She left this position when she became an associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court in 1957—the first woman to hold this position.

Throughout her career, Barron remained active in the Jewish community serving as the first president of the Women’s Auxiliary of Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, on the first board of Brandeis University National Women’s Committee, and as the first president of the New England Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress. Barron died in March 1969, one year after her husband’s death.

Source: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 122-123.

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October 13, 1986

Rita Levi-Montalcini wins the Nobel Prize

Rita Levi-Montalcini’s pioneering work on nerve growth earned her the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on October 13, 1986. Born in Turin, in northwestern Italy, on April 22, 1909, Levi-Montalcini had begun her research on nerve cells at the University of Turin. Banned from the university in a purge of Jews in 1938, and then forced to hide during the Nazi occupation of Italy, she immigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1946.

Levi-Montalcini went to St. Louis at the invitation of embryologist Viktor Hamburger; his support helped her to continue her work at a time when very few women worked in basic science research. It was at Washington University, in 1951, that Levi-Montalcini first hypothesized the existence of the nerve growth factor. Between 1953 and 1959, she worked with collaborator Stanley Cohen to identify nerve growth factor as a protein. For this work, Levi-Montalcini and Cohen shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Their work had significant effects on cancer research, and has also been important in work on Parkinson’s disease.

Levi-Montalcini retired from Washington University in 1977. Beginning in the 1960s, she also held an appointment at the National Laboratory for Cell Biology in Rome. After the Nobel Prize, Levi-Montalcini won many other honors. In 1986, she and Cohen were awarded the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award. The following year, she received the National Medal of Science, America’s highest scientific award. She also became the first woman ever named to membership in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in Rome.

Sources: http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1986/; http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1986/levi-montalcini-autobio.html; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 832-833; Rita Levi-Montalcini, In Praise of Imperfection, My Life and Work (New York, 1988); New York Times, October 14, 1986.

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October 15, 2003

Tovah Feldshuh stars in "Golda's Balcony"

Golda’s Balcony, starring Tovah Feldshuh, opened at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre on October 15, 2003. In this one-woman show, Feldshuh plays the role of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Golda’s Balcony is set during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In the midst of those events, the play’s Golda looks back upon her life from her childhood in Milwaukee to her role in founding the Jewish state.

Golda Meir is not the only dramatic Jewish woman that Feldshuh has played during her illustrious career. Feldshuh has earned three Tony nominations for best actress, including the title role in Yentl (1975). She has also won four Drama Desk Awards, including one for Golda’s Balcony. Her roles on television have included a Czech freedom fighter in Holocaust (1978), a role for which Feldshuh was nominated for an Emmy. She has appeared in a number of movies, including Kissing Jessica Stein (2001) and A Walk on the Moon (1999). Feldshuh is also a supporter of Seeds of Peace, a non-profit organization that helps teenagers from regions of conflict. She is a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanitas Award, the Israel Peace Medal, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s Jewish Image Award.

A film version of Golda's Balcony starring Valerie Harper premiered in New York City, on October 10, 2007.

Sources: www.tovahfeldshuh.com.

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October 16, 1955

Esther Lederer becomes Ann Landers

Esther Pauline Friedman Lederer, writing as Ann Landers, had her first advice column published in the Chicago Sun Times on October 16, 1955. By the end of Lederer’s life, Ann Landers had become the world’s most widely syndicated column, published in more than 1,200 publications and with more than 90 million readers around the world.

When Esther Lederer and her husband moved to Chicago in the 1950s, she contacted a family friend at the Chicago Sun Times to see whether the columnist Ann Landers needed any help in writing her column. The Sun Times was in the process of finding a replacement writer for the column, and Lederer took over as the new Landers, a name that would remain with her for the rest of her life. Because Lederer had been involved in politics and had volunteered extensively, she was very well connected, and her column reflected these connections. Lederer was able to solicit advice from experts in many different fields. From her column, Landers openly opposed racism and anti-Semitism, and devoted much space to fighting injustice. Lederer's identical twin sister, Pauline Esther Friedman Phillips gained equivalent renown as a sage advice-giver as author of the column "Dear Abby."

Lederer continued to write as Ann Landers for 46 years, until her death in 2002.

Source: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 789-790.

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October 17, 1988

Gertude Elion wins Nobel Prize

The October 17, 1988 announcement that chemist Gertude Elion had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine represented the culmination of an unlikely career. The young Elion had known what she wanted to do—but nobody seemed ready to let her do it. New York’s Hunter College provided her with a free education during the Depression, but when she graduated at age 19, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, not one graduate school would provide her with needed financial aid.

Unable to find a laboratory job, she started secretarial school. Supporting herself as a doctor’s receptionist and a substitute high school science teacher, Elion earned a master’s degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 (she was the only woman in her classes). With more lab opportunities open to women during World War II, Elion found a job at Burroughs Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company, in 1944.

