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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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Yiddish life in prewar Eastern Europe comes alive on this website
On a quiet corner of the internet, a new website asks us to listen.
That site — “https://www.yiddishculture.co/” — is more than a digital exhibit; it’s an act of cultural restitution. Each page restores the sound, movement and texture of Jewish life that once animated the streets of Poland and Lithuania, before silence fell.
Yiddishculture.co. is the latest project by sociologist and educator Adina Cimet, founder of the Educational Program on Yiddish Culture (EPYC). The site opens with a single, evocative idea: that language is not only speech, but atmosphere.
“The goal,” she told me, “is to make the world in which Yiddish lived visible again — its humor, its music, its human geography.” Through layered maps, archival photographs and classroom modules, EPYC transforms the abstraction of Eastern European Jewry into a living landscape of shtet, shtetlekh un derfer — cities, towns and villages.
A map of memory
At first glance, the site’s interface feels deceptively simple: a rotating globe dotted with the names Vilna, Lublin, Lodz, Kuzmir and Czernica. Click on any of them, and the screen opens on an illustrated panorama — markets alive with movement, children’s schools, synagogue facades and Yiddish signs appearing quietly amid the rhythm of Jewish life. The pages are not static memorials, but invitations to explore.
For Cimet, who has spent decades teaching Yiddish language and culture to younger generations at YIVO, this project grew out of her frustration with what she calls the “flattening” of Jewish Eastern Europe. “When people say the shtetl,” she said, “they imagine one homogenous place. But there were many shtetlekh, each with its own accent, customs and political life. I wanted to restore that diversity.”
The culture of a people, not a relic
The site’s culture section expands that vision. In elegant bilingual typography — Yiddish and English — the reader encounters the interwoven strands of Jewish civilization: Language, religion, food, political life, Shoah. Each topic reveals vivid artifacts and explanatory essays. A 1930s cookbook, for example, reveals how “the Jewish kitchen was a bridge between faith and economy.” Political cartoons appear beside essays that trace the tensions between Bundist, Zionist and religious ideologies.
“The famous linguist Max Weinreich called Yiddish a ‘fusion language,’” one caption notes. “But fusion is not confusion — it’s creativity.” The site seems to take that statement as a guiding principle: Yiddish as an adaptive art of survival, where humor and holiness share the same breath.
Teaching the future to hear the past
“We’re not trying to resurrect the past,” Cimet told me, “but to help students inhabit its worldview — to see what those people saw, to feel how they felt about language and belonging.” The project is structured for educators, with lesson plans and cultural modules designed for middle and high school classrooms. Teachers can build units around geography, literature or history, while students trace Yiddish culture’s evolution from market stalls to modern universities.
What makes “When These Streets Heard Yiddish” so moving is that it resists both sentimentality and detachment. It speaks to the generation that grew up hearing their grandparents’ Yiddish mixed with English or Hebrew, only half-understanding its cadences. Here, those cadences are given back — paired with images, texts, and sounds that reanimate them. The result is part museum, part curriculum, part memorial and wholly alive.
Memory as education
EPYC’s design quietly models an educational philosophy that feels deeply Jewish: learning as remembrance, remembrance as responsibility. The Shoah section concludes with a simple line:“The Jews of Poland were not strangers to the winds of war” and a photo of deported children walking away from the camera. Yet even here, the tone is not only tragic. The placement within the broader framework of language, food and song reminds the reader that destruction came after centuries of creativity.
Cimet, who worked with YIVO and taught for decades in Mexico before moving to the United States, understands that digital space is now where memory must live. “If we can’t walk these streets anymore,” she said, “we can at least hear them. And by hearing, begin to imagine again.”
The post Yiddish life in prewar Eastern Europe comes alive on this website appeared first on The Forward.
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Bernie Sanders downplays Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo: ‘There might be one or two more important issues’
After Graham Platner, the progressive Senate hopeful running in Maine’s Democratic primary, revealed this week that he had had a Nazi-inspired tattoo on his chest for nearly two decades, several of his allies on the left cut him loose.
One who hasn’t: Vermont’s Jewish senator, Bernie Sanders.
“I’m not overly impressed by a squad of media running around saying, ‘What do you think about the tattoo on Graham Platner’s chest?’” the elder statesman of the progressive movement told Axios this week. “Between you and me, there might be one or two more important issues.”
Sanders also said he “absolutely” stood by his endorsement of Platner. Axios plans to air its full interview with Sanders on Friday but released snippets of the conversation on social media.
Sanders has backed Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer, since soon after the latter announced his Senate bid this August. Platner’s anti-establishment platform, which includes embracing many progressive policies Sanders helped popularize, had made him a rising star despite his lack of any political experience. Platner has also taken a hard line against Israel.
That popularity was shaken following the recent revelation of Platner’s old Reddit posts, in which he made comments disparaging various groups. In an effort to get ahead of the opposition, Platner then himself revealed that he sported a skull-and-crossbones chest tattoo resembling an S.S. Totenkopf. He said he paid for it in 2007 while “inebriated” with fellow Marines in Croatia, and claimed he hadn’t known it was affiliated with Nazis (though subsequent reporting has suggested he knew it was a Totenkopf).
“I’m not a secret Nazi,” Platner said on Monday. He initially did not apologize for or suggest he would remove the tattoo.
After the revelations, Sanders told Axios he was still “impressed by the guy.”
“He went through some very difficult experiences in the military as a machine gunner, seeing his friends killed, came out of the military, he will acknowledge, I’m not telling you what he doesn’t say, he had PTSD,” the senator said. “He went into a dark period in his life. I suspect that Graham Platner is not the only American to have gone through a dark period.”
Sanders then sought to draw a line between condemnation of Platner and the election of President Donald Trump. “I think as a nation, especially given the fact that we have a president who was convicted on 14 felonies, maybe we have to do a little bit of forgiveness,” he said.
He wasn’t the only prominent progressive Jew who has remained in Platner’s corner since the tattoo revelation. Jon Lovett, the co-founder of influential left-wing podcast “Pod Save America” and media company Crooked Media and a former Obama official, has accused Platner’s progressive critics of demanding “only perfect candidates off the Harvard Law conveyor belt.” (Platner revealed his Nazi tattoo on a “Pod Save America” episode.)
“Of course he SHOULD answer for that tattoo,” Lovett wrote in a follow-up post on X Wednesday. “He’s explained the story, how it wasn’t flagged as a hate symbol when he entered the army or when he received a security clearance. He’s apologized and covered it up. Maybe it’s not enough. Maybe you don’t believe him.”
Following pushback, Platner did cover up the tattoo with a different design he referred to as a “Celtic knot with some imagery around dogs.”
In a post and video he posted to social media Wednesday, the candidate lifted his shirt to reveal his new tattoo and expressed regret that the old one might have invited comparisons to Nazis.
“It’s come to my attention that it has a stark resemblance to a symbol that is used by neo-Nazis, and I want to say, that was not my intent at all. And the idea that I was going around with something like that utterly horrifies me,” Platner said. “I know that symbols like this can be incredibly damaging to people, and the idea that I had it all these years and it could have been read like that is incredibly troubling.”
He added, “I have lived a life dedicated to antifascism, antiracism and anti-Nazism. I think that racism and antisemitism are a long scourge on our society and a long scourge on our politics, and I think it has no place in our world.”
Platner quickly pivoted, accusing “the establishment” of trying to destroy his movement with distractions.
“Every second we spend talking about a tattoo I got in the Marine Corps is a second that we don’t talk about Medicare for All, it’s a second we don’t talk about raising taxes on the wealthy,” he said.
Another prominent Jewish senator, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, responded to the revelations about Platner’s tattoo by making an endorsement in the race, which he had until this week avoided. He is backing Janet Mills, Maine’s former governor, saying she “is the best candidate to retire Susan Collins.”
A recent poll, conducted just before the tattoo revelations, found that Platner holds a wide lead over Mills among Democratic voters.
Platner’s opponents have started to riff on the controversy, as well: Jordan Wood, a former congressional aide also running in the primary, posted on social media to “fess up” that he, too, has a tattoo — of the symbol of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. “I got this tattoo a few years ago as a reminder of what hope and a positive vision can do in our politics,” he said on Instagram. Adding a dig at Platner, he concluded, “And yes, I knew what it was when I got it.”
A defiant Platner has pledged to remain in the race. At a rally Wednesday evening in Ogunquit, he again said he hadn’t known the meaning behind his tattoo.
He added, “If they thought this was going to scare me off, if they thought that ripping my life to pieces, trying to destroy me, was going to make me think that I shouldn’t have undertaken this project, they clearly have not spent a lot of time around Marines.”
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Bob Vylan Reschedules UK Gigs Amid ‘Political Pressure’ After ‘Death to the IDF,’ Other ‘Antisemitic’ Comments
Bob Vylan music duo performance at Glastonbury Festival (Source: FLIKR)
The British punk rap duo Bob Vylan announced on Thursday the rescheduling of two shows in Manchester and Leeds in the United Kingdom “due to political pressure” from government officials, Members of Parliament, and Jewish groups.
The concerts were scheduled to be the first of their “We Won’t Go Quietly” UK and Ireland tour. The London-based band was set to perform at the O2 Academy in Leeds on Nov. 4 and the following night at Manchester Academy, which is located on the campus of the University of Manchester. The shows in Manchester and Leeds will now take place on Feb. 5 and 7, respectively. Tickets purchased for the original dates will be valid for the rescheduled shows.
Bob Vylan shared on Instagram an updated tour poster, featuring the new dates, and wrote in the caption that the “political pressure” to move the shows stemmed from “the likes of Bridget Phillipson and groups in the Northwest of England.” Phillipson is the UK ‘s education secretary and minister for women and equalities. During a guest appearance earlier this month on a BBC morning talk show, Phillipson was asked if she thinks Manchester Academy should cancel Bob Vylan’s concert on Nov. 5 because of some of the band’s controversial and offensive comments.
The duo’s lead singer, Pascal Robinson-Foster, led chants of “death, death to the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces,” and “Free, free Palestine,” during Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury set in June, which was broadcast live on the BBC. Robinson-Foster, who goes by the stage name Bobby Vylan, has led chants of “death to the IDF” at other concerts as well following Glastonbury. He talked about the chant during a podcast interview on Tuesday, saying he is “not regretful of it at all” and that he “would do it again tomorrow, [and] twice on Sundays.”
Phillipson said she was “deeply, deeply troubled” by Bob Vylan’s past comments and believes the punk rap duo’s remarks on stage could cause “fear and intimidation.” She added that universities, like the University of Manchester, “have powers to take action to prevent harassment and intimidation.”
During a September concert in Amsterdam, Robinson-Foster called for violence against Zionists while calling conservative activist and pro-Israel advocate Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot the prior week in Utah, “an absolute piece of s–t of a human being.”
“F–k the fascists, f–k the Zionists, get out there and fight there, get out there and meet them in the streets, get out there and let them know that you do not f–king stand by them, you understand me?” the singer shouted.
A separate Bob Vylan concert in the Netherlands was canceled because of the singer’s remarks about Kirk and Phillipson told the British LBC radio station recently that the comments about Zionists are “chilling,” as well as “absolutely disgusting and shameful.”
Manchester Academy is operated by the University of Manchester Students’ Union. In a released statement on Thursday, the student group said the decision to postpone the Nov. 5 concert until February was made following conversations with promoters and Bob Vylan’s management.
“The Manchester performance has been the subject of deep and understandable public scrutiny, given it’s during a difficult time for our city, following the horrific terror attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue,” the student union said, referring to the deadly attack that took place on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. It added that Manchester Academy is still committed “to providing space for creative and cultural expression” and that freedom of artistic expression “is a cornerstone of a democratic society, and it must be protected.”
“Music and culture have always been spaces where protest, dialogue, and difference can exist safely and respectfully,” the statement read in conclusion. “Everyone is and always has been welcome in our spaces. We support thousands of students and the Manchester community from every background each year to find their voice and place.”
The Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester (JRC) sent a letter, supported by 10 members of Parliament, to Manchester Academy demanding that the venue cancel the punk-rap show, and made the same request in statements shared online. JRC explained that Bob Vylan has “repeatedly engaged in rhetoric that crosses the line from legitimate political discourse into antisemitism and incitement,” and said the venue must “cancel the performance and commit to clear policies to ensure that it will not legitimize prejudice under the guise of freedom of speech.”
Further concerts as part of the “We Won’t Go Quietly” tour are scheduled in Glasgow, London, Bristol, Dublin, and Birmingham throughout November and into early December. Bob Vylan said on Thursday that all of those shows will continue “as planned,” with the Bristol and Dublin shows being sold out. The “last few tickets” are on sale for the London gig.
Bob Vylan is also scheduled to perform on Dec. 2 in Brussels, but the European Jewish Congress is calling for the cancellation of the gig because “the event risks providing a platform for rhetoric that incites violence and fuels a surge of hostility toward Jewish communities.”
“We call on the concert organizers and Belgian authorities to review the decision to host this act,” the EJC said on Thursday in a statement shared on X. “The safety and dignity of Jewish individuals and all attendees must be safeguarded. There is no place in Europe for ‘art’ that glorifies violence.”
Several British MPs as well as BBC Director-General Tim Davie condemned Bob Vylan’s “Death to the IDF” comments following the band’s Glastonbury set. Because of the Glastonbury incident, Bob Vylan had their US visas revoked, ahead of scheduled shows in October, and are currently under criminal investigation in the UK. The duo was also dropped from Manchester’s Radar festival in July.
Bob Vylan has defended the Glastonbury “Death to the IDF” comments several times. Robinson-Foster explained once that he was calling for the “dismantling of a violent military machine” and insisted in a social media post last month “there is nothing antisemitic or criminal about anything I said at Glastonbury.” During a recent guest appearance on a podcast hosted by Louis Theroux, the singer revealed that BBC staff members cheered the duo when they got off the stage at Glastonbury and described the set as “fantastic.”