SESSION 3 ©2017 9

HANDOUT S3.2: JEWISH WOMEN ROLE MODELS

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wrote about the challenges women face in the workplace and strategies women can use to to reach their goals in her book, Lean In. Sheryl graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1991 with a degree in economics and shortly after earned her MBA in the same subject.

From 1996-2001, she was Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of the Treasury, working to reduce debt in developing countries. She worked for Google from 2001-2008 as Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations and launched Google.org, Google’s philanthropic initiative.

She was then hired as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Facebook, in charge of using online marketing to raise money for the platform. Sheryl became the first female member of Facebook’s board of directors in 2012.

In her 2010 TED talk, she asked why there are so few women leaders in business, suggesting that women often take themselves out of the running for promotions. Her 2013 bestseller, Lean In, expanded on these ideas but critics said Sandberg focused too much on changing women’s behavior and ignored their economic and social constraints.

Sheryl SandbergBorn: August 28, 1969Occupation: Entrepreneur, OrganizationalLeader, Civil Servant, Philanthropist

Alexandra “Aly” Raisman began gymnastics in her early teens and took online classes during her senior year of high school to help her focus on training for the Olympics.

Between 2009–2012, she became a threetime World Championship medalist and eight-time National Championship medalist. She also won numerous international competitions. At the 2012 Olympics, she earned a gold medal for her floor routine, bronze for her balance beam work, and helped the US team win the gold medal, making her the gymnast with the most medals that year.

Proud of her Jewish heritage, Aly dedicated her Olympic routine to the memory of the murdered athletes of the 1972 Munich Games.

She has been a contestant and finalist on the 2013 season of Dancing with the Stars and a spokesperson for various companies. She also volunteers for the Special Olympics and for MitoAction, an organization to help those with mitochondrial disorders.

An injury on the uneven bars required Aly to retire from athletics for a few years. But, Aly returned to gymnastics in 2015 and at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, she brought home six Olympic medials, making her the second most decorated American Olympic gymnast.

Aly RaismanBorn: May 25, 1994Occupation: Athlete, Volunteer

SESSION 3 ©2017 10

“Especially in the car ride to and from gym. I find myself spacing out a lot, just visualizing what the Olympics would

be like and just having such great role models”

“You have to remember that the hard days are what make you stronger. The bad days make you realize what a good day is. If you never had any

bad days, you would never have that sense of accomplishment!”

“We need women at all levels, including the top, to change the dynamic, reshape the conversation, to make sure women’s voices are

heard and heeded, not overlooked and ignored.”

“I want to tell any young girl out there who’s a geek, I was a really serious geek in high school. It works out. Study harder.”

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Sheryl Sandberg

Aly Raisman

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Mayim BialikBorn: December 12, 1975Occupation: Actress, Biologist, Neurosci-entist, Activist, Writer

Mayim Bialik is not the typical Hollywood actress. She has portrayed strong, intelligent women in movies and TV and works as a neuroscientist offscreen. Her first acting job was in the 1988 horror film, Pumpkinhead. She then went on to star in MacGuyver, Beauty and the Beast, Beaches, and she was on the television sitcom, Blossom from 1990-1995.

After Blossom was cancelled, she decided to study neuroscience and Jewish studies at UCLA. She earned her PhD in neuroscience in 2007 for her work with Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare genetic disorder.

In 2011, she began starring in The Big Bang Theory, earning three Emmy nominations for her portrayal of neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler. Bialik has written a parenting guide called Beyond the Sling published in 2012 and a cookbook, Mayim’s Vegan Table, in 2014.

Ruth Bader GinsburgBorn: March 15, 1933Occupation: Lawyer, Professor, Organizational Leader, Judge

Ruth Bader Ginsberg brought landmark cases for gender and racial equality before the Supreme Court, transforming the American legal landscape even before her historic appointment as the second-ever female Supreme Court justice.

Ginsberg first enrolled at Harvard Law before transferring to Columbia Law School. She tied for first in her class at Columbia but it took her a while to find work after graduation because of her gender.

Ginsberg began teaching law at Rutgers and then at Columbia, becoming the first woman to earn tenure at Columbia, and at the same time served as the first director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project.

As the project’s chief litigator, Ginsberg argued important cases for women’s equality before the Supreme Court. An advocate for women’s rights, she selected cases that showed gender discrimination could also harm men. For example, she argued a case where a widower was denied his wife’s Social Security benefits, which he needed to raise their baby son.

In 1993, President Clinton appointed Ginsberg to the Supreme Court, where she has had a huge impact on gender and racial equality in America.

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“I don’t care much about conforming.”

“My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent.”

“[W]hen I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the supreme court]? And I say ‘When there are nine.’ People are

shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”

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Mayim Bialik

“I don’t wear pants, or like them; I’m a Jewish woman who’smade the decision to wear skirts, so I wear mostly skirts past the knee.”