Elion’s research with her mentor and partner George Hitchings led to the first effective treatment for childhood leukemia and to immunosuppressants that made organ transplants possible. Her anti-viral research led to treatments for many ailments including AIDS. Elion, whose doctorates were all honorary, received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Hitchings and British scientist James Black.

Elion thus joined an impressive list of American Jewish female Nobel Prize winners in science that also includes American-born Rosalyn Yalow (1977), and Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori (1947) and Rita Levi-Montalcini (1986) who were born and educated abroad.

Source: jwa.org/exhibits/wov/elion/over.html.

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October 18, 1948

Molly Goldberg makes her television debut

Gertrude Berg made her television debut as Bronx housewife Molly Goldberg on NBC's Chevrolet on Broadway in 1948. The Goldbergs began running as a comedy series on NBC radio in 1929 and became one of television's earliest and most popular situation comedies beginning in 1949. Berg produced and scripted the shows and portrayed Molly Goldberg, the family matriarch.

Each show offered audiences a pleasant, often comical portrayal of the life of a second-generation Jewish American family. Assimilation into American culture was a prominent theme throughout the series with the last season incorporating the family's move from their Bronx apartment to a fictitious suburb. After the series' cancellation in 1955, Berg went on to win a Tony Award in 1959 for her work in the Broadway comedy A Majority of One by Leonard Spigelgass.

Sources: Jewish Women In America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 139-141; J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler, ed., Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton, NJ: 2003), pp. 113-127.

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October 18, 2004

Celebrating 350 years of Jewish women in America

The Jewish Women's Archive joined with National Women's Philanthropy of the United Jewish Communities for an historic celebration of 350 years of American Jewish community on October 18, 2004. The evening showcased Jewish women, of the past and the present, whose boldness, vision, and hard work have shaped America and American Jewish life. Part of the International Lion of Judah conference in Washington, D.C., the event was attended by nearly 1,400 women from across the United States.

An extraordinary group of contemporary women of achievement were brought together for this evening to reflect upon their own work and careers within the historical context of 350 years of Jewish women creating community in North America.

Honorees included Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Representative Shelley Berkley; communal leaders Shoshana Cardin, Amy Friedkin, Carole Solomon, and Linda Rae Sher; artist Judy Chicago; actress Tovah Feldshuh; composers Debbie Friedman and Elizabeth Swados; cookbook author Joan Nathan; authors and activists Blu Greenberg, Ruth Gruber, and Letty Cottin Pogrebin; Rabbi Sally J. Priesand; and Barnard College President Judith Shapiro.

Keynote speaker Justice Ginsburg drew the audience's attention to the inspiring “humanity and bravery” of “New Colossus” poet Emma Lazarus and Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold. Ginsburg also referred to the experience of her own mother as she posed a question that illuminates the promise that American experience has offered to many of its immigrants and citizens: “What is the difference between a New York City garment district bookkepper and a Supreme Court Justice?” Her answer: “One generation.”

Source: jwa.org/press/2004/20041025-lion.html.

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October 19, 1854

Ernestine Rose presides over national women's rights convention

Ernestine Rose was born in Poland in 1810. Fleeing an arranged marriage at the age of 16, Rose traveled around Europe, arriving in England in 1830. There, she became a follower of the noted social reformer Robert Owen and honed her skills as a popular public orator.

Rose arrived in America with her husband, a jeweler, in 1836, ready, apparently, for a fight. She learned, soon after her arrival, that a bill proposed to the New York legislature would grant married women the right to control their own property and earnings. Rose drew up a petition, worked for five months to gain supporters, and submitted the first petition (bearing five signatures) on this topic to the state legislature. Passage of New York's Married Women's Property Act was secured in 1848.

Rose became a central figure among woman's rights advocates and a close colleague of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Anthony celebrated Rose’s inspiration to the movement, describing her as the “most eloquent speaker on our platform,” keeping Rose’s portrait over her desk, and adopting her slogan, “Agitate, agitate.”

Rose attended every national woman's rights convention between 1850 and 1869, serving as president of the fifth national convention in Philadelphia from October 17-19, 1854. In Philadelphia, Rose declared, "[I]s woman not included in that phrase, 'all men are created...equal'? ...Tell us, ye men of the nation...whether woman is not included in that great Declaration of Independence?"

Rose worked tirelessly traveling to twenty-three states to speak out for women's rights, against slavery and, eventually, for the rights of freed slaves, until she and her husband returned to England in 1869. Rose was not active as a Jew, but she did engage in a published debate in which she attacked anti-Semitism and praised the contributions of Jews throughout history.

Sources: www.nps.gov/wori/nwrc1854.htm; www.brandeis.edu/centers/wsrc/Ernestine_Rose_Website/Shortbio.html; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1163-1165.

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