Yiddishe Mamas (34 page)

According to author Tim Boxer, when the late great Shari Lewis aired her 1995 PBS special,
Lamb Chop’s Special Chanukah,
she was eager to “put [her] menorah in the window” to “enrich the lives of non-Jewish viewers.” The creative Lewis invited Pat Morita, the Japanese actor and martial arts expert, to participate. “Why not?” he said. “After all, I’m half ju and half jitsue!”

Lewis, a multiple award winner, was a puppeteer, ventriloquist, producer, author, and a pioneer in children’s programming. She used “tough love” on her puppet progenies, Lamb Chop, Charley Horse, and Hush Puppy, and taught values through entertainment. But her most beloved “creation” was her daughter, Mallory, who joined her mom as writer and producer. Since her mother’s death in 1998, Mallory has performed with Lamb Chop, and has a very special fan: her son.

Anna Sokolow (1910-2000) was part of the radical dance movement, which fused left-wing politics, Judaic themes, and dance. As a dancer and choreographer, she “felt a deep social sense about what I wanted to express.” Her mother, Sarah, was
both an inspiration and a possible detriment to her career. In 1910, when Sarah Sokolow came to this country, she was quickly forced to take the financial reins when her husband Samuel was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“Eventually my mother, with her great energy, stepped in and took over,” Anna later said. The Sokolows had four children and moved to New York City, where Sarah worked in the garment industry. She remained spirited and determined and became an activist: attending trade unions meetings, joining the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, and participating in union solidarity marches, sometimes even bringing her daughters. She also took her children to Workman’s Circle dances and the Yiddish theater.

When Anna told her mother she wanted to be a dancer, she was thrown out of the house. Sarah was convinced that Jewish women should work as teachers or secretaries until they married.

The two eventually reconciled, as Anna continued to pursue the dance, becoming world famous. Her work has reflected the horrors of the Holocaust and her early life in the tenements.

“The Germans had to be educated in violent anti-semitism; the Austrians erupted with it spontaneously,” wrote Dr. Gerda Lerner, a Jew, of her countrymen and women. “Within weeks of the Anschluss, the situation of Jews in Austria was far worse than that of Jews in Germany five years after the Nazi takeover.”

Dr. Lerner was well aware of the horrors she wrote about and eventually became the godmother of women’s history.

Her commitment to political struggle undoubtedly began in Vienna in 1934, when she heard the sounds of war from her family’s darkened apartment. “I said to myself, this I can’t live with.”

She was born Gerda Kronstein, the first child of an affluent Jewish couple, Ilona and Robert Kronstein. Her father was a pharmacist, and her mother was a frustrated artist.

Dr. Lerner has written at length about her difficult relationship with her mother, who survived a concentration camp, but died in Europe far from her daughter and her estranged husband. In her 2003 memoir,
Fireweed: A Political Autobiography,
her personal history is inexorably tied to major world events—her family’s flight to Liechtenstein, her six weeks in a Nazi prison, and her complicated relationship with her mother, artist Ilona (Ili) Kronstein. Although Lerner managed to get a U.S. visa, her family remained in Europe. Her parents and sister fled throughout Europe while many perished in concentration camps. Ili wrote to her daughter begging her to get her to America, which was impossible given the rigid quotas on immigrants. Yet her mother’s letters also described her artistic breakthroughs, while Ili was away from her husband and social constraints. Ili died of multiple sclerosis in Switzerland after the war. Their failure to connect has been a lifelong pain for Dr. Lerner.

When a gaunt and exhausted Dr. Lerner arrived in the United States, she made an unfortunate first marriage just to stay here. Her second marriage to filmmaker Carl Lerner produced a son, a daughter—and a strong political agenda. The couple struggled to unionize the film industry, resisted the Hollywood blacklist, and became active in the civil rights movement.

Dr. Lerner also become a key player in the women’s movement, and, at thirty-eight, she began her academic career—pioneering the field of women’s history. In 1963, at the New School for Social Research, she taught what may have been the first postwar college course in women’s history. In 1972, she established the first graduate program in the field at Sarah Lawrence College, and in 1981, she created a doctoral program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She then went on to become the Robinson-Edwards professor of history, emeritae, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences.

