The monumental contributions of American women to the war effort convinced him that female students belonged at his school. Dr. Meister, one of America’s greatest 20th century educators, grew up on the Jewish Lower East Side and graduated from Townsend Harris High School, City College, and Columbia.
Gertrude Schimmel, Joan Rivers, Cynthia Ozick, and the other women of The Greatest Generation have been proud, unapologetic Jews and strong supporters of Israel. At Schimmel’s memorial service, attended by Police Commissioner William Bratton and former commissioner Ray Kelly, several speakers spoke of her 1972 trip to Israel with the Shomrim Society, the fraternal organization of Jewish police officers. A photograph of her kissing the Kotel was widely published in local newspapers.
Most of these women were the grandchildren of the Jews who emigrated from Russian Empire or the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1881 and 1914. An exception was Eydie Gorme, whose parents were Sephardic Jews from Sicily and the Turkish Empire.
However, we must also remember the pioneering Jewish women in New York who were descended from the German Jews who arrived earlier in the 19th century. They include: Julia Richman (1855-1912), the first female school superintendent, whose district included the teeming Lower East Side; Justine Wise Polier (1903-1987), a graduate of Yale Law School and the first female judge in New York State (and daughter of the influential Rabbi Stephen Wise); Dorothy Schiff (1903-1989), the owner and publisher of the New York Post between 1939 and 1976; and Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979), the art patron who escaped with her collection from Nazi-occupied France in 1941.
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In 1955, the novelist Herman Wouk (a World War II Navy veteran who recently turned 100), wrote Marjorie Morningstar, a wildly popular novel that was made into a movie. The book is partly based on Wouk’s sister, and on page three we learn that Marjorie, an aspiring actress whose original surname was Morgenstern, attends Hunter College in the 1930s, where she “had been taking a course of study leading to a license as a biology teacher.”
Marjorie never became a successful actress and spent her adult life as a non-working “suburban Shirley.” Marjorie’s first serious boyfriend, Noel (born Saul) Airman, a minor Broadway composer and Jewish anti-Semite, mocks her professional aspirations: “What she wants is what a woman should want, always has and always will – big diamond engagement ring, house in a good neighborhood, furniture, children, well-made clothes, furs – but she’ll never say so.”
Noel ends this diatribe by dismissing young Jewish women’s aspirations for careers as sentimental nonsense: “She’s going to paint, that’s what – or be a social worker, or a psychiatrist, or an interior decorator, or an actress.”
But in the real world of this incredible generation of Jewish-American women, many in fact combined successful working careers, marriage to Jewish veterans of World War II or the Korean War, and motherhood. Their lives have been much more phenomenal than the stereotypical ones depicted in Marjorie Morningstar or even Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which also focused on affluent, non-working suburban women.
In the Daily News obituary for Deputy Chief Schimmel, her son Edward said: “She was definitely a New Yorker…. She always said she loved the city and was honored to serve it. The city gave her everything from her education to her career…. She was a typical Jewish mother, except she couldn’t cook.”
My mother, who was a great cook, taught home economics at two South Bronx junior high schools whose student bodies were almost entirely black and Puerto Rican. Today, with 57 percent of bachelor degrees being awarded to women, many of them black or Hispanic, my mother’s vision of America was that the next generation should aspire to more education and wider employment opportunities than previous ones had had.
