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Ruth Bader Ginsburg

A Life

Author Jane Sherron de Hart

Hardcover

$35.00 US

Knopf

6.7"W x 9.6"H x 1.68"D | 39 oz | 12 per carton

On sale Oct 16, 2018 | 752 Pages | 9781400040483

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The first full life—private, public, legal, philosophical—of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, one of the most profound and profoundly transformative legal minds of our time; a book fifteen years in work, written with the cooperation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself and based on many interviews with the justice, her husband, her children, her friends, and her associates.

In this large, comprehensive, revelatory biography, Jane De Hart explores the central experiences that crucially shaped Ginsburg’s passion for justice, her advocacy for gender equality, her meticulous jurisprudence: her desire to make We the People more united and our union more perfect. At the heart of her story and abiding beliefs—her Jewish background. Tikkun olam, the Hebrew injunction to “repair the world,” with its profound meaning for a young girl who grew up during the Holocaust and World War II. We see the influence of her mother, Celia Amster Bader, whose intellect inspired her daughter’s feminism, insisting that Ruth become independent, as she witnessed her mother coping with terminal cervical cancer (Celia died the day before Ruth, at seventeen, graduated from high school).
From Ruth’s days as a baton twirler at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School, to Cornell University, Harvard and Columbia Law Schools (first in her class), to being a law professor at Rutgers University (one of the few women in the field and fighting pay discrimination), hiding her second pregnancy so as not to risk losing her job; founding the Women's Rights Law Reporter, writing the brief for the first case that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down a sex-discriminatory state law, then at Columbia (the law school’s first tenured female professor); becoming the director of the women’s rights project of the ACLU, persuading the Supreme Court in a series of decisions to ban laws that denied women full citizenship status with men.
Her years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, deciding cases the way she played golf, as she, left-handed, played with right-handed clubs—aiming left, swinging right, hitting down the middle. Her years on the Supreme Court . . .
A pioneering life and legal career whose profound mark on American jurisprudence, on American society, on our American character and spirit, will reverberate deep into the twenty-first century and beyond.

The critics welcome Jane Sherron De Hart's RUTH BADER GINSBURG

"An excellent biography ... in its comprehensiveness, range, and attention to detail, this is a vivid account of a remarkable life."

--Jeffrey Rosen, The Washington Post

"The first full biography of Ginsburg ... passionate and thorough ... a major event in scholarship on American law."

--Michael O'Donnell, Washington Monthly

"Magisterial and timely ... engaging ... written in clear language and grounded in historical context."

--Julia M. Klein, Forward

"De Hart succeeds in showing us that the 107th person to be appointed to the Supreme Court is much more than a pop culture icon ... Compelling."

--Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal

"Engaging and admiring."

--Bryan A. Garner, Wall Street Journal

"Scholarly, yet accessible ... rewarding and compelling."

--Joel K. Goldstein, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"An in-depth biography of the Supreme Court justice who has become a pop-culture icon."

--USA Today

"Meticulously researched, comprehensive ... Ginsburg's career is skillfully placed within the context of American social and political history ... a sophisticated analysis of the justice's thinking on constitutional change, reproductive rights, gender equality, and affirmative action."

--Marie M. Mullaney, Library Journal

"De Hart reminds us in her new scholarly biography: Ginsburg is a true-blue legal icon ... [the book] draws on extensive research ... readable and rewarding."

--Michelle Olsen, NPR

"RBG has lived a helluva life, and everything--from her days as a baton twirler in Brooklyn to her eventual ascension to the highest court in the land--is chronicled in this expansive history."

--Cristina Arreola, Bustle

"De Hart dynamically devotes more than 500 pages to the amazing life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ... Telling anecdotes skillfully illuminate Ginsburg's devotion to her family and her wonderfully supportive late husband, her long-standing friendships with an array of public figures, her love of opera, and her humorous wit. This extensively documented account, incorporating more than 100 pages of chapter notes and a bibliography that cites hundreds of resources, is also quite engaging and very easy to read. Expect high demand."

--Kathleen McBroom, Booklist (starred review)

"Laudatory ... De Hart's great strength is her ability to explain Ginsburg's cases and the legal strategies she employed ... an insightful, fascinating, and admiring biography of one of America's most extraordinary jurists."

--Publishers Weekly

"The first comprehensive biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg . . . De Hart describes in absorbing detail the behind-the-scenes campaign to obtain her appointment to the Supreme Court engineered by her devoted husband Martin Ginsburg . . . De Hart excels in explaining the majority opinions, and later the dissents, in which she participated with remarkable clarity, illuminating the issues, the competing positions, and the significance of each in language easily grasped by readers with no legal training . . . A monumental biography."

