Ruth Bader Ginsburg A life

Review by New York Times Review

DURING AN ONSTAGE INTERVIEW this summer following a performance in New York of a play about her late friend Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a.k.a. Notorious R.B.G., then a few months past her 85th birthday, observed offhandedly: "I consider myself a flaming feminist." Decades earlier, as a 21-year-old newly married Army wife, she applied for a job as a claims examiner in a Social Security office near her husband's post in Lawton, Okla. The position carried the respectable Civil Service rank of GS-5. But when she informed the personnel office that she was pregnant, she was offered a clerk-typist job at the lowly rank of GS-2. A pregnant woman would be unable to travel for the necessary claims examiner training, a bureaucrat explained, adding that, by the way, once she had the baby she would have to quit the job altogether. Did the future flaming feminist protest, demand justice or otherwise stand up for herself in the face of such manifest unfairness? No, she did not, Jane Sherron De Hart informs us in "Ruth Bader Ginsburg," the first full biography of the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg needed the job and "rationalized the incident as 'just the way things are.' " A lot has happened in the intervening 64 years to make the way things were appear so outlandish as to be scarcely believable to the young women who have turned Ruth Ginsburg into a matriarchal icon, surely one of the culture's most unlikely rock stars. Was she really one of only nine women out of 552 students in her Harvard Law School class of 1959? Can it be true that, tied for first in her class at Columbia Law School (to which she transferred in her final year, in order to be with her husband in New York City), she couldn't find a job after graduation? When she began her teaching career in 1963, were there really only 18 female tenured law professors in the entire country? Believe it, millennials. The journey from then to now, in society in general and law in particular, is well documented. And Ginsburg's role in the lawrelated aspects of that transformation will be familiar, at least in general terms, to anyone drawn to this weighty book (546 pages of text and 111 pages of endnotes, to say nothing of the bibliography and index). Readers will know of the young lawyer's pathbreaking (or, as she might put it, "way paving") litigation campaign that persuaded the nine men of the Supreme Court, step by tentative step, to create an entirely new jurisprudence of sex equality. The question for any Ginsburg biography - and there will be others, including a long-anticipated authorized one by Wendy Williams and Mary Hartnett of Georgetown Law School, still some years down the road - is not only what happened, but why. Why Ruth Ginsburg? Why this quiet woman whose conversation was marked by long awkward pauses, whose academic passion was for civil procedure and who "never had the slightest intention of becoming an expert on discrimination law and equal protection analysis"? The young women who hang on her every dissenting opinion and who tattoo her image, complete with lace jabot, onto their arms may be tempted to reduce her life's trajectory to a tale of "don't get mad, get even," but as this book amply demonstrates, it's a good deal more elusive than that. We can quickly discount Ginsburg's own often-repeated claim that "it was all a matter of being in the right place at the right time." De Hart, a scholar of women's history and an emeritus professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, searches doggedly for an alternative explanation: "Adopting a feminist identity is a process - one in which her own life experience intersected with a larger historical canvas colored by the past and stretching well beyond the United States." That's a framing of the mystery, not its solution. Part of the answer clearly lay with Ginsburg's mother, Celia Amster Bader, the Brooklyn household's center of gravity, who had given up her own ambitions years earlier in order to help put her brother through Cornell. Before she died, two days before Ruth's high school graduation, she had transferred those ambitions to a daughter who excelled on her own route to Cornell. Another clue to the mystery lay in the fortuity of a two-year job Ginsburg accepted, early in her career, to write a book about the Swedish legal system, part of a new Project on International Procedure at Columbia Law School (where she would later become the first female full professor). She found life in Sweden eye-opening, particularly the assumption that there was nothing unusual or untoward about women combining work and family obligations. Child care was effortlessly available. An article by the editor of a feminist magazine was a hot topic in Swedish academic circles. "We ought to stop harping on the concept of 'women's two roles,' " the editor, Eva Moberg, had written. "Both men and women have one principal role, that of being people." It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say, although De Hart doesn't quite lock this piece into place, that converting this observation into reality became Ruth Ginsburg's life work. First as an advocate and later as a justice, she made it her goal to dismantle the structures that embody "overbroad generalizations about the way men and women are," as she put it in a majority opinion just last year. And finally, surely, there was her marriage to Martin Ginsburg, a man far ahead of his time, or of any time for that matter. Viewers of "RBG," the surprise movie hit of the summer, glimpsed the quality of the 56year marriage that ended with Marty Ginsburg's death in 2010. It was a true partnership, a daily reminder of what equality of the sexes could be. The charming fact that Marty did the cooking was only the tip of a much more consequential iceberg. Ahugely successful tax lawyer, his own ego intact, he reveled in his wife's accomplishment and dedicated himself to helping her achieve her ambition to become a judge. This prize did not fall into her lap. President Jimmy Carter passed her over three times before finally naming her to the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., in the waning months of his administration. President Bill Clinton needed more persuading than is commonly realized, owing in part to the fact that the feminist leaders who came later to lionize Justice Ginsburg mistrusted her voting record on the appeals court, where she often sided with the conservatives. "The women are against her," Clinton grumbled to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a key champion of her candidacy for the vacancy created by Justice Byron R. White's retirement in 1993. De Hart's lengthy narrative, strong on facts, is less so on analysis. (And her grip on Supreme Court procedure is shaky: The court, for example, does not have a "spring term.") We are left to wonder what it was, beyond obvious dismay at the court's conservative turn, that transformed a judge known for singing the virtues of minimalism and consensus-building into a famous dissenter, the heroine of a recent book for young readers titled "I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark." "She has objected. She has resisted. She has dissented," the text reads. "Disagreeable? No. Determined? Yes. This is how Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed her life - and ours." It's almost as if, were we not lucky enough to have Ruth Bader Ginsburg among us in this troubled time, we would have had to invent her. Icons, it seems, are made as well as born.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* It's always daunting to tackle the biography of a living person, let alone an active, recognized expert in her field; and a cultural icon who's the subject of a popular documentary film and an upcoming biopic. And yet, University of California history professor de Hart dynamically devotes more than 500 pages to the amazing life of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, detailing her accomplishments (so far) and the influences that have shaped her interpretation of constitutional law. The text aptly describes Ginsburg's increasing legal expertise, using court cases to illustrate her keen grasp of legal argumentation, whether wielded as law clerk, expert on gender equality, U.S. Appeals Court judge, or Supreme Court justice. De Hart documents the omnipresent prejudice and male chauvinism Ginsburg encountered, suggesting that these experiences helped cement Ginsburg's commitment to equal rights and fair treatment under the law for everyone. 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 plenty of interest.--Kathleen McBroom Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

