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Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75
(JTA) — In Judith Heumann’s 2020 memoir, the lifelong advocate for people with disabilities describes feeling shocked upon being invited to read from the Torah at her synagogue in Berkeley, California. Not only were women permitted to carry out the sacred task, unlike in the Orthodox synagogue of her Brooklyn childhood, but the bimah, or prayer platform, had been made accessible just for her.
“Oh my God, I thought, I’ve never been asked to do an aliyah,” Heumann wrote, using the Hebrew word for the ritual. “I learned how to do it.”
The moment was just one of many when Heumann, who died Saturday at 75, charted ground that had previously been off-limits to wheelchair users like her. Since contracting polio as a toddler, Heumann broke down barriers for disabled children and educators in New York City schools, protested until federal legislation protecting people with disabilities was passed and advised multiple presidential administrations on disability issues.
A cause of death was not immediately given for Heumann, whose website announced her death on Saturday in Washington, D.C. Heumann had lived there for 30 years, since being tapped by the Clinton administration to serve as assistant secretary of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services.
Heumann was born in 1947 to two parents who had separately fled Nazi Germany as children in the 1930s; all of her grandparents and countless other family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
She said she believed it was her parents’ experience that led them to reject doctors’ advise to have their daughter institutionalized after she contracted polio and lost the use of her legs. “They came from a country where families got separated, some children sent away, others taken from their families by the authorities and never returned — all part of a campaign of systematic dehumanization and murder,” she wrote in her memoir, “Being Heumann.” “Their daughter, disabled or not, wasn’t going anywhere.”
Instead, her parents and in particular her mother, Ilse, set about to advocate for her. When the city school system said Judith could not attend her neighborhood school, Ilse got a rabbi to agree that she could attend his yeshiva if her daughter learned Hebrew. Judith did, but the rabbi did not keep his word. Instead, Ilse lined up an array of activities for Judith, including thrice-weekly Hebrew school classes accessible only if her father carried her in her chair up a flight of stairs, until the city opened a program for children with disabilities.
Judy Heumann attends the 2022 Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Organization Summit at United Nations in New York City, May 20, 2022. (Chance Yeh/Getty Images)
There, Heumann wrote, she first encountered “disability culture” — what she described as “a culture that has learned to value the humanity in all people, without dismissing anyone for looking, thinking, believing or acting differently.” She would experience and then help craft this culture during a decade at summer camp, in a movement captured in the 2020 documentary “Crip Camp,” and then throughout a lifetime of advocacy that earned her the moniker “mother of the disability rights movement.”
One notable win came in 1970, after Heumann graduated from college with a degree in speech therapy. Told that she could not teach in New York City schools because she could not help children leave in case of fire, Heumann sued. She was represented in part by an attorney who would argue Roe v. Wade in front of the Supreme Court, and the case came before Judge Constance Baker Motley, the only woman on the NAACP legal team that argued Brown v. Board of Education. The city quickly settled and Heumann ultimately got a job at her old elementary school.
The public fight propelled Heumann into the leadership of an inchoate disability rights movement. Two years later, she participated in New York City protests in favor of federal anti-discrimination laws that President Richard Nixon ultimately signed. In 1977, she was one of dozens of disability advocates to occupy a federal building in San Francisco in a demonstration calling for enforcement mechanisms. Their advocacy led to Section 504, a federal statute that requires entities receiving government funds to show that they do not discriminate on the basis of disability.
The episode was dramatized on Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” Heumann was played by Ali Stroker, a Jewish actress who was the first wheelchair user to perform on Broadway. Heumann was also recognized as Time Magazine’s 1977 Woman of the Year in a 2020 retrospective.
Heumann was a cofounder of the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley before returning to the East Coast and the government advisory roles. Through it all, Heumann remained involved with the Jewish communities where she lived, including by having a bat mitzvah ceremony as an adult. In Washington, she was a member of Adas Israel Congregation.
In 2016, she cited tikkun olam, the ancient rabbinical imperative to repair the world, during a 2016 White House event during Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month. “The Jewish community has an obligation, I believe, to be leaders,” said Heumann, then special advisor for international disability rights in the State Department.
