Other accomplished Jewish women of The Greatest Generation who moved to New York City after World War II and built their professional success there include the late Muriel Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange (1967); sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer; Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is widely credited with reviving the feminist movement in the U.S.; Midge Decter, the author and conservative political activist; and Dr. Myriam Sarachik, professor of physics at City College.
Dr. Sarachik was born in Antwerp in 1933 and seven years later her family fled Nazi-occupied Belgium, arriving in Cuba in 1941. In 1947 they moved to New York and she graduated from Bronx Science in 1950, four years after my alma mater first admitted female students.
(Two of her classmates, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg, won the Nobel Prize in physics and another physics laureate, Melvin Schwartz, graduated from the school in 1949. Bronx Science produced four other Nobel laureates in physics – Roy Glauber, Leon Cooper, H. David Politzer, and Russell Hulse – and one laureate in chemistry, Dr. Robert Lefkowitz.
Of the 42 graduates of New York City public high school who have won the Nobel Prize, 37 are Jewish: 14 for physics, 12 for medicine, 5 each for chemistry and economics, and 1 for peace – former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a World War II veteran.)
* * * * *
Two years ago, on Bronx Science’s 75th anniversary, I interviewed 87-year-old Dr. Anna Burton, a psychiatrist and the daughter of Dr. Morris Meister, the school’s founding principal. When Dr. Burton graduated from Barnard at the top of her class in the mid-1940s and fewer than five percent of medical students were female, she was rejected by every top medical school – Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, NYU – before finally being accepted at New York Medical College/Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital.
Nearly 70 years later, this gender – and religious – discrimination, and the constant harassment she endured from the male medical students and faculty, were still sources of vexation.
Today, approximately half the doctors in training at American medical schools are women, and many of them are Jewish. Since Bronx Science began admitting female students in 1946 – nearly a quarter-century before a landmark lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education opened the doors of Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, the city’s two other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) high schools – my alma mater has led the nation in producing female graduates who have made their professional careers in these critical fields.
In 1987, on the 20th anniversary of my graduation, I co-edited a class yearbook based on personalized questionnaires returned by 162 male and 103 female classmates (out of 580 male and 280 female graduates). Forty-four of the respondents – 13 of whom were women – had become medical doctors, including several who were professors at Yale, Wisconsin, UCLA, and Emory medical schools.
In September 2014, when my niece, a high-school senior, and my sister were exploring Emory in Atlanta, I arranged a meeting for them with my Bronx Science classmate and reunion-yearbook co-editor, Dr. Barbara Stoll, chairperson of the pediatrics department at the university’s medical school. Rachel, a pre-medical major, will be starting at Emory in August, and when she graduated from a Florida high school in May, I reminded her what a different world it is today for women and Jews who are pre-med students as compared to 1944, when her grandmother graduated from NYU with a BS in education.
Dr. Morris Meister, Bronx Science’s principal between 1938 and 1958, was motivated to push for the admission of female students in 1946 by his experiences during World War II, when he traveled around the country for the War Department, advising high schools about math and science curricula that would help prepare young men and women for jobs in the military and the private sector that required a high educational level.
