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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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Trump Says US Will Intervene if Iran Kills Protesters Amid Regime Crackdown: ‘Locked and Loaded’
US President Donald Trump attends a press conference, as he makes an announcement about the Navy’s “Golden Fleet” at Mar-a-lago in Palm Beach, Florida, US, Dec. 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jessica Koscielniak
US President Donald Trump threatened on Friday to come to the aid of protesters in Iran if security forces fire on them, days into unrest that has left several dead and posed the biggest internal threat to Iranian authorities in years.
“If Iran shoots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue, he said in a social media post. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”
The United States bombed Iranian nuclear facilities in June, joining an Israeli air campaign that targeted Tehran’s atomic program and military leadership.
Responding to Trump’s comments, top Iranian official Ali Larijani warned that US interference in domestic Iranian issues would amount to a destabilization of the entire Middle East. Iran backs proxy terrorist forces in Gaza, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon, among other places.
“Trump must realize that US intervention in this internal matter will lead to destabilizing the entire region and destroying American interests,” Larijani posted on X. “The American people must know that Trump is the one who started this adventure, and they should pay attention to the safety of their soldiers.”
Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, similarly warned on social media that Iran’s national security was a “red line, not material for adventurist tweets.”
“Every hand of intervention that approaches Iranian security under any pretext will be cut off with a regrettable response before it arrives,” he posted.
The comments came as a local official in western Iran where several deaths were reported was cited by state media as warning that any unrest or illegal gatherings would be met “decisively and without leniency,” raising the likelihood of escalation.
TRUMP COMMENTS
This week’s protests, sparked by soaring inflation and other economic hardships, are so far smaller than some previous bouts of unrest in Iran but have spread across the country, with deadly confrontations between demonstrators and security forces focused in western provinces.
State-affiliated media and rights groups have reported at least six deaths since Wednesday, including one man who authorities said was a member of the Basij paramilitary affiliated with the elite Revolutionary Guards.
The Islamic Republic’s clerical leadership has seen off repeated eruptions of unrest in recent decades, often quelling protests with heavy security measures and mass arrests. But economic problems may leave authorities more vulnerable now.
This week’s protests are the biggest since nationwide demonstrations triggered by the death of a young woman in custody in 2022 paralyzed Iran for weeks, with rights groups reporting hundreds killed.
Trump did not specify what sort of action the US could take in support of the protests.
Washington has long imposed broad financial sanctions on Tehran, in particular since Trump’s first term when, in 2018, he pulled the US out of Iran‘s nuclear deal with world powers and declared a “maximum pressure” campaign against Tehran.
US presidents have been wary of engaging militarily in Iran, but in June, Trump ordered airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities. Trump at the time ruled out sending any ground force into the Islamic Republic.
GUNSHOTS, PROTEST CHANTS
Video verified by Reuters showed dozens of people gathered in front of a burning police station overnight, as gunshots sporadically rang out and people shouted “shameless, shameless” at the authorities.
In the southern city of Zahedan, where Iran‘s Baluch minority predominates, the human rights news group Hengaw reported that protesters had chanted slogans including “Death to the dictator.”
Hengaw has reported 29 arrests so far over the unrest, mostly in the west, and including 14 members of Iran‘s Kurdish minority.
State television also reported the arrest of an unspecified number of people in another western city, Kermanshah, accused of manufacturing petrol bombs and homemade pistols.
The deaths acknowledged by official or semi-official Iranian media have been in the small western cities of Lordegan and Kuhdasht. Hengaw also reported that a man was killed in Fars province in central Iran, though state news sites denied this.
Reuters could not verify all the reports of unrest, arrests or deaths.
MAXIMUM US PRESSURE
Trump spoke a few days after he met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime advocate of military action against Iran, and warned of fresh strikes if Tehran resumed nuclear or ballistic work.
A spokesperson for the US State Department said Washington would “continue to put maximum pressure on the regime” in Iran, accusing Iranian authorities of “squandering billions on terrorist proxies and nuclear weapons research.”
The Israeli and US strikes in June last year have cranked up the pressure on Iranian authorities, as have the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, a close Tehran ally, and the Israeli pounding of its main regional partner, Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
Iran continues to support groups in Iraq that have previously fired rockets at US forces in the country, as well as the Houthi group that controls much of northern Yemen.
IRAN‘S PRESIDENT ACKNOWLEDGES FAILINGS
During the latest unrest, Iran‘s elected President Masoud Pezeshkian has struck a conciliatory tone, pledging dialogue with protest leaders over the cost-of-living crisis, even as rights groups said security forces had fired on demonstrators.
Speaking on Thursday, before Trump threatened US action, Pezeshkian acknowledged that failings by the authorities were behind the crisis.
“We are to blame … Do not look for America or anyone else to blame. We must serve properly so that people are satisfied with us … It is us who have to find a solution to these problems,” he said.
Pezeshkian’s government is trying a program of economic liberalization, but one of its measures, deregulating some currency exchange, has contributed to a sharp decline in the value of Iran‘s rial on the unofficial market.
The sliding currency has compounded inflation, which has hovered above 36% since March even by official estimates, in an economy battered by Western sanctions.
Conservative cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda said protests over the economy were legitimate, but warned demonstrators they “should not be used as a pretext by the enemy to incite sedition.”
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Yemen’s Southern Separatists Call for Path to Independence Amid Fighting Over Key Region
A flag of the UAE-backed separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) flutters on a military patrol truck, at the site of a rally by STC supporters in Aden, Yemen, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Fawaz Salman
Yemen’s southern separatist movement said on Friday it aimed to hold a referendum on independence from the north in two years, following its seizure of swathes of the country last month in a move that triggered a major feud between Gulf powers.
Southern Transitional Council leader Aidarous al-Zubaidi called on the international community to sponsor talks between concerned parties in the south and north on a path and mechanisms that “guarantee rights of the people of the south.”
The announcement comes as the Saudi-backed internationally recognized government moved to recapture the crucial region of Hadramout from the STC, which is backed by the United Arab Emirates.
RIFT BETWEEN SAUDI ARABIA AND UAE
The STC’s sudden seizure of swathes of southern and eastern Yemen from the government in early December revealed a bitter rift between Saudi Arabia and the UAE and caused a major fracture in the coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthi movement, which holds Yemen’s capital Sanaa and the heavily populated northwest.
Earlier on Friday, the Hadramout governor under the internationally recognized government said he had launched a “peaceful” operation to restore control over the area.
Saudi airstrikes hit an airport in Hadramout, according to a spokesperson for the province’s tribes, and the governor said his forces had taken control of the most important military base in the area.
Oil-producing Hadramout borders Saudi Arabia and many prominent Saudis trace their origins to the province, lending it cultural and historical significance for the kingdom. Its capture by the STC last month was regarded by the Saudis as a threat.
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What’s funny about living next to a Nazi?
This article contains spoilers for the film My Neighbor Adolf.
In the oddball fiction film My Neighbor Adolf, a Holocaust survivor living in 1960s South America believes his new neighbor is Adolf Hitler; in fact he’s so sure, he sets out to prove it. As he researches and compares notes, we learn a lot about Hitler — his aversion to drinking and smoking, his short temper, his love for chess. Yet somehow, the film has little to say about the Holocaust itself.
The film, directed by Leon Prudovsky, opens in 1934; title cards tell us, vaguely, that we are in Eastern Europe, but savvy audiences will be able to recognize it is Poland from the language. There, our protagonist, Marek Polsky (David Hayman), is a champion chess player with a big loving family. Then, the film flashes forward to 1960; now, he lives alone in South America — exactly where is unclear — the sole survivor of his family.
The film’s writers have an aversion to specifics. Most of Marek’s experience during the war is obscured, with the exception of a few small hints. When he’s in the shower, a number tattooed on his arm is visible. He asks his neighbor Hermann Herzog (Udo Kier) to keep his dog — a German Shepherd, of course — under control, because, he says, “I don’t like dogs,” an allusion to guard dogs in concentration camps. That’s about it.
Not all Holocaust films go into graphic details about the horrors their characters experienced. But they generally provide enough basic details to give the story some substance, like what camps they were at, when they were separated from their family, how they ended up in their new country or what kinds of emotional scars they now bear. My Neighbor Adolf skips all of this, making the Holocaust more of a rushed plot point than a source of emotional depth. Even Marek’s Jewish identity feels sidelined; it’s primarily limited to his visits to the Israeli embassy — where he is trying to convince officials that Hermann is Hitler — his penchant for homemade pickles and a few books he owns in Hebrew.
Still, whatever unspecified horror Marek went through in the Holocaust, it made him bitter and paranoid. He decides Hermann must be Hitler after seeing the man’s eyes, which he usually hides behind sunglasses; Marek believes he met Hitler at a 1934 chess tournament and tells the Israeli embassy he could never forget those eyes. While doing intensive research on Hitler — including buying a copy of Mein Kampf — Marek also notes that Hermann shares other qualities with Hitler, such as being left-handed and enjoying painting.
In order to get closer to Hermann and prove he is Hitler, Marek strikes up a friendship with his neighbor. In a series of events that feel more fitting for a buddy comedy than a film about Hitler, the two play chess, share pickles and even spy on an undressing woman together (coincidentally). For the sake of finding the truth, it makes sense that Marek would be willing to play a chess game or two with the person he believes is responsible for the Holocaust. But it seems improbable that it would go as far as sharing heartwarming conversations.
The film’s eventual big reveal is as underdeveloped as the rest of the film: Hermann tells Marek that he was forced to be a Hitler impersonator and now makes money from Nazi fanatics around the world. But he doesn’t quite explain how or to what end. Did the Nazi government force him? Did a non-governmental Nazi fan club see a way to market Hitler?
If the premise wasn’t already confusing enough, Hermann also reveals it was actually him, not Hitler, at Marek’s long-ago chess tournament. Is the film suggesting Hitler died before 1945, and a body double was used to keep the Reich alive? Or was Hermann just a stand-in for Hitler at events the Fuhrer didn’t want to actually attend?
Either way, this implies Hermann was cooperating with the Nazis. Yet for some reason, this revelation seems to win Marek over. Though at the beginning of the film Marek mutters “Bloody Krauts” under his breath multiple times every time he sees his neighbor, even before suspecting he is Hitler, by the end, Marek has become fond of Hermann, even going so far as to warn him that the Israeli Embassy is sending officials to his house.
It seems as though the movie wants us to think that, in the end, both men are victims of the Third Reich in their own ways. They have more in common than they have differences. It’s a lesson in empathy and humanity.
Except for one problem: Hermann is an antisemite.
In what is apparently meant to be a heartwarming moment, he tells Marek: “You may be a Jew, Mr. Polsky, but you are a good neighbor.” But, of course, this indicates that Hermann shares the prejudices that led to the slaughter of Marek’s family. Yes, he’s not the Fuhrer, but how much does that actually matter when the ideology is the same? Even Hitler had Jewish friends — that doesn’t negate his actions. Perhaps Hermann is meant to be the embodiment of the culpability of every German, that they all could be Hitler no matter how congenial they are. But even if that’s the case, it’s unclear how Marek, after losing his whole family due to the culpability of everyday citizens, is able to ignore the man’s prejudices and continue the friendship.
The expectation that Marek would ignore Hermann’s antisemitism trivializes the harm such beliefs can cause. An antisemite that likes homemade pickles is still an antisemite.
My Neighbor Adolf opens in theaters on January 9.
The post What’s funny about living next to a Nazi? appeared first on The Forward.