Stars of David Read Online Free PDF Page A

excuses himself to go to the bathroom.
    When he returns, neither of us refers to the moment before. He asks if I want to walk with him the few blocks to his home and, as we chat, we end up talking again about the Yankee game he attended a few days ago. “I didn’t have any identity on—neither a Yankee hat nor a Red Sox hat,” he says, “and this one woman said, ‘Are you neutral?’ And before I could stop myself, I said, ‘No, I’m Jewish.’” He chuckles. “That would never have happened a bunch of years ago. Some part of me wants to advertise it now. Finally.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

    JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG HAS A RUN in her stocking, which, I must admit, puts me at ease. It’s my first time in a U.S. Supreme Court Justice’s chambers—even that word, “chambers,” conveys hushed, erudite activity—and it’s strangely comforting to see that this tiny woman with the giant intellect gets runs in her hose like the rest of us. “Why don’t we just sit here.” She gestures to a couch in her sitting area.
    Ginsburg, often described as small and soft-spoken, appears almost miniaturized in her sizable office space, formerly occupied by the late Thurgood Marshall. Dressed all in black—slacks, blouse, stockings, sandals, a shawl draped around her shoulders—she looks like a frail Spanish widow rather than one of the nine most powerful jurists in the land.
    But it’s clear that despite her petite frame, small voice, and a recent battle with colon cancer, Ginsburg—age seventy when we meet, the second woman on the bench in the court’s history and its first Jewish member since Abe Fortas—is formidable. She tells one story that illustrates her intrepid style: “My first year here, the court clerk, who is just a very fine fellow, came to me and said, ‘Every year we get letters from Orthodox Jews who would like to have a Supreme Court membership certificate that doesn’t say
In the year of our Lord
. [She’s referring to the certificate lawyers receive when they become members of the Supreme Court bar.] So I said, ‘I agree; if they don’t want that, they shouldn’t have it.’
    â€œSo I checked to see what the federal courts and circuit courts were doing and discovered, to my horror, that in my thirteen years on the D.C. circuit, the membership certificate has always said
In the year of our Lord
. So I spoke to the chief judges of all the circuits, and some of them had already made the change, others were glad to make the change. Then I came to my Chief and said, ‘All the other circuits give people a choice.’” Her “Chief,” William Rehnquist, recommended she raise the issue “in conference” with her fellow justices, which she did. “I won’t tell you the name of this particular colleague,” she says, “but when I brought this up and thought it would be a no-brainer, one of my colleagues said, ‘
The year of our Lord
was good enough for Brandeis, it was good enough for Cardozo, it was good enough—’ and I said, ‘Stop.
It’s not good enough for Ginsburg
.’”
    Significant laws have been changed over the last few decades because the status quo wasn’t “good enough for Ginsburg.” She is known as a pioneer in the field of antidiscrimination law, a founder of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first female tenured professor at Columbia University Law School, and the lawyer who argued six women’s rights cases before the Supreme Court and won five of them.
    She abandoned Judaism because it wasn’t “good enough for Ginsburg” either. Its exclusion of women from meaningful rituals was painfully brought home to her at age seventeen, when her mother, Celia Bader, succumbed to cancer a day before Ruth’s high school graduation. “When my