Ruth Bader Ginsberg speaks about her faith and being a Supreme Court justice. The Washington Post reports on the latest justice to reveal the role of faith in her life.
It is a story told in many versions, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says near the beginning of the new PBS series “The Jewish Americans,” “but mine is: What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s garment district and a U.S. Supreme Court justice? One generation.”
Ginsburg, 74, repeated the story last week at the Sixth and I Historic Synagogue in Washington for an audience that watched clips of the series and then listened to Ginsburg speak of her heritage with filmmaker David Grubin.
“I am the beneficiary of being a Jewish American,” she told Grubin, the child of a father who immigrated at age 13 and a mother “conceived in the Old World and born in the New World.”
In her generation she faced obstacles of gender and religion.
As for her career, Ginsburg said, being a woman provided more obstacles than being a Jew. She graduated tied for first in her 1959 Columbia Law School class, she said, but did not receive a job offer from any New York law firm. That she was a woman hurt, she said, but that she was the mother of a young child was “the real killer.”
Ginsburg spoke of the anti-Semitism that faced the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis, even from within the court. But when President Bill Clinton named Ginsburg to the court in 1993, and Stephen G. Breyer the next year, “our religion had nothing to do with our appointment. . . . It didn’t come up at all.”
If the five Jews who preceded her on the court were known collectively as the “Jewish justices,” she said, she and Breyer “are justices who happen to be Jews.”
Read it all here.