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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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UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament
(JTA) — The new British government plans to announce in the coming weeks a comprehensive package of economic sanctions and other measures designed to prevent the Israeli expansion of West Bank settlements.
Overall the U.K. needs “a comprehensive reset of our policy” when it comes to the West Bank, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the House of Commons on Tuesday. He spoke during his first question and answer session with lawmakers since he and the government he represents were sworn into office in July.
Miliband added that the new measures would include a ban on goods produced in the settlements and targeted sanctions on British institutions and individuals.
“We are looking, indeed, at our wider economic relationship with the occupied territories, and the different tools we have to tackle it,” Miliband explained. “We do not want British companies financing, constructing, or advertising new settlements. The work we are now undertaking is how we can stop that.”
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar warned Tuesday that if the U.K. acted against his country, the Jewish state would take retaliatory steps against Great Britain.
“We are prepared and I hope they will not make the mistake of doing this. If they do, there will be a reaction,” Sa’ar said in a podcast interview with the Hebrew news website Ynet.
Tensions between Israel and the U.K. have been escalating in light of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank following the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack.
The U.K.’s decision under the last government to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2025 inflamed the situation, which is expected to get worse should Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu win the October 27 election in Israel.
Any government that Netanyahu forms is expected to be right-wing and to continue the policies of the existing government, just as the U.K. under Miliband and the new Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, are more willing than their predecessors to go head-to-head with Israel on the issue
Miliband already floated the idea of targeted sanctions after Israel’s Lands Authority opened bids for 1,234 homes in the largely underdeveloped E1 section of the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim in August, a move that he said would undermine any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Miliband went further on Tuesday when fielding a number of questions from lawmakers frustrated about the lack of U.K. response to Israeli actions in the West Bank, such as terror activity by Israelis against Palestinian civilians and continued settler building. This includes the opening of E1 bids last month.
The foreign secretary explained that his words reflected the policies Burnham had considered even before he entered Downing Street in July, such as a ban on trade for goods produced in the settlements. “We are obviously working across government and with our allies on these measures,” Miliband said.
Israel has said that it has a right to build settler homes in Area C of the West Bank, which is under Israeli military and civilian control and where all the settlements are located. Under the Oslo Accords, the West Bank was divided into three areas, with sections A and B, under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority.
The International Court of Justice in 2024 issued an advisory opinion explaining that such construction in Area C is illegal, affirming a long-held stance of the U.N. and many nations, including the U.K.
Concern has been particularly high with regard to the E1 project, