As we celebrate Women’s History Month, we celebrate the women of Humanistic Judaism! Some of these woman left their mark on our movement long before the idea was ever born, while others have actively participated in the growth of our communities. We recognize their contributions with gratitude and have named them all Humanistic Jewish Role Models! Read more about them below and click here to see the full list of Humanistic Jewish Role Models.
2020–21 Role Model: Helen Suzman (1917–2009)
It seems especially fitting that in this year of seeking racial justice that our Humanistic Jewish Role Model for 2020-21 is longtime anti-apartheid activist South African MP Helen Suzman. Born Helen Gavronsky, the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, she ultimately became a professor of economic history.
Helen’s nephew. Paul Suzman shares his memories of his aunt in conversation with Dr. Richard Logan at this link.
Suzman was elected to parliament in 1953, several years after apartheid was declared. A few years later, she and eleven other deputies formed the activist Progressive Party in 1959. The Progressives called for the gradual enfranchisement of blacks, for abolition of internal passports and the legalization of black trade unions. But, being too liberal for most of white South Africa, all eleven Progressive deputies except Suzman lost their seats in the next election. She thus became the lone parliamentary voice against apartheid from 1961 to 1974. It was during these years that Suzman made her international reputation as a champion of human rights. In 1961, she protested the Sharpeville massacre of sixty-nine blacks for demonstrating against the internal passport system, and against draconian measures in its aftermath. In 1963, the South African government arrested Nelson Mandela, leader of the African National Congress (ANC), along with nine of his white supporters, primarily Jews. Suzman visited Nelson Mandela frequently serving a life sentence on Robben Island. Thanks to her persistence, Mandela received more humane treatment.
2018–19 Role Model: Grace Paley (1922–2007)
Grace Paley, born in 1922, was an American short story writer, poet, teacher, and political activist. Born in the Bronx, New York, Paley was the youngest child of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. She grew up in a socialist, intellectual family that spoke three languages — Yiddish, Russian, and English. Typical of such families, Jewish identity was grounded in family and community relationships and socialist politics, rather than in synagogue life.
Paley taught creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and City College of The City University of New York, and was also the first official New York State Author. For her Collected Stories, Paley was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction; she was also a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction and the Rea Award for the Short Story.
Paley was known for pacifism and for political activism. She classified herself as a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist,” a label that stuck. Her pacifism led her to help found the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961. With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War, and in 1969 she came to national prominence as an activist when she accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. Paley spent time in jail for her anti-war activities.
Her fictional characters were rooted in modern Jewish life. They were not religious, but they were Jewish, struggling with the issues of the day. When she lived in New York, her life-style and her Jewish identity were one and the same. But, later in life, after moving to Vermont, she became more connected to religious Judaism. “‘I often go [to services] on the High Holy Days,” Paley said. “In New York, I didn’t, but here the towns are very church-centered — the church is like the community center, and I’m not in it. If I didn’t have the Jewish community, I’d be lonesome.”
Paley was chosen as the SHJ 2018–19 Humanistic Jewish Role Model because her values were expressed in action. She did not look to a higher power to solve the issues and problems of the day. Her behavior reflected her secular belief system. She was Jewish through and through and when she moved to Vermont, away from New York City where you could express your connection to being Jewish in the streets, she sought out Jewish community where she could find it, rather than abandoning her identity.
2016–17 Role Model: Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958)
Rosalind Franklin was a British chemist renown for her work in the use of X-ray diffraction and the significant role one of her photographs played in the discovery of the structure of DNA. She also invented carbon fiber technology. Franklin was born in 1920, the second of five children, in London England, to a well to do Jewish family. Her family took in and saved two Jewish children during World War II. Her exceptional intelligence was noted early in her life. She ultimately achieved a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Cambridge. Franklin felt the full force of both anti-Semitism and sexism when she worked at King’s College. She learned that she was to serve as the research assistant to a male colleague, when, in fact, the research was a result of her own genius and hard work. The major controversy in her professional life occurred when her colleague at King’s College shared her research, without her knowledge with scientists Watson and Crick at Cambridge University who went on to earn the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of DNA’s double helix. Playright Anna Ziegler, in her play about Franklin called “Photograph 51” characterized her as staunchly secular, with a strong sense of wonder. Tragically, she died at the age of 38 of ovarian cancer.
2014–15 Role Model: Nora Ephron (1941–2012)
Nora Ephron was known for her caustic wit, biting sarcasm, brutal honesty, and her innovative sense of humor as a reporter, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter. Her credits include countless essays, plays, the iconic films When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail, and her autobiographical book, Heartburn, which was turned into a movie. Her family were secularists and incidental Jews. She bristled at being pegged a “Jewish director,” just as she cringed at being described as a “woman director”: “It seems like a narrow way of looking at what I do.” She was neither an observant or strongly self-identified Jew. “You can never have too much butter—that is my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it,” she quipped in an NPR interview about her 2009 movie Julie & Julia. In 1994, she received the Women in Film Crystal Award. After her death from leukemia in 2012, the Tribeca Film Festival established the Nora Ephron Prize, which awards $25,000 to a female writer or director “with a distinctive voice who embodies [her] spirit and vision.”
2011–12 Role Model: Ernestine Rose (1810–1892)
The nineteenth-century activist Ernestine Rose was an ardent abolitionist, a spokesperson for women’s rights long before Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton appeared on the scene, a socialist in a capitalist country, and an atheist at a time when many Americans turned to their Bibles for guidance. Ernestine Rose was one of our more intriguing Humanistic Jewish Role Models. Many of our members learned of her for the first time through this project, and they felt the excitement of discovering a Jewish woman who demonstrated the philosophy and values of Humanistic Judaism long before Humanistic Judaism existed.
2006–07 Role Model: Betty Friedan (1921–2006)
Betty Friedan was the author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), which sparked the feminist revolution. Friedan was the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which she founded. Earlier in life, she was active in Jewish circles; she attributed her “passion against injustice” to her “feelings of the injustice of antisemitism.”
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