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mother died, the house was
filled
with women; but only men could participate in the minyan [the quorum required for public prayers of mourning].” It didn’t matter that the young Ruth had worked hard to be confirmed at Brooklyn’s East Midwood Jewish Center—“I was one of the few people who took it seriously,” she remarks, or that at thirteen, she’d been the “camp rabbi” at a Jewish summer program. Having a Jewish education counted for nothing at one of the most important moments in her life. “That time was not a good one for me in terms of organized religion,” she says with typical understatement. I ask her to expand on how Judaism made her feel secondary. “It had something to do with being a
girl
. I wasn’t trained to be a yeshiva
bucher
.” (She uses the Yiddish word for “boy.”)
    Later, she was also turned off by the class system in her family synagogue. “This is something I’ll tell you and you know it exists: In many temples, where you sit depends on how much money you give to the shul. And my parents went to the synagogue, Temple Beth El in Belle Harbor, Long Island—it’s right next to Rockaway. When my mother died and my father’s [furrier] business went down the drain, he was no longer able to contribute to the temple. And so their tickets for the High Holy Days were now in the
annex
, not in the main temple, although they had been members since the year they married. And I just—that whole episode was not pleasing to me at all.”
    Neither was the time when she tried to enroll her son, James, in Sunday school at Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue in New York City. “The rabbi told me to fill out the application for membership ‘as though I were my husband,’” she recalls with indignation. “I said, ‘Well I haven’t consulted him; I don’t know if he wants to be a member of Temple Emanu-El.’
    â€œThe idea was, as a woman, if you were not single, widowed, or divorced, you could not be a member. If you were married, then your husband was the member. I was still teaching at Rutgers—it was 1972. And I remember how annoyed I was. Still, I wanted James to have something of a Jewish education. So I said, ‘I will make a contribution to the temple that is equivalent to the membership, if you will allow my child to attend Sunday school.’”
    I ask her if these bouts with sexism were what kept her from embracing Jewish observance. Again she’s not expansive. “Yes,” she answers softly. “Yes.”
    Despite giving up synagogue attendance, Sabbath candle-lighting, and fasting on Yom Kippur, Ginsburg did go to her husband’s parents’ home for Passovers. “That was always a great time for the children,” she says. “I think even more for my children than it was for me.” Her husband, Martin Ginsburg, a respected tax lawyer and an accomplished cook, occasionally dabbled in Jewish ethnic cuisine. “In his very early days he made his mother’s chopped liver,” she says with a smile.
    Her children were bored with Sunday school, and she didn’t urge them to stick it out. “James was not bar mitzvahed,” she says of her younger son, “and that was his choice. He didn’t want to do the studying. We were living in California at that time—we were at Stanford [where she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences]. James did not like the Sunday school there, and I didn’t want to have one more issue in his life.”
    Her daughter, Jane, ducked Sunday school more cannily. “She made a deal with us.” Ginsburg smiles. “We were then going to a much nicer Sunday school at Shaaray Tefilah on East Seventy-ninth Street in New York City, but Jane didn’t like it very much. She is ten and a half years older than her brother. One Sunday morning, when he was an