De Hart, a professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offers a laudatory biography of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. De Hart, who had Ginsburg's cooperation, pays appropriate attention both to the experiences that informed Ginsburg's passion for justice and to her personal life, highlighting her lifelong love affair with her husband and her friendships with professional colleagues, including her ideological opposite Antonin Scalia. De Hart's great strength is her ability to explain Ginsburg's cases and the legal strategies she employed, for example, to convince the Supreme Court to apply the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution to strike down laws that discriminate on the basis of gender. De Hart clearly and accessibly lays out background information, the various legal theories employed, and the judges' holdings. She also demonstrates Ginsburg's far-reaching influence as the second woman appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1993, taking readers into the inner workings of the court as Ginsburg and other justices war over the defining legal and cultural issues of the era-abortion rights, marriage equality, race, and religion. Readers will find this an insightful, fascinating, and admiring biography of one of America's most extraordinary jurists. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Fifteen years in the making, this meticulously researched, comprehensive volume is the first full biography of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Ruth Bader -Ginsburg (b. 1933). Based on court decisions and interviews with family and friends as well as conversations with Ginsburg herself, De Hart (emerita, history, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; coauthor, Women's America) outlines the forces that shaped the justice's life and jurisprudence. These include the feminist influence of her mother and the impact of her Jewish heritage. Ginsburg's career is skillfully placed within the context of American social and political history from the 1930s to the present. Detailing each step of Ginsburg's career and providing a sophisticated analysis of the justice's thinking on constitutional change, reproductive rights, gender equality, and affirmative action, the author documents the difficulties women have faced in achieving gender equality, the influence of progressive social movements, and the changing dynamics of the Court. With its discussion of both the 2016 presidential race and the accession of Neil Gorsuch to the Court, the book is especially timely. VERDICT For informed readers interested in contemporary American politics as well as women's rights and biographies on influential women. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/18.]-Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The first comprehensive biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (b. 1933), Supreme Court justice and cultural icon.Ginsburg grew up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn; early in her career, she repeatedly suffered discrimination both as a woman and as a Jew. Nevertheless, she attended Cornell University and then law school at Harvard and Columbia (after she transferred), joined law school faculties, and was appointed to the federal bench at a time when those achievements were rare for women. Political historian De Hart (co-author: Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: A State and the Nation, 1990, etc.) describes in absorbing detail the behind-the-scenes campaign to obtain her appointment to the Supreme Court engineered by her devoted husband, Martin Ginsburg, a renowned tax attorney, gourmet chef, and her biggest cheerleader. Since her arrival in 1993, the court has shifted steadily rightward, leaving her a lionized but increasingly isolated voice of principled dissent. Ginsburg's influence on American law can hardly be exaggerated, particularly in areas regarding minority and women's rights. The author clearly explains how, as an ACLU lawyer, Ginsburg plotted a successful incremental strategy to attack legal discrimination against women, which at the time was pervasive and took remarkably egregious forms. Once Ginsburg reaches the Supreme Court, 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 (for a nonlawyer, De Hart has a remarkable grasp of court jurisprudence). While the author's primary focus is Ginsburg's professional achievements, she also covers such topics as her battles with cancer, her love of opera, and her unlikely friendship with conservative Justice Antonin Scaliathough, as a notorious workaholic, it often appears she had little noteworthy personal life apart from the law.A monumental biography of one of the most influential and revered Supreme Court justices of the last century. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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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. Excerpted from Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life by Jane Sherron de Hart All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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