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