Yiddishe Mamas (33 page)

She is past chair or president of the Jewish Book Council and the Federation Commission on Synagogue Relations, and she serves on the editorial board of
Hadassah
magazine and the advisory board of
Lilith
magazine.

Blu Greenberg received a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College in political science, a master’s degree from the City University in clinical psychology, and a master’s from Yeshiva University in Jewish history. She taught religious studies at the College of Mount St. Vincent from 1965 to 1973, and during a sabbatical, lectured at Pardes Institute in Jerusalem.

She is a deeply caring and accessible woman, a great pioneer, and an inspiration to her readers, the Jewish community, and to her beloved family.

Blu Greenberg is listed in
Who’s Who in America
and
Who’s Who in World Jewry.
Her papers were recently archived at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This remarkable woman is married to Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who is a firm supporter of his wife’s work. They have five children and nineteen grandchildren.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is a premier journalist and author, and is a critical voice who combines feminist ideas with Jewish values.

She was born on June 9, 1939, to Cyral and Jacob Cottin. Her father was an attorney and her mother a designer. She was raised in an observant Conservative household in Queens, New York. In 1955, when she wasn’t allowed to participate in the
kaddish minyan
following her mother’s death, she rejected the patriarchal rituals of Judaism. She didn’t rejoin organized Judaism until 1975, when the United Nations International Women’s Decade Conference passed a resolution equating Zionism with racism. In 1959, after receiving her BA from Brandeis University, she became active in the American feminist movement, and in 1971, she was one of the founding editors of
Ms.
magazine, where she worked for seventeen years. Her name continues to appear on the masthead.

In 1970, Pogrebin published
How to Make It in a Man’s World,
and the following year, she was one of the founders of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She also consulted with Marlo Thomas on the breakthrough album
Free to Be You and Me.

She has been influential in MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger, the Jewish Fund for Justice, the New Israel Fund, and the American Jewish Congress Commission on Women’s Equality. She is a past president of Americans for Peace Now, spent five years in a Jewish-Palestinian dialogue project, and has also been active in dialogue efforts between Blacks and Jews.

Her memoir,
Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America
(1991), delves into her own work, merging Judaism and feminism.
Getting Over Getting Older
(1996), deals frankly with the struggles and joys of aging.

She is still active in progressive and feminist politics, lectures frequently, and is also a regular contributor to
Moment
magazine.

Susan Weidman Schneider’s
Jewish and Female: Choices and Changes in Our Lives Today
(1984) codifies two decades of Jewish feminist thinking. She was poised to write the book, as she was a “founding mother,” and since 1976 has been the editor in chief of
Lilith,
an independent Jewish Women’s Magazine.
Lilith
has now chronicled nearly three decades of Jewish feminism for its estimated readership of 25,000.

In addition to an active lecture schedule, she has regularly been invited to address the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds. She has also published
Intermarriage: The Challenge of Living with Differences between Christians and Jews
(1990), and in 1991, she coauthored (with Arthur B. C. Drache)
Head and Heart: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Independence.

Susan was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in a tightly knit Jewish community. Her studies at Brandeis University during the 1960s helped hone her social consciousness and exposed her to the burgeoning feminist movement.

When she made a trip to Israel with her husband, Bruce Schneider, a physician, and their two-year-old, she was very
impressed with the acceptance of working mothers and the accessibility of child care in that country. When she returned to the United States, she wrote and lectured about women’s issues and the difficulty in realizing meaningful lives as both Jews and women.

In 1973, when Jewish magazines were edited by men, she knew it was time for a Jewish feminist magazine:
Lilith
was born and has advocated for women in all aspects of religious, spiritual, and philanthropic life.

Weidman Schneider is the mother of three grown children: Benjamin, Rachel, and Yael.

On January 3, 2006, fifty-five-year-old Wendy Wasserstein died of lymphoma and many of us felt as if they had lost a friend, besides a great writer and playwright. Her poignant, funny, and wry books and plays touched the souls of both Jews and non-Jews everywhere.

Born and raised in New York City, she was educated at Mount Holyoke College and the Yale School of Drama. When Wendy won the Tony Award for best play for
The Heidi Chronicles
in 1989, she was the first woman ever to do so. The play also garnered a Pulitzer Prize for drama, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Susan Blackburn Prize.

Wasserstein explored the females of our time through her writing and plays.
Chronicles
and
The Sisters Rosensweig
(1992), for example, examine the modern woman, and the issues of sexism, marriage, and careers.

Hit by the “too Jewish” criticism by some, her response has been: “When your name is Wendy Wasserstein and you’re from New York, you are the walking embodiment of ‘too Jewish.’”

The feminist writer became a Jewish mother in 1999.

Sophie Tucker (Sophia Kalish), the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” was born “on the road” in the 1880s while her mother was fleeing Poland to join her husband. Her observant family settled in Hartford and ran a kosher diner and rooming house. Tucker, who was surrounded by theater performers, began singing for the customers.