“I came to parenting the way most of us do - knowing nothing and trying to learn everything.”

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg

SESSION 3 ©2017 13

Lena DunhamOccupation: Actress, Screenwriter, Film Director, Film Producer, Television Director, Television Producer

Lena Dunham became the first woman to win a Director’s Guild Award for Outstanding Director for a Comedy Series for her HBO series Girls, for which she writes, directs, produces and plays the lead character.

Dunham earned a degree in creative writing from Oberlin in 2008 and began writing and directing herself and friends in movies. Two years later, she won Best Narrative Feature at the South by Southwest Festival for her film Tiny Furniture.

In 2012 she began work on Girls, which was nominated for eight Emmys and won two Golden Globe Awards, one for Best Comedy Series and one for Dunham as Best Lead Actress. The show, often called an updated, grittier version of Sex and the City, follows the misadventures of four young women struggling to make it in NewYork.

In 2014, Dunham published her first book, an essay collection called Not that Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned.”

Regina SpektorBorn: February 18, 1980Occupation: Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Philanthropist

With her surreal lyrics and experimental vocal style, Regina Spektor created a place for herself in the anti-folk music scene and went on to conquer the pop charts. Spektor emigrated from Russia with her family in 1989 and settled in the Bronx. She attended both SAR Academy and the Frisch School yeshiva while studying piano with a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music.

She graduated from the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in 2001 and began performing in the East Village in New York, distributing homemade CDs including 2001’s 11:11 and 2002’s Songs. She signed a contract with Warner Records in 2004 and her fourth CD, Begin to Hope, rose to number 20 on the Billboard charts in 2006.

Her fifth album, Far, premiered at number 3 on the charts in 2009. In 2010 she performed at the White House to celebrate Jewish Heritage Month and got a standing ovation from Michelle Obama.

Her song “You’ve Got Time” is the theme of the hit show Orange is the New Black. She has performed concerts and recorded songs for different causes, including Darfur relief, Doctors Without Borders, and Planned Parenthood.

SESSION 3 ©2017 14

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Lena Dunham

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Regina Spektor

“It’s very easy for me to say what success is. I think success is connecting with a audience who understands you and having a

dialogue with them. I think success is continuing to push yourself forward creatively and not sort of becoming a caricature of yourself.”

“I think if you feel like you were born to write, then you probably were.”

“This is how it works: you’re young until you’re not, you love until you don’t. you try until you can’t, you laugh until you cry, you cry until you

laugh.”

“I care so much about making things that are useful for people to have and listen to, but I don’t care so much that I won’t do whatever I want.

It’s just one of those things.”

SESSION 3 ©2017 15

Roz ChastBorn: November 26, 1954Occupation: Cartoonist

Roz Chast has spent decades sharing the craziness of her life and her imagination as one of the most popular staff cartoonists of the New Yorker. Chast earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1977, but faced resistance from staff at the school who considered cartoons childish.

She moved to New York and began creating comics for Christopher Street and the Village Voice before selling her first cartoon to the New Yorker in 1978. Chast’s work often features shaky line drawings and a focus on neurotic families and the details of everyday life. Besides the New Yorker, her work has appeared in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.

Roz has written or illustrated over a dozen books, including two collections of her New Yorker cartoons, The Party After You Left in 2004 and Theories of Everything in 2006. In 2014 she was a National Book Award finalist for her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk AboutSomething More Pleasant? about her parents’ decline and deaths.

Sandra LawsonOccupation: Rabbinical School Graduate, Police Officer, Personal Trainer

Sandra Lawson is a former military police officer turned personal trainer and the first Black, LGBTQ individual accepted to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, PA. Her father grew up attending a small black church in Arkansas and her mother did not belong to a specific religion. When she was younger, she learned that the earliest relative in her family was an Ethiopian Jew.

During her junior year of college at St. Leo’s University, she joined the military and spent most of her twenties in the US Army as a Military Police Investigator. Her interest in Judaism began at college when she signed up for a class on the Old Testament to fulfill a graduation requirement. The class was her first real introduction to the Torah and it changed her view of religion.

In the spring of 2014, Lawson finished her fourth year at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College with the help of an online GoFundMe campaign. She plans to marry her girlfriend, Laura and spend the fall semester in Israel. If all goes according to plan, she will celebrate her ordination as one of the first - if not the first- black, openly lesbian rabbi in 2018.

SESSION 3 ©2017 16

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Roz Chast

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Sandra Lawson

“I used to love to draw things that made me laugh or made friends laugh. When I was 13 or 14, I started thinking, This is what I like to do

more than anything else.”

“Don’t be surprised if you see me in the near future walking around with a mini guitar or ukulele.”

