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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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Video: The queen of Yiddish cabaret
אַן אינטערוויו מיט דער אָנגעזעענער ייִדישער זינגערין, אַקטריסע און שרײַבערין עלענאָר ריסאַ איז לעצטנס אַרויפֿגעשטעלט געוואָרן אויף יוטוב.
אינעם שמועס געפֿירט פֿון אלי בענעדיקט פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע, דערציילט ריסאַ וועגן אירע ערשטע טריט אויף דער בינע, די מענטשן און פֿאָרשטעלונגען וואָס האָבן אויסגעבויט איר קינסטלערישן וועג, אירע אויפֿטריטן איבער דער וועלט, און דעם אופֿן ווי זי בויט אַ מוזיקאַלישע פּראָגראַם און קלײַבט אויס לידער. זי רעדט אויך וועגן איר בליק אויף דער צוקונפֿט פֿון ייִדיש־טעאַטער.
ריסאַ איז אַ געבוירענע ייִדיש־רעדערין פֿון פּויליש־ייִדיש, קאָן דער ווידעאָ אויך דינען ווי אַ גוטער לערן־מיטל פֿאַר ייִדיש־סטודענטן וואָס ווילן הערן אַ נאַטירלעכן ייִדיש.
עלענאָר ריסאַ איז אַן אַמעריקאַנער אַקטריסע, רעזשיסאָרין, דראַמאַטורגין און זינגערין, און ייִדיש איז איר מאַמע־לשון. זי איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן אין ברוקלין, די טאָכטער פֿון צוויי לעבן־געבליבענע פֿון פּוילן. אין משך פֿון לאַנגע יאָרן האָט זי געשפּילט, רעזשיסירט און געשאַפֿן סײַ אין ענגלישן, סײַ אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, און איז געווען די קינסטלערישע מיטדירעקטאָרין פֿון דער פֿאָלקסבינע.
זי האָט אויך געשריבן, רעזשיסירט און איבערגעזעצט אַ ריי פּיעסעס און מוזיקאַלישע פּראָגראַמען. אין די לעצטע יאָרן פֿירט זי דעם פּאָדקאַסט “Those Who Were There” בײַם פֿאָרטונאָף־אַרכיוו אין יעיל־אוניווערסיטעט און אַרויסגעגעבן אַ בוך זכרונות, The Letters Project.
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Israel is rich enough to live without American aid. But can it afford to lose what that aid represents?
Israel is a rich country, with a GDP per capita comparable to Germany’s and higher than that of France and Britain. It has one of the world’s most advanced technology sectors, a sophisticated defense industry and formidable military capabilities. Israel is not a developing country dependent on American charity.
But the argument that Israel no longer needs American military assistance because it can afford to pay for its own weapons misses the essential point: The $3.8 billion in annual American military assistance is not simply a financial transfer but part of a much larger strategic architecture that has sustained Israel’s security for decades.
That superstructure includes America’s repeated use of its veto at the United Nations Security Council, intelligence cooperation, access to advanced military technology, joint weapons development, and the projection of American power throughout the Middle East. Above all, it sends an unmistakable message to Israel’s enemies: The United States stands behind Israel.
On Election Day this week, President Trump seemed to throw all of that out the window. He told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” program that Israel no longer needed the funding and that some Democrats and left-wing politicians were using the financial arrangement to pummel Republicans. “Now, as far as paying Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal that we give Israel $4 billion a year, and we made a deal months ago that we’re stopping,” Trump said. “We’ve already agreed that by the end of this year we won’t be paying Israel.”
Ending the assistance would not automatically terminate intelligence sharing or American diplomatic protection – and it’s unclear what role Congress would play in changing the financial terms of the agreement with Israel, which was established in a Memorandum of Understanding that expires in 2028. But the aid is an important institutional expression of the special relationship, embedding Israel’s security in the American political, military and industrial establishments.
Consider the Iron Dome. Developed in Israel and subsequently supported by substantial American funding, it became a model of bilateral defense cooperation, involving joint production, technological exchange and close coordination between the two countries’ defense industries.