--Kirkus (starred review)

Jane Sherron De Hart is professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She lives in Santa Barbara, California. View titles by Jane Sherron de Hart

Chapter 1

Celia’s Daughter

June 27, 1950, should have been a day of triumph for an ambitious young girl just turned seventeen—the culmination of four years of outstanding academic achievement. It was graduation day at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School. Ruth Bader had been chosen as just one of four students to speak for her eight hundred classmates. Instead, it was a day of wrenching grief.

Two days before, Ruth’s mother, Celia, had succumbed to cancer after a four-year struggle. Ruth knew her mother had been waging a losing battle. Watching the physical deterioration of the parent who represented nurture and security, along with her father’s silent grief, had been anguishing for the sensitive adolescent. Yet with Celia’s encouragement, she won prestigious college scholarships, played in the school orchestra, and cheered on the football team as a baton twirler—never once revealing to her schoolmates the illness that shadowed the Bader household in Flatbush. By the end of summer, the ground floor of the modest gray stucco house at 1584 East Ninth Street stood vacant, a symbol of loss and abandonment following her mother’s death and her father’s emotional and economic collapse.

***

Celia Bader gave birth to her second daughter, Joan Ruth, on March 15, 1933, at Beth Moses Hospital in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. (Ruth’s first name was dropped in kindergarten when there proved to be too many other children who answered to Joan.) The Baders brought the infant back to their apartment in Belle Harbor, a town near the ocean in the borough of Queens, just as they had her older sister, Marilyn. The new baby, energetic from the start, kicked so much that Marilyn promptly dubbed her “Kiki.” The name stuck.

The boroughs, like the rest of the country in 1933, faced an unprecedented economic depression. Factories lay idle. Construction had come to a standstill. The banking system had crumbled, wiping out the hard-earned savings of millions. One wage earner in four was laid off, and according to the U.S. Children’s Bureau one out of five children was not getting enough to eat. As tax revenues dried up, teachers went unpaid. In other parts of the country, schools simply closed their doors. In the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, jobless men put up makeshift shacks of junked Fords and old barrels at the city dump dubbed “Hoovervilles” in derisive reference to President Herbert Hoover’s economic policies.

Nathan Bader, Ruth’s father, was no stranger to hard times. He had begun his own struggle to earn a living shortly after his arrival in New York as a shy thirteen-year-old Russian Jew from a town near Odessa. Denied admission to schools in the Old World because of anti-Semitism, he had attended only Hebrew school. His mother tongue was Yiddish until he learned English at night school in his new homeland. Nathan worked in his father’s business, Samuel Bader and Sons, which specialized in inexpensive furs. By the 1920s, he felt financially secure enough to marry Celia Amster.

Celia, who arrived in New York City while still in her mother’s womb, had been conceived in a little town near what is now Cracow, Poland. Growing up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the primal homeland for immigrant Jews, she developed a passion for reading. Indeed, she so often walked down the bustling, crowded streets with her head buried in a book that on one occasion she tripped and broke her nose. Her father, recognizing that she was the most intelligent of his three daughters, had enlisted her help with his bills, which she wrote out in a mixture of English and Yiddish: for example, “one cabinet, gefixed” (repaired).

Though eager to continue her education, Celia had to settle for a commercial emphasis in her course work at Julia Richman High School, a massive brick building on East Sixty-Seventh Street. At least the training would spare her the fate of her older sister, Sadie, who worked in a sweatshop until marriage. Upon graduating at the age of fifteen, Celia found a job as a bookkeeper and secretary for a fur maker in the bustling, densely packed garment district, a roughly rectangular area of Manhattan ringed by West Thirty-Fifth and Forty-Second Streets and Seventh and Ninth Avenues, where a largely Eastern European workforce fueled the trade. The position allowed her to develop a familiarity with the industry, capitalizing on her innate business instincts and her ability to shrewdly assess people.

The personable and highly intelligent young woman had just the qualities that the shy, sentimental Nathan instinctively sought in a wife. Celia, according to her daughter, would always be the stronger partner in their new household, advising her husband on his business as well as other matters. After marriage, the couple joined the Belle Harbor synagogue. In 1927, two years before the stock market crash, Celia gave birth to their first child, Marilyn Elsa.

***

The downward economic spiral after Black Thursday in October 1929 prompted many young couples like the Baders to delay having more children. But in the fall of 1932, a new baby was on the way. Three years later, economic recovery remained elusive. Despite the Roosevelt administration’s many initiatives, the country remained mired in poverty and despair. The Baders were spared the worst hardships; however, in 1934, they faced a different kind of loss. Six-year-old Marilyn was fatally stricken with spinal meningitis. Though Kiki was too young to remember her sister, she later recalled how deeply her parents mourned Marilyn’s death. Every month, in the cold of winter or the heat of summer, they trudged to the cemetery. On the anniversary of Marilyn’s death, they went to the synagogue to recite the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. Marilyn’s picture continued to hang over the headboard of the Baders’ bed, making her a looming presence throughout Kiki’s childhood. There is no way to measure the impact of parental grief on their surviving daughter or to know whether it contributed to her preternatural seriousness. Ruth herself, however, later remarked that she grew up with the very “smell of death,” alluding to the cloud her sister’s passing cast over the Bader household.