SESSION 3 ©2017 17

Jill SolowayBorn: September 26, 1965Occupation: Playwright, Screenwriter, Comedian, Director

Jill Soloway is the creator of the Amazon original series, Transparent, a comedy/drama inspired by her own life, about a Los Angeles family and their lives following the discovery that their father is transgender.

Jill also won the US Dramatic Directing Award at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival for her first feature, Afternoon Delight and a three-time Emmy nominee for her work writing and producing Six Feet Under. Jill was born in Chicago to a public relations consultant/writer mother and a psychiatrist father In 2011, her father came out as transgender.

Jill studied film and TV at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Along with writing/producing films and TV shows, she has worked as a production assistant in commercials and music videos, and wrote thememoir, Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants: Based on a True Story. Soloway says that she often ends up revisiting the theme of conflict betweenwomen.

Barbara MyerhoffBorn: February 16, 1935 • Died: January 7, 1985Occupation: Author, Educator, Motion Picture Producer and Director, Scholar, Anthropologist

Even as a child, entranced by the tales of her grandmother, anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff knew that “stories told to oneself or to others could transform the world.” Myerhoff spent her lifetime studying the ways in which men and women from diverse cultures used their stories and sacred rituals to give difficult lives more meaning.

Myerhoff was a renowned scholar, heading the University of Southern California anthropology department in Los Angeles where she lived and raised her children. A creative and extremely popular professor, she urged her students to use the tools of anthropology to question and better understand their own lives and the lives of other people.

Myerhoff’s earliest book, Peyote Hunt, dealt with the Huichol Indians of Mexico. Her later book, Number Our Days, and an Oscar-winning documentary based on the book, was about elderly Jews living in a senior center in Venice, California. Myerhoff’s work helped redefine public perceptions of the elderly and represented pioneering scholarship on women and religion. Her final documentary film, In Her Own Time, depicted Myerhoff’s battle with cancer, as a Hasidic community in Los Angeles led her through its rituals for healing.

SESSION 3 ©2017 18

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Jill Soloway

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Barbara Myerhoff

“I’m a naturally open person - some might say radically open.”

“If you can laugh with your friends over something, you own it.”

“The self is made, not given.”

“Being pretty... I’m just confused about it. I mean, I love getting my nails done, but I also like dressing like a boy. I think I feel most myself

when I’m mixing femininity and masculinity. Like, fifty-fifty.”

“The best lives and stories are made up of [small details] that somehow are also universal and of use to others as well as oneself.”

SESSION 3 ©2017 19

Angela BuchdahlBorn July 8, 1972 in SeoulOccupation: Rabbi, Cantor

Angela Buchdahl made history as the first Asian- American rabbi and cantor, but it has been her skill with congregants that has fueled her rise to senior rabbi at a prestigious Manhattan synagogue.

The child of a Korean mother and Jewish American father, Buchdahl was raised Jewish, but her religious identity was challenged by other Jewish teens on her first trip to Israel. To silence such challenges, shereaffirmed her faith through an Orthodox conversion at age 21, and after graduating from Yale in 1994 with a degree in religion, continued her education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, becoming a cantor in 1999 and a rabbi in 2001.

Her first post was at the Westchester Reform Temple, but in 2006 she became senior cantor at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. Over the next seven years, the synagogue’s Friday night attendance doubled and their post-Bar-Mitzvah retention tripled. In 2013 the synagogue named her their first female senior rabbi. Buchdahl has taught for the Wexner Foundation and is a board member of the Jewish Multiracial Network.

Judith ResnikBorn: April 5, 1949 • Died: January 28, 1986Occupation: Engineer, Astronaut

Judith A. Resnik was determined to do her best at everything. In 1978, with a doctorate in electrical engineering, she was selected to be an astronaut candidate, and worked on several projects for NASA. She was also a classical pianist, gourmet cook, runner, and biker. When asked about her intensity on the piano, she replied, “I never play anything softly.” In 1984, on the first voyage of the space shuttle Discovery, Resnik became the second American woman to travel into space.

On January 28, 1986, Resnik smiled and waved to television cameras as she boarded the Challenger, along with six other crew members, including S.C. McAuliffe, the first teacher-astronaut. A horrified nation watched as the Challenger exploded seconds after it was launched; the entire crew was lost.

Resnick will be remembered as a woman who “reached for the stars.”Resnik Crater, on the far side of the moon, was named in her honor.

SESSION 3 ©2017 20

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Angela Buchdahl

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Judith Resnik

“I never play anything softly.”

“As a cantor she appreciates the art and aesthetics, but as a rabbi she appreciates academics. She’s a remarkably holistic person.”

