Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fi
rst Jewish woman to Serve on Supreme Court, dies at 87
SARAH WILDMAN JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY
R
uth Bader Ginsburg, the first Jewish
woman to serve on the Supreme
Court and a tireless advocate for
gender equality, died Sept. 18, 2020, at 87.
A fierce jurist known for her outsized
presence and outspokenness, Ginsburg died
from “complications of metastatic pancreas
cancer,
” the Supreme Court said. She had
previously survived multiple bouts of differ-
ent cancers over the course of two decades
and rarely missing time in court.
Ginsburg’
s death comes six weeks before
the presidential election and at a time of
intense political polarization.
She penned blistering dissents in
high-profile cases concerning birth control,
voter ID laws and affirmative action, even as
she maintained a legendary friendship with
fellow Justice Antonin Scalia, the staunchly
conservative firebrand who died in 2016.
She was also frank about the importance
of Jewish tradition in influencing her life and
career, hanging the Hebrew injunction to
pursue justice on the walls of her chambers.
“I am a judge, born, raised and proud of
being a Jew,
” she said in an address to the
American Jewish Committee following her
1993 appointment to the court.
Ginsburg was nominated to the nation’
s
highest bench by President Bill Clinton and
approved overwhelmingly by the Senate. She
became only the second woman to serve on
the court, after Sandra Day O’
Connor.
At her nominating ceremony, Clinton
lauded her for standing with “the outsider
in society … telling them that they have a
place in our legal system, by giving them
a sense that the Constitution and the laws
protect all the American people, not simply
the powerful.
”
Ginsburg attributed that outsider perspec-
tive to her Jewish roots.
“Laws as protectors of the oppressed, the
poor, the loner, is evident in the work of my
Jewish predecessors on the Supreme Court,
”
she wrote in an essay for the AJC. “The
Biblical command: ‘
Justice, justice shalt thou
pursue’
is a strand that ties them together.
”
HER JOURNEY TO THE BENCH
Born in Brooklyn in 1933 to Nathan Bader,
a Russian immigrant and furrier, and the
former Celia Amster, Ginsburg often noted
that her mother was “barely second genera-
tion,
” having been born a scant four months
after her parents’
arrival from Hungary. The
Holocaust colored her perspective of the
world and the law.
“Our nation learned from Hitler’
s rac-
ism and, in time, embarked on a mission
to end law-sanctioned discrimination in
our own country,
” Ginsburg said at a 2004
Yom HaShoah commemoration at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum.
With a 14-month-old daughter, she was
one of only nine women in her Harvard Law
School class.
When her husband Martin Ginsburg, who
graduated from Harvard a year before her,
took a law firm job in New York, Ginsburg
transferred to Columbia. She finished, tied
for first in her class, yet not a single law firm
would hire her.
Ginsburg eventually clerked for Judge
Edward Palmieri and created the Women’
s
Rights Project at the American Civil
Liberties Union. She built a reputation for
establishing gender parity before the law,
arguing six major sex-discrimination cases
before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning all
but one.
In one of those winning cases, Weinburger
v. Wiesenfeld in 1975, Ginsburg represent-
ed a widower left with a child in his care
when his wife died in childbirth. The father
requested the childcare benefits that a
woman would receive if her husband died.
“From the outset, she insisted that gen-
der discrimination was not only an issue
of women’
s rights, demonstrating how
using gender as a basis for different treat-
ment was also harmful to men,
” said Judith
Rosenbaum of the Jewish Women’
s Archive.
On the Supreme Court, Ginsburg contin-
ued fighting for gender equality. In 1996, she
wrote the majority opinion in United States v.
Virginia, which deemed the Virginia Military
Institute’
s policy of not admitting women
unconstitutional. She also authored the
dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, a pay dis-
crimination case that would lead to the 2009
Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. She consistently
argued for protecting abortion rights.
Late in her career, she emerged as a cul-
tural icon: “Notorious R.B.G.
” — a play off
the deceased rapper Notorious B.I.G. In
2013, law student Shana Knizhik started
a Tumblr blog collecting all manner of
Ginsburg fan art, from celebratory tattoos to
coffee mugs. The blog spawned a 2015 book
co-authored with Irin Carmon.
“Justice Ginsburg more than earned her
Notorious crown and the admiration of mil-
lions of people with her fearless advocacy for
marginalized people and her stubborn belief
that women are people,
” said Carmon.
Ginsburg is survived by two children
— Jane, a law professor at Columbia, and
James, a music producer — and four grand-
children.
18 | SEPTEMBER 24 • 2020
Good-bye to an Icon
BY RALPH ALSWANG VIA WILLIAM J. CLINTON LIBRARY
Jews in the D
OFFICIAL 2016 SUPREME COURT PORTRAIT