Sophie’s short-lived marriage to Louis Tuck at age sixteen produced one son. But Sophie still had plans to move on. However, she was so overweight that her early managers insisted she hide behind black face. In 1908, she lost the detested makeup. By 1909, her career skyrocketed with the Ziegfeld follies and grew for sixty years with her signature song, “Some of These Days” (1911), written by African American songwriter Shelton Brooks, and of course, “My Yiddishe Mama,” written in 1925 by Jack Yellen and Lew Pollack, which she sang in both Yiddish and English. In 1931, the gutsy Tucker broadcast “My Yiddishe Mama” over Berlin radio. During Hitler’s reign, her records were smashed in Germany, and in 1932 the song nearly set off an anti-semitic riot during a performance in France.

Starting in 1922, the
3-D Mama with the Big Wide Screen
toured England, giving command performances in 1934 and 1962, but her proudest moment was when London’s Jews gave her an ovation at Whitechapel’s Rivoli Theatre.

Tucker headlined at Manhattan’s Latin Quarter in 1966, just before she died at eighty-two.

Her philanthropy included contributions to actors guilds, Jewish and Zionist causes, synagogues, and hospitals.

She was big, brassy, and talented, and her “hot” songs were done with humor and a sense of her own power. Tucker’s work challenged stereotypes of age, size, gender, and Jewish women’s sexuality.

Fanny Brice, born Fania Borach in 1891, the third of four children of immigrant saloon owners, knew her destiny early. At one point, her mother, Rosie Stern, struggled to make a living in the garment center in New York. Years later, Fanny sang “The Song of the Sewing Machine,” honoring her mother and others who suffered a similar plight.

Although relegated to “Jewish” roles, she catapulted to fame through the Ziegfeld Follies in 1916, where her timing, accents, and poses often contained social commentary. She was not fluent in Yiddish, but her repertory included brilliant lampoons, wild vamps, Yinglish songs, and comic dances.

She said, “I never did a Jewish routine that would offend my race. … I wasn’t standing apart making fun. I was the race. … They identified with me, which made it all right to get a laugh, because they were laughing at me as much as at themselves.”

Brice’s personal life was equally filled with drama. In 1918, she married Jules “Nicky” Arnstein, a handsome, sophisticated, but unfaithful and ineffective con. While her husband was in Sing Sing, Brice supported him and their two children by constantly working. Arnstein did give Brice her rare nonethnic hit—a straight performance of “My Man,” in 1921, which filled Ziegfeld’s audience with tears.

When he was convicted of bond theft and sent to Leavenworth in 1924, Brice stood firmly by “her” man, funding his expensive defense, and waiting for his discharge. When Arnstein was released in 1927, however, he disappeared out of her life. The indomitable Brice had another failed marriage, this time to Billy Rose, but then found her niche in radio in 1938 with the bratty, precocious Baby Snooks character, whose popularity lasted until her death in 1951.

Brice was multitalented: an art expert, costume designer, interior decorator for stars like Eddie Cantor, Danny Kaye, and Dinah Shore—and a minor hypnotist.

Her life became fascinating fodder for film producers. Ray Stark, producer of
Funny Girl
(1968) and
Funny Lady,
succeeded in making the Brice story film legend—for creative and no doubt personal reasons, as his wife was Brice’s daughter Fran.

Fanny Brice was truly a comic pioneer, proving that women could create hilarious comedy without relying on blatant sexuality or domestic situations.

Louise Nevelson, one of America’s most innovative sculptors, was born in Kiev on September 23, 1899. She was the daughter of Mina Sadie and Isaac Berliawsky and was raised in Rockland, Maine. Louise was influenced by her mother, who was a free thinker, and she knew that her destiny was to be an artist, despite being stigmatized as a Jew. In 1918, after high school, she met and married Charles Nevelson and in 1922, she gave birth to her only child, Myron, who also became a famous sculptor. The
marriage failed because her husband expected her to play the role of the affluent Jewish wife. When they separated in 1931, true to her convictions, she never asked for support. She left her son with her parents and continued her art studies in Munich, Germany until the Nazis shut the school down. The first public showing of her sculpture was in 1933 and two years later, her work was part of an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1964, Nevelson created
Homage to 6,000,000,
a memorial to Jews of the Holocaust that is in the Israeli Museum. Her huge breakthrough came in 1967, with a show at the Whitney Museum.

She virtually created environmental sculpture as an artist with large box-shaped pieces made from wood fragments. Among her most important works are
Dawn’s Wedding Feast
(1959) and
Atmosphere and Environment XIII: Windows to the West
(1973).

Nevelson was also active on behalf of artists, as president and vice president of various artists’ associations. In 1979, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in 1988. Today, her works can be found in art museums across the world and are showcased in prominent New York plazas. The largest collection is at the Whitney Museum in New York City. In 2000, the U.S. government issued special Louise Nevelson commemorative stamps in recognition of one of the most important American sculptors of the twentieth century.