- Lawrence Hoffman

“Internal questions of authenticity loomed over my Jewish identity throughout my adolescence into early adulthood, as I sought to integrate my Jewish, Korean, and secular American identities,”

“[Resnik] was a goal oriented person. It was as if she heard an inner voice constantly challenging her to greater achievements.”

-Rabbi Abraham Feffer

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Frieda FrommreichmannBorn October 23, 1889 • Died: April 28, 1957Occupation: Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst

Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was born in Germany in 1889, the eldest daughter of a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family. Although publiceducation was closed to women beyond the elementary grades, Frieda studied on her own. At the age of seventeen, she passed the entrance exam to study medicine. She specialized in psychiatry and trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst. In 1926, she met and marriedErich Fromm, with whom she established and ran a psychoanalytic training institute and a residence for psychotic patients.When Hitler came to power, Fromm-Reichmann fled to France, and then Palestine, and she ultimately came to the United States in 1935.

Her work focused on the quality of her therapeutic relationship, which often had a protective, maternal quality. Fromm-Reichmann’s work with schizophrenic patients was depicted in the fictionalized account, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, written by Joanne Greenberg, a former patient.

Alicia GarzaBorn March 4, 1981Occupation: Activist, Organizational Leader

After her impassioned plea that black lives matter ignited the internet, Alicia Garza helped lead the movement that has transformed the modern struggle for civil rights.

Born Alicia Schwartz, Garza studied anthropology at UC San Diego and was an early activist for causes including LGBT rights, civil rights, and fair housing. Garza became executive director of POWER, a San Francisco-based labor group, in 2009. In 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin, Garza reacted to how little black lives were valued by American society by posting her now-famous quote, which quickly went viral on social media.

Together with two friends, she co-founded Black Lives Matter, which gained traction the following year when they organized powerful events across America to protest the police killing of Michael Brown. As part of that campaign, Garza stopped a BART train to represent the time Brown’s body was left in the street. She continues to work with Black Lives Matter while serving as special projects director for the Oakland office of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and as a board member of the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL).

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Frieda Frommreichmann

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Alicia Garza

“Psychiatric services - that is, the attempt to help a person overcome has emotional difficulties in living - are priceless if successful and

worthless if they fail.”

“Hashtags are just hashtags. Hashtags do not create movements, people do.”

“When we say ‘black lives matter,’ we are not saying that others don’t, we are saying that ours do too. For a harmonious world, we must not

deny the presence of inequity and differences.”

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Sharon KleinbaumBorn 1959Occupation: Activist, Rabbi

Sharon Kleinbaum’s longtime leadership of Congregation Beth Simchat Torah and her outspoken activism have made her a powerful voice for GLBTQ rights and human rights in America and around the world.

Kleinbaum’s activism began in college, protesting for divestment against South Africa. Ordained as a Reconstructionist rabbi in 1990, Kleinbaum became senior rabbi of CBST in New York, the largest gayand lesbian synagogue in the country, in 1992. Speaking out for the rights of gays and lesbians, immigrants, Palestinians, women, and people of color, Kleinbaum was repeatedly arrested and jailed for her beliefs, but was also hailed by the Huffington Post, Newsweek, the Forward, and the Jewish Week in their annual lists of the most influential rabbis in the country.

She was part of Mayor Bloomberg’s Commission on GLBTQ Runaway and Homeless Youth, the NYPD’s GLBT Advisory Committee, and Mayor de Blasio’s Transition Committee. When New York ruled infavor of gay marriage, Kleinbaum set up just across the street from the courthouse to offer couples the chance for a religious marriage ceremony.

Joy LadinBorn March 21, 1961Occupation: Poet, Professor, Writer

Poet and scholar Joy Ladin is the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox institution, Yeshiva University’s Stern College.

Ladin studied poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1982, and went on to earn an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1995 and a PhD from Princeton University in 2000. Her poetry collections Alternatives to History (2003) and The Book of Anna (2006) earned her early tenure from Stern College, but in 2007, when she came out as a trans woman and changed her name from Jay to Joy, she was asked to take a leave of absence. In 2008, undeterred by controversy, she returned to Stern College, where she holds the Gottesman Chair in English. As of 2016 she has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Impersonation (2015).

She has also published numerous essays on gender and religion, as well as a memoir: Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award. Among her other honors, she has been both a Fulbright scholar and a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Sharon Kleinbaum

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Joy Ladin

“I never wanted to simply be a female rabbi. I want to be a part of a Judaism that is transformed by feminism.”

“I believe that what we do matters. Our lives, our actions, ourwords, even our thoughts can make a difference.”

“To me, gender was like a fish trying to breathe air. It was, you know, the binary gender system that was really all that was available in the mid-20thcentury world that I was living in. I couldn’t thrive or survive

in it, and so I had no choice but to be excruciatingly aware of it.”