Over the last six months, my extended family lost three inspiring women — a powerful first-cousin triumvirate. In reflecting upon their lives, I have been struck by the ways in which they responded to the expectations of their era and, perhaps even more significantly, the ways in which they carved their own paths.

Judy Moore (1927-2023) and Ruth Fein (1927-2024) were both about four years older than my mother, Merle Goldman (1931-2023). They all came of age as young women in the restrictive 1950s. And, viewed through a certain lens, it might seem like their life courses ran much, and even eerily, the same. Born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, they were all raised by parents who arrived in the U.S. at a young age. They each were raised in an urban setting, with one other sibling — a brother. All of their parents owned (loosely connected) shops that sold fabric remnants — with a focus on reupholstery. This turned out to be a great Depression-era business.

They each married young. I believe my mother held out the longest, waiting a full two weeks after her college graduation to be wed. They each had 4 children — 2 boys and 2 girls each, and raised them (eventually in Ruth’s case), in the suburbs.

So from a certain distance, you might assume that they all conformed to a simple and restrictive script — the one prescribed for women of their era, race, and class status. But in truth none of them did. In fact, what is so striking about these three cousins is how each, in her own way, defied the expectations of the era in which they came of age.

They came from and looked up to a strong immigrant generation of grandparents, parents, and aunts and uncles. They were blessed in particular with strong, often fierce, sometimes relentless, female role models. As Ruth shared in an oral history “all six of my aunts were about as strong-willed and about as powerful as you can get. And my mother was no shrinking violet either.” These were women who grabbed onto America and its promise. They hoped, they knew, that their daughters, their nieces would seek meaning, purpose, and achievement that never would have been possible for them, or for Jews or women in the old world they had left behind.

Each of these three cousins transcended the feminine mystique which might have been their lot. The eldest, Judy Moore, passed away on the very doorstep of the new year in September. Brimming over as she was with insight, energy, and compassion, people were irresistibly drawn to Judy. One cousin aptly described her as “incandescent.” Raised by an unconventional mother, she raised unconventional children and grandchildren, who roamed the world investigating new frontiers and communities, and she roamed with them and gloried in it.

When I saw her, already in her 90s, having moved back recently to California, following her already late-life adventure of building family and community in Israel, I remember her describing the beautiful spirit and culture of the senior home where she had moved. There were many losses that could have defined Judy’s life, but I remember so clearly how she declared: “I am the luckiest person in the world.”

My mother, the youngest of these three, as Ruth always rushed to remind her, died in November. As with her cousins, family was at her center. But family was only part of an ethos bred into by her parents, aunts and uncles to invest herself fully in understanding the world around her. She ultimately brought her insight, energy and curiosity to parsing a culture far different than her own – becoming the leading scholar of intellectual dissent in Communist China. Through her teaching, speaking, and writing, she was able to grant others access to understanding modern China in the context of the deep cultural foundation upon which it was built. While she of course looked at the ruling regime with a critical eye, she, characteristically as with so much else — looked toward the country’s future with hope and optimism.

And last week, in February, our family and leaders of the Boston Jewish community gathered to remember Ruth Fein. She would want us to remember her in concert with her two cousins — and her whole big family. At the end of a long oral history interview, her interlocutor asked if there were any other subjects she’d like to include. Ruth considered for a moment and then added “our family, our extended family.” “Now this,” she said, “is a big piece of being Jewish.”

Ruth of course was one of the pioneers of women’s public leadership in the Jewish community. She was the first woman to serve as board chair of any number of organizations, both Jewish and non-Jewish, local and national — including the American Jewish Historical Society and (in Boston): Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP), the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the United Way. She was founding president of the New England Holocaust Memorial Committee and founding chair of the Jewish Coalition for Literacy. Not least, she was a founding and engaged board member of the Jewish Women’s Archive.

How did all this come about? There’s a tell in her oral history. When Ruth is talking about her time in college, she first mentions being the founding President of the Baltimore Chapter of the Inter-Collegiate Zionist Federation of America and then about winning an election in the face of antisemites to become chair of Goucher College’s Judicial Board: “There were opportunities,” she observes, and “I was very involved.”

Wherever she went Ruth “involved” herself. Whether in Chapel Hill, Washington DC, or Newton, Massachusetts, she was teaching, volunteering — and serving as president of Hadassah. In DC, volunteering in the library of her children’s school led to a role coordinating all the volunteer school librarians in the city. Becoming active in DC Citizens for Better Public Education led to being part of the group that founded the national effort “Reading is Fundamental.”

What did being involved look like when she moved to Boston? At the end of her first year in town, Ruth read an article in the Jewish Advocate with the headline “CJP Completes Its Most Successful Campaign.” So she called CJP and informed them that the headline was not true; they hadn’t completed their campaign. “What?” said the man on the phone. “Well, nobody called us,” she told him.

It wasn’t that her feelings were hurt. But here she was the daughter of a national leader of United Jewish Appeal. People in Washington had phoned ahead to let the Boston folks know that she and her husband were moving there. This was a failure at follow-through that the organization needed to address. From there, it really wasn’t such a long journey to becoming the organization’s first woman president. Wherever Ruth got involved, it was never a very long path to leadership.

As my mother always said, Ruth was a natural leader, people wanted to follow her. She was committed, she was effective. She was welcoming. She made a difference. There was a reason people, whether in boardrooms in Boston or on her porch at her summer home on Lake George, wanted to gather around her. I know I did.

There is an often mentioned saying in our family that has come down to us from these cousins’ grandfather, my great-grandfather. It was an instruction to his children to “remember who you are.” Later generations have wondered if this was an invocation of snobbery or something else. My great aunt Faith referred to it as a guide to right action in the face of difficult choices. She also shared that she and her siblings would often puzzle: “well, who are we?”

In the end, what I take from the repetition of this lesson is that the imperative to “remember who you are” can only be answered in the context of Aunt Faith’s “who are we?” These women, along with their cousins and aunts, taught me and those in my generation that we need to understand ourselves within the larger stories and larger family of which we are a part.

Judy, Merle, and Ruth did this remarkable thing. In drawing upon the strength and faith of their immigrant grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, they were able to focus on the bigger picture and, somehow, overlook the barriers and obstacles. Even through layers of loss — both Ruth and Judy suffered the loss of two of their children — and amid the failings and diminishments brought by aging, they maintained the kind of unflagging buoyancy, energy, and optimism that characterized them all their lives. They channeled the fierceness and passion of their immigrant forbears, and remained, each in their own way, loving, strong, intelligent, embracing, somehow and always well put together, and ineffably beautiful. May their memories always be a blessing, and may they always remind us not just of who we are, but of who we can be.