She also traveled as an adult to her father’s hometown in Germany, Hoffenheim, where she was taken to the site of the synagogue that the Nazis destroyed but noted that no one there spoke openly about what had happened to the local Jews.
In “Being Heumann,” she connected the experience to her own efforts to bring people with disabilities into the mainstream. “What a pervasive influence silence and avoidance have had on my life,” she wrote. “Why wasn’t I in school? Silence. Why aren’t we allowed on buses? Silence. Why can’t disabled people teach? Silence. Where are all the Jews going? Piercing silence.
“I refuse to give in to the pressure of the silence,” she concluded.
Heumann’s allies in the Jewish disability advocacy community mourned her death.
“So sad to learn of Judy Heumann’s passing,” tweeted Jay Ruderman, whose family foundation has been a leader in supporting Jewish disability inclusion. “She was one of the preeminent disability rights leaders in our country’s history and her accomplishments made our world a better place. I’ll miss you Judy and may your memory be a blessing.”
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The post Judy Heumann, Jewish disability advocate who spurred a movement, dies at 75 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Alabama is forcing the Ten Commandments into my children’s classrooms. As a rabbi, I’m horrified
As of this month, many public schools in Alabama are required to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, libraries, lunchrooms and all other common spaces.
Proponents of Senate Bill 99, signed into law by Gov. Kay Iven on April 10, have claimed that these enforced displays are historical, educational and religiously neutral. As an Alabama rabbi — and a father of two future public school students — I see that defense as not just incorrect, but also deceitful, especially because the version of the Ten Commandments that the law endorses is, itself, not historically accurate.
The Ten Commandments are a sacred Jewish text. They were given to the Jewish people, written in Hebrew, and rooted in a specifically Jewish story of liberation and covenant. This law takes that text, strips it of its context, and reshapes it using a Christian lens.
The version of the Ten Commandments that will be displayed in our schools omits the text’s defining opening: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” That line grounds the commandments in the narrative of the Jewish people. To remove it is not preservation. It is distortion.
Claims of the law’s neutrality are a strategy meant to give legal and cultural cover to the fact that it clearly privileges one particular Christian worldview in public institutions meant to serve everyone.
This does not reflect the beliefs or desires of all Christians. Many Christian leaders and communities understand that faith loses its integrity when it is elevated or enforced by the state. Many of my Alabama colleagues, across religious traditions, are dismayed by this as well. They understand that this law is an ideological move that uses religion to draw boundaries around belonging, and object to that weaponization of something sacred.
In opposing Senate Bill 99, the American Historical Association made the point plainly, arguing that this law presents a distorted version of American religious history under the label of “historical truth.”
The text of the bill describes the Ten Commandments as “a key part of the Judeo-Christian religious and moral tradition” — a claim that does not reflect the consensus of historians, legal scholars or the judiciary.
The idea of a unified “Judeo-Christian” tradition is itself a misleading modern construction. It did not come from Judaism. It emerged within a Christian framework and recasts Judaism as a precursor to Christianity rather than a living, evolving tradition in its own right.
Alabama students, like students across this country, deserve an education that is accurate, intellectually honest and grounded in real scholarship. Public schools should be places where students can form identities they are proud of, develop the values that guide them, and begin to understand how they can contribute to the world around them. They should be places where students feel safe, nurtured and valued.
This law erodes those principles. Instead, it replaces real education with ideology, narrowing what students are allowed to learn and how they are taught to understand their country. It denies students exposure to the full diversity of American religious life, replacing that rich landscape with a single, imposed narrative.
When a classroom wall presents one version of a religious text as if it were foundational to civic life, it sends a message. Some students will see themselves reflected in the text. Others, like my children, will learn that they are on the outside. Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists and others will be further pushed to the margins.
This law is about power: who has it, and who does not. It is about whose story is told, and whose is reshaped to fit someone else’s narrative. And it teaches something dangerous: not to think, but to conform. To get in line. To stay silent. To learn, early on, where you stand.
The United States cannot be great when it elevates one religion over others. Our students deserve better than indoctrination presented as education. They deserve a system that reflects that we are a nation shaped not by one tradition, but by many.
As a rabbi, I am angry that a sacred text from my tradition is being taken, altered and presented as something it is not.
As a Jew, I am furious that our story is being stripped of its context and repurposed in a way that marginalizes others.
And as a father of two children who will be in public school, I am deeply uneasy about what this signals to them about who belongs — and who does not.
That is why we must speak out and do everything we can to oppose and repeal this law. We must work to protect a better kind of American society — one that ensures our public institutions remain open to all, and that our children grow up in a world that reflects the dignity of difference, not the demand for conformity.
The post Alabama is forcing the Ten Commandments into my children’s classrooms. As a rabbi, I’m horrified appeared first on The Forward.
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Some Tankers Cross Strait of Hormuz Before Shots Fired, Ship-Tracking Data Shows
A satellite image shows the ship movement at the Strait of Hormuz on April 17, 2026, in Space. EUROPEAN UNION/COPERNICUS SENTINEL-2/Handout via REUTERS
More than a dozen tankers, including three sanctioned vessels, passed through the Strait of Hormuz after a 50-day blockade was lifted on Friday, shipping data showed, before Iran reimposed restrictions on Saturday and fired at some vessels.
Reopening the strait is key for Gulf producers to resume full oil and gas supplies to the world, and end what the International Energy Agency has called the worst-ever supply disruption.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday Iran had agreed to open the strait, while Iranian officials said they wanted the US to fully lift its blockade of Iranian tankers.
Western shipping companies cautiously welcomed the announcements but said more clarity was needed, including on the presence of sea mines, before their vessels could transit.
IRAN RESUMES RESTRICTIONS
The ships that passed through the strait on Friday and Saturday via Iranian waters south of Larak island were mainly older, non-Western-owned vessels and included four sanctioned ships, according to ship-tracking data.
Iran arranged passage for a limited number of oil tankers and commercial ships following prior agreements in negotiations, a spokesperson for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.
Other ships have been seen approaching the strait and turning back as Iran said it would maintain strict controls as long as the US continues its blockade of Iranian ports.
The UK Navy reported on Saturday that Iranian gunboats fired at some ships attempting to cross the strait.
Some merchant vessels received radio messages from Iran’s navy saying the strait was shut again and that no ships were allowed to pass, shipping sources said on Saturday.
Ship-tracking data showed five vessels loaded with liquefied natural gas from Ras Laffan in Qatar approaching the strait on Saturday morning.
No LNG cargoes have transited the waterway since the US-Israeli war with Iran began on February 28.
Hundreds of ships have been stuck in the Gulf since the conflict started and Tehran closed the strait, forcing Gulf oil and gas producers to sharply cut production.
Top producers such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq and Kuwait say they need steady tanker flows and unrestricted passage through the strait to resume normal export operations.
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Trump Greenlights Russian Oil to Ease Strain on Global Markets After War with Iran
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Washington, DC, US, March 27, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
i24 News – The Trump administration has authorized a 30-day emergency waiver allowing the maritime purchase of Russian oil, reversing a hardline stance in an effort to stabilize skyrocketing global energy prices.
The Treasury Department announced Friday that the license for crude and petroleum products will remain in effect until May 16, 2026, responding to intense pressure from international partners struggling with the fallout of the war with Iran.
This policy pivot comes as a surprise after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested earlier this week that no further exemptions would be granted:
“As negotiations with Iran accelerate, the administration seeks to ensure oil availability for those who need it most. We must prevent a total price collapse for consumers while the geopolitical situation remains volatile.”
Ensuring global oil availability is paramount for the US as over 80 energy facilities in the Middle East have been damaged by recent war with Iran. With the November midterm elections approaching, record-high fuel prices at the pump remain a primary vulnerability for the Republican party. By allowing Russian oil back into the maritime flow, the administration hopes to neutralize “pain at the pump” before voters head to the polls.