She is the author of eleven history books, has edited the groundbreaking
Black Women in White America: A Documentary History,
one of the first books detailing the contributions of Black women, and released a two-volume study titled
Women and History,
in 1986 and 1993.

Dr. Lerner was the first woman to receive the Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing from the Society of American Historians.

Annie Nathan Meyer, writer, and a founder of Barnard College, was born in New York on February 19, 1867, to Robert Weeks and Annie Florence Nathan, members of the upper-crust Sephardic community. She had a difficult childhood: Her father was a philanderer, his business failed, and her mother descended into depression. Annie prepared herself for college with special tutoring and enrolled in Columbia College. After a year, she married Alfred Meyer, a cousin and prominent physician. The couple had one daughter.

Annie was politically savvy and turned her attention to creating a women’s college at Columbia. When she named the college for the institution’s recently deceased president, F. A. P. Barnard, she won the support of his widow, and in September 1889, Barnard College was founded. She remained involved with Barnard throughout her life. Meyer wrote twenty-six plays, three novels, an autobiography, and two books of nonfiction. Most of her themes involved career vs. marriage for women.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it,” or “It’s all in your mind,” were typical medical responses to women’s concerns until fairly recently. Then there was Barbara Seaman.

Since 1969, Seaman, a medical journalist, has doggedly taken on not only the medical establishment but also the powerful pharmaceutical companies. She exposed their drive for profit at the expense of women’s health—notably, slipping drugs to women without their knowing the consequences—and is a leading U.S. advocate for women’s health.

In 1959, she watched her forty-nine-year-old aunt succumb to cancer. Her doctor then told her not to take the estrogen-based drug Premarin, as she might have the same susceptibilities. That conversation inspired Seaman to write
The Doctors’ Case against the Pill
(1969), which shook up the medical establishment by showing the Pill posed risks of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and stroke. The book also revealed how very poor women in Puerto Rico were used in the Pill’s early testing at very high doses without thorough study. Several died of apparent heart attacks, with little medical attention and no autopsies.

Her book led to Congressional hearings in 1970, but the Senate barred women harmed by the Pill from testifying. These women, however, interrupted the hearings. As a result, birth control pills carry warning labels and for the first time the Federal Drug Administration allowed input from patients.

Seaman has also written
The Greatest Experiment Ever Performed on Women: Exploding the Estrogen Myth
(2003), cofounded the National Women’s Health Network, and has published numerous articles and books on women’s health and patients’ rights. Her work triggered a revolution encouraging women to take their health into their own hands.

In 1947, Dr. Gerty Theresa Radnitz Cori, along with husband Carl F. Cori, and Dr. B. A. Houssay of Argentina, shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology.

Gerty, the eldest of three daughters, was born on August 15, 1896, in Prague to Martha and Otto Radnitz. Her uncle, a doctor, urged her to study medicine at the German University of Prague’s medical school where she graduated in 1920. She met her husband, Carl Ferdinand Cori, a fellow student there, and the two later accepted research positions at the University of Vienna. The couple had one son, Carl Thomas.

They came to the United States in 1922 and joined the staff of Buffalo’s New York Institute of Malignant Diseases. Her husband became an assistant pathologist and she was appointed assistant biochemist. They studied sugar in animals and the effects of insulin and epinephrine.

The Coris then accepted positions at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. They were interested in the action of hormones and carried out studies on the pituitary gland. Their work on carbohydrate metabolism eventually focused on tissue extracts and isolated enzymes. In 1936, they isolated and tracked glucose-1-phosphate, which was called the Cori ester. This discovery made possible the enzymatic synthesis of glycogen and starch in vitro. Subsequently, other enzymes were crystallized.

Dr. Gerty Cori was the third woman to receive the Nobel prize and the first Jewish American woman to do so. She also received many other honors and honorary degrees before she died on October 26, 1957, from kidney failure. Newscaster Edward R. Murrow eulogized her dedication, intellectual integrity, courage, and professionalism in her pursuit of answers in biochemistry.