Hoping to ease the pain with new surroundings, Nathan and Celia moved to Brooklyn, though the neighborhood was less desirable than the one left behind in Belle Harbor. They soon discovered that sustaining a separate apartment even in Flatbush was economically impossible. Because Nathan’s brother Benjamin had married Celia’s younger sister, Bernice (Buddy), the Bader brothers and their wives decided to share the downstairs of a two-family house in Flatbush until they could afford to live in separate houses on East Ninth Street.

Though the move to Flatbush was primarily initiated as a response to grief, it eventually turned out to be fortuitous. Flatbush was one of Brooklyn’s six original colonial towns. Over the years, it had been transformed into a semi-urban area with a Jewish population that by 1930 was rapidly approaching the million mark, the largest concentration of urban Jews in the world. Yet the Jewish community was anything but homogeneous. Groups differed in culture, wealth, and religious affiliation as well as in origin—Western European, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern. Brooklyn’s Syrian Sephardic Jews—a minority within a minority—maintained their traditional ways and food preferences as well as their Arabic language. In contrast, the many Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews tried hard to assimilate. After achieving some modest economic success, most moved out from the Lower East Side and from more crowded Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Brownsville to escape the congestion and shabbiness along with the weight of old-world strictures. If not quite the suburbs, the move brought more grass and open space.

As a sign of their newfound freedom, Jews of Nathan and Celia’s generation often strayed from Orthodox Judaism with all its rules and rituals. Many chose to forgo Sabbath services, leaving Brooklyn’s houses of worship half-empty on Saturday mornings. Sloughing off vestiges of their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness, they took pride in their “Americanness”—their ability to speak English, to wear American clothes, to have an education beyond the Talmud, and to escape the historical cycle that had locked even the most ambitious sons into the ghetto.

Yet at the same time, even those who were secular clung to cherished parts of their tradition—lighting candles for Friday dinner, keeping kosher kitchens while their children were young or eating only kosher meat and poultry, and observing the more important religious holidays, notably the high holy days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur. Those needing a synagogue for the holy days had plenty of choices; more than half of all the synagogues in New York City had a Brooklyn address. Some in the community relished the sense of belonging that came from hearing a Yiddish radio station playing popular dramas such as Bei tate-mames tish (Round the family table) or musical programs like Yiddish Melodies in Swing—though not Celia, who saw Yiddish as the language of the Old World. Instead, the Bader family listened to The Goldbergs, a weekly comedy-drama created by the talented writer and actress Gertrude Berg. Playing the warmhearted Bronx matriarch Molly Goldberg, Berg guided her radio family and neighbors through the challenges of assimilating and simultaneously maintaining their roots as Jews while coping with the travails of the Great Depression and World War II. Mrs. Goldberg was an “amalgam of Jewish aunts, [mothers], and grandmothers,” Kiki later recalled. However, she hastened to point out that her own mother “did not yell out of the window” in their working-class neighborhood, as did Molly Goldberg.

Flatbush in the 1930s and 1940s was home not only to Jews but also to Italians, Irish, and a smattering of Poles who lived on the same tree-lined streets, abutting busy Coney Island Avenue and Kings Highway. Each ethnic group was secure in its own identity, but that did not negate tensions among them. Anti-Semitism in the immediate neighborhood of East Ninth Street was not a major problem, although it certainly existed. Two elderly Catholic women living on the same block as the Baders clung to the belief that if a Jew came into the house, especially for lunch, it would bring bad luck—a superstition they transmitted to the boys for whom they served as foster parents. Other children on the street repeated stories that matzo was made from the blood of Christian boys and called Kiki and her Jewish friends “kikes.” Nonetheless, a measure of tolerance prevailed in the neighborhood of modest homes and apartments.

Both homes and streets served as children’s playgrounds for games of “red light, green light,” giant steps, jump rope, jacks, and marbles. Before and after games, youngsters and especially their teenage siblings, gathered in nearby candy stores and soda shops to spend their twenty-five-cent weekly allowances on Cokes, egg creams, comic books, movie magazines, and an occasional newspaper.

What bound the citizens of Flatbush together was a sense of neighborhood solidarity and an intense yearning to be solidly middle class. Even if the Great Depression had thwarted their own youthful dreams, they could transfer hopes and aspirations to their children. Weathering the strains of the worst economic crisis the country had ever experienced, they nurtured a disproportionate share of the twentieth century’s most distinguished citizens—many of them Jews. George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Beverly Sills, Barbra Streisand, Milton Friedman, and Sandy Koufax would become household names. So would that of Nathan and Celia Bader’s daughter.

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