blogs/rabbi-ed-feinstein

In Praise of RBG

A time will come in the next generation when we will have to explain to our children and grandchildren how it was that even into the middle of the 20th century women were considered lesser. How could it be that opportunities and possibilities enjoyed by men were closed to women simply because they are women? And when they asked us how that changed, how women earned equal rights, there will be many stories to tell. Among the most dramatic will be story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, who was awarded the Genesis Prize for Lifetime Achievement this week in Jerusalem. In our times, moral heroes are hard to find. Especially in government. “RBG” is a soul to hold up and celebrate.

Born in 1933 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Joan Ruth Bader was raised by her father, a Jewish immigrant from Odessa, Russia, and her mother, the child of Austrian Jewish immigrants, who never went to college but put her own brother through school working in a garment factory. Although not devout, the Bader family belonged to East Midwood Jewish Center, a Conservative synagogue, where Ruth attended Hebrew school. At age thirteen, Ruth acted as the "camp rabbi" at a Jewish summer program at Camp Che-Na-Wah in Minerva, New York.

Ruth graduated from Cornell University (where she was classmate with VBS's former president, Sylvia Bernstein Tregub). After graduation, she married Martin Ginsburg and followed him to Oklahoma when he was called to active military duty. In the fall of 1956, Ginsburg enrolled at Harvard Law School, one of only nine women in a class of five hundred men. The Dean of Harvard Law reportedly asked the female law students, including Ginsburg, "How do you justify taking a spot from a qualified man?" When her husband took a job in New York City, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School. She became the first woman on the Harvard Law Review and on the Columbia Law Review. In 1959, she earned her law degree at Columbia and tied for first in her class.

Despite a distinguished academic record, Ginsburg was rejected for judicial clerkships. Only the strong intervention of her professors earned her a clerkship with Judge Edmund Palmieri of the US District Court. Following the clerkship, Ginsburg taught at Rutgers Law School, where she was informed she would be paid less than her male colleagues because she had a husband with a well-paid job. At the time Ginsburg entered academia, she was one of fewer than twenty female law professors in the United States. In 1970, she co-founded the Women's Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal in the U.S. to focus exclusively on women's rights. From 1972 to 1980, she taught at Columbia, where she became the first tenured woman and co-authored the first law school casebook on sex discrimination.

In 1972, Ginsburg co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union and, in 1973, became the ACLU's general counsel. The Women's Rights Project and related ACLU projects participated in over three hundred gender discrimination cases by 1974. As the director of the ACLU's Women's Rights Project, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court between 1973 and 1976, winning five. A fierce advocate before the court, Ginsburg led the battle to extend legal equality to women in the United States.  Her Supreme Court colleague and adversary, Judge Antonin Scalia observed that Ginsburg, "became the leading and very successful litigator on behalf of women's rights�"the Thurgood Marshall of that cause." Arguing her last case as a lawyer before the Supreme Court in 1978, then Associate Justice William Rehnquist asked Ginsburg, "You won't settle for putting Susan B. Anthony on the new dollar, then?" Ginsburg is said to have responded, "We won't settle for tokens."

Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals in 1980, and the Supreme Court in 1993. When our times will be written as history, Ginsburg will be celebrated as among the Court's great voices �" arguing vociferously, often as a dissenter, for the rights of women, of workers, the disenfranchised and disempowered. In her chambers, hangs a banner with the Torah's commandment,

Tzedek, Tzedek, Tirdof, Justice, Justice, you shall pursue.

This week, the Jewish world turns toward Jerusalem to share our admiration for this this great and powerful voice for justice, a hero for our times.