This is a strategic partnership, painstakingly constructed by generations of Zionists and their American supporters, encouraged by generous Jewish donations to both political parties in the U.S. – which in turn reflected, for decades, Jewish affinity with the values Israel represented.
Moreover, American military assistance to Israel is not simply a one-way transfer of money. Much of the assistance is required to flow back into the American economy through purchases of weapons, aircraft, missile systems and other military equipment from U.S. defense manufacturers, supporting American jobs, technological development and the country’s defense-industrial base. Joint projects created opportunities for shared research, production and technological innovation.
All of this has been subordinated to politics.
The relationship is now part of Trump’s damage containment strategy in a week during which the Republicans endured a midterm shellacking. Trump – and even more so Vice President JD Vance – seem to be concluding that American assistance to Israel, in all its forms, has become a political liability for Republicans.
American support for Israel, including among American Jews, has eroded dramatically during the Gaza war, in which tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed, and so too has support for aid dropped, exposing a widening rupture in what was once a remarkably durable bipartisan and communal consensus.
There is a legitimate argument for transforming the financial relationship between two wealthy, technologically advanced countries. But that transformation requires careful strategic planning, not an Election Day declaration. And even more remarkable is Trump’s assertion that the initiative came from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself.
Netanyahu has spent much of his political career presenting himself as the indispensable guardian of Israel’s relationship with Washington. His supporters have portrayed Trump as Israel’s greatest friend, often dismissing the quieter, institutional commitments of previous American administrations.
Yet it was Barack Obama, frequently vilified by Netanyahu’s political camp, who negotiated the historic $38 billion, 10-year military assistance agreement, just about a decade ago, in a different political epoch, before Netanyahu created scorched earth diplomacy in Israel’s relations with the Democrats.
And it is Trump, celebrated by so many on the Israeli right, who has now proposed bringing that assistance to an early end. The irony could hardly be greater, and the folly of putting all of Israel’s eggs in Trump’s basket could hardly be clearer.
“This is a function of the tremendous deterioration in the relationship with the United States to which the prime minister has led,” said former premier Ehud Olmert, speaking on Israel Radio. He argued that the principal requirement for repairing the relationship is a change of government. He pointed to the conduct of far-right Israeli ministers, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and to Jewish extremist violence in the West Bank as factors contributing to growing American alienation from Israel’s current leadership.
In a statement on Friday, Netanyahu’s office said the change “shows the strength and sophistication of our relationship, and its ability to adapt and stand strong over time.”
The possibility that Netanyahu himself initiated the accelerated termination of American assistance raises serious questions. Netanyahu had predicted an end to U.S. aid just before the Israeli elections and discussed in January phasing out the grants over a decade. Why, then, would he support ending them before the current agreement expires in 2028?
The timing is particularly striking. Trump endorsed Netanyahu ahead of Israel’s October election. Days later, on Election Day in the U.S., he announced that Netanyahu had proposed ending an assistance program that had become politically inconvenient for Republicans.
If Netanyahu subordinated a decision of such strategic importance to his own political interests, it would represent a grave failure of leadership, to say the least. The danger is that the financial component of the alliance will be dismantled without sufficient attention to the political and strategic architecture it has helped sustain.
For decades, the special relationship has been one of Israel’s greatest strategic assets. Its value cannot be calculated by adding up the annual assistance payments. Israel cannot afford to squander the confidence that America will stand behind it when its security is threatened.
Israel’s friends in the United States should not abandon the special relationship without thought for the consequences. And this entire affair is yet one more reason why Israel needs new leadership urgently.
The post Israel is rich enough to live without American aid. But can it afford to lose what that aid represents? appeared first on The Forward.
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Young Jews aren’t disengaging, they’re finding Jewish meaning in different ways than their parents and grandparents did
The Jewish community for years has worried about young adults drifting away. It’s true that people in their 20s and 30s are less likely to go to synagogue regularly or belong to a congregation or other Jewish communal institutions, which can make it look like young adults are disengaging from Jewish life.
But new research suggests that many of them aren’t abandoning Jewish life at all. They’re practicing it at home with friends and family, often through food, culture, and meaningful conversation. This development speaks to a broader evolution that will shape the Jewish future. While young adults still crave Jewish meaning, identity, and belonging, they increasingly expect to find them in ways and places different from their parents and grandparents.
The Jim Joseph Foundation recently commissioned Project Prism, a study of more than 2,000 Jewish Americans ages 22 to 40 in 49 states over 40 weeks, conducted in partnership with Sense Worldwide, and with NORC at the University of Chicago. The research included a nationally representative survey alongside qualitative and cultural research, and included many people whose lives rarely, if ever, intersect with Jewish institutions.
What we found complicates the conventional story about religious disengagement. Three out of four Jewish young adults say they do something Jewish regularly. But 45% of all respondents say their Jewish participation occurs exclusively in informal settings. That includes celebrating Jewish holidays with friends and family, engaging in Jewish cooking and food traditions, and discussing Jewish topics or current events with people close to them. Others express their Jewish identity through music, books, humor, and media, or by observing Jewish rituals and traditions at home.
In other words, a young adult who rarely sets foot in a synagogue or other Jewish institution may still consider Judaism a meaningful part of their life. They aren’t abandoning Judaism; they’re simply engaging in it in places and ways that are comfortable for them, reflect the home-based component of Jewish ritual, and bring them meaning.
What communities can do
The research is the starting point for understanding how young adults navigate life. For example, many Jewish young adults feel that they have a strong sense of purpose or direction in their lives, but a much smaller percentage say that being Jewish plays a strong role in creating that sense of purpose. Instead, they draw meaning from helping others, personal growth, their careers, and family. So rather than wondering why young adults are not going to existing Jewish spaces, families and community leaders might ask how Jewish tradition can deepen the things they already find meaningful. Helping a neighbor, caring for family, sharing a meal, and contributing to one’s community are deeply embedded in our teachings and rituals. Thankfully, our community has many existing organizations committed to these experiences. There is more work to do to help young adults find and connect with these existing offerings, and our community should also strive to design new, innovative offerings that don’t yet exist.
At the same time, the research shows that participation alone isn’t enough to create positive outcomes. When a young adult feels a sense of belonging, an experience is much more likely to have a lasting positive impact. Immersive and socially intensive experiences are especially effective. As people are increasingly worried about loneliness and social isolation, it’s important to recognize that simply getting people through the door cannot be the end goal. We need to think about how we help them build relationships and feel a part of something bigger once they arrive.
We also need to remember that these immersive experiences, as powerful as they are, attract only a minority of Jewish young adults. The vast majority are engaging on their own or in smaller groups. For Jewish families and organizations seeking to reach them, the research offers some practical guidance.
Young adults say Jewish experiences would be more appealing if they were more cultural and less religious, offered low-pressure opportunities to participate without a major commitment, fit their schedules, and allowed them to engage alongside people they already know. That could mean a casual Shabbat dinner, a Jewish cultural event that welcomes friends and family, or a gathering where participants can explore Jewish identity without feeling judged or pressured to participate in a particular way. These approaches recognize that young adults are navigating busy schedules, competing demands, and a polarized environment, while still seeking connection and meaning.
At their best, Jewish communities and institutions can provide exactly what these young adults are looking for — relationships, opportunities for meaning, and places where they feel part of something larger than themselves. But doing so may require thinking differently about how and where Jewish life happens. A generation that celebrates a holiday around a friend’s dinner table, talks about Jewish identity with family, and seeks community outside traditional institutions is constructing Jewish life differently than previous generations did, and can still create a meaningful Jewish life.
Rather than expecting young adults to come to them, Jewish organizations can help support the experiences young adults are already creating, whether by providing resources for home-based celebrations, partnering with informal groups, or making existing programs more flexible and welcoming.
Our community can continue offering the powerful immersive experiences that resonate with some while also embracing the more informal expressions of Jewish life that resonate with many others. In doing so, we can help more young adults experience Judaism as a meaningful part of their lives — wherever and however they choose to engage.
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