It is a story told in many versions, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says near the beginning of the new PBS series “The Jewish Americans,” “but mine is: What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s garment district and a U.S. Supreme Court justice? One generation.”
Ginsburg, 74, repeated the story last week at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington for an audience that watched clips of the series and then listened to Ginsburg speak of her heritage with filmmaker David Grubin.
“I am the beneficiary of being a Jewish American,” she told Grubin, the child of a father who immigrated at age 13 and a mother “conceived in the Old World and born in the New World.”
Ginsburg, who was raised in Brooklyn, said her first glimpse of anti-Semitism came during a drive with her parents down a country road, where she saw an “unsettling” sign outside an inn that instructed, “No dogs or Jews allowed.”
I would say, the bookkeeper knows he cannot make up a law out of nothing, pretend it’s in the Constitution, and then force everybody to obey it.
It appears from the article that Ginsberg has little to reflect upon. Fortunately for many younger Jews there is an awakening to the Faith and it has little to with women leading a minyan.
Let’s see- a first generation Jewish woman attending an Ivy League undergraduate and law school in the mid-50’s. Oh to be so oppressed.
[blockquote] Unlike Scalia and Thomas, Ginsburg said she is not an observant Jew…[/blockquote]
When did Scalia and Thomas convert?
Seriously, however, I think this is sad — I pray that even this late in her life she would come to know the One who could make Sarah laugh.
The story about the “No dogs or Jews” sign simply doesn’t ring true. Sorry, but I don’t believe it for a minute.
I agree with #2, phil. It does not sound from this article that Ginsburg has much religious faith at all.
I saw the first half of the program, Justice Ginsburg was only on for about 30 seconds. Now she might have been on again in the second hour, but we didn’t see that part.
The first hour was devoted to the arrival of Jews in America in the colonial era, and went up to the Westward Expansion. It was a fascinating exploration of how one can be an American and still maintain their Jewish identity. I wish I could have seen the second half, but I was just too tired, and didn’t expect it to be as long as it was.
#4,
Do you doubt that such signs existed or just that Justice Ginsberg saw one? I imagine she’s old enough to have seen them.
#4 and 7, a more common sign was “No Irish.” Each immigrant group has encountered prejudice in turn in the years after the biggest influx, and it may not have had anything to do with religion. My Norwegian and German ancestors were discriminated against to the point of needing to change their names. My brother’s wedding was boycotted by some of those same relatives because he was marrying an Eastern European. Fortunately for me, when I married an Hispanic, Midwest Americans hadn’t formed prejudices against people whose names end in “ez” and my husband was welcomed into the family.
Interesting comments. 4,7: I couldn’t say what signs were outside Brooklyn in the early 1900s, but I know that when my in-laws, Jews who had just fled the Chinese Communists, were looking for an apartment in Glendale CA in about 1952 they were told on at least one occasion, “We don’t rent to Jews”. And in 1986, my Jewish then-fiance was, let’s say, freaked out to see a huge swastika painted on a signboard at a roadside park where we had stopped in southeast MO. 2: Right on – such oppression she experienced! It occurs to me to wonder if Ginsburg has ever thought of herself as a beneficiary of the many Christian Americans, like my family, who welcomed Jews and whose families’ centuries of belief and toil to create and build America had made a place for her to come where she would succeed so well.
Oh, and 8: my g-grandfather felt a need to anglicize his German surname in the NY area about 1917!
#4, I must respectfully disagree with you. My late father told me when he was a second-grader in the late 1920s Richmond, VA, his teacher tolerated other children calling him a kike and a Christ-killer. Around the same time, my mother’s pet dog was poisoned in Petersburg, VA, because it was a “Jew dog.”
When I grew up in Richmond in the ‘Fifties, I remember seeing signs barring blacks from restaurants and water fountains, and hearing very nasty language used to describe people of color. I’m not saying that all non-Jews are antisemites, or that all non-blacks are racist, but sadly, there were (and I’m sure still are) people who have reprehensible, unChristian views.
She is not an observant Jew. If she is not, how can she be a Jew?
For a Jew has to be one who is inside Judaism. How can it be otherwise? Ethnicity does not identify a Jew, nor race, nor national origin. What else is there, for a Jew, save his religion?
I have increasingly come across people who call themselves Jews and who maintain that there need be no connection with the religion. When I ask, what then is the identifying mark, then answer is always something like, “belonging to a certain culture,” or “my mother was a Jew,” (as if Jewishness were genetic, and one inherited it). Increasingly, I see this as nonsense, a opportunistic argument for people who wish to keep an identity but do not wish to have to possess a set of distinguishing characteristics. Sometimes I think that the claim to Jewishness is simply a claim to wear the superior victim’s mantle of the Holocaust.
Is there an increase of those who keep a set of religious tenets whereby they are identified? I hope so, but the Justice isn’t one of them. LM
I don’t for a minute believe that anti-semitism wasn’t rampant back then. I only find it a stretch to believe the story about the “No dogs or Jews” sign. Again, I just don’t find it credible.
addendum to my earlier comment:
I thought the program was one episode long,and it was that to which I made reference. Last night, however, I caught another episode (“the best of times, the worst of times”), this one three hours long, in which Justice Ginsburg had a much larger role.
They are good programs, but in three hour blocks each, way too long.
Evan,
Pre-WWII, yes, anti-semitism WAS rampant in the ‘States, and the world. It is an historical fact, not conjecture and not made up for the program. I have older relatives in Pennsylvania who were alive in those days (or at least I remember talking to them when I was a child) and they had very little nice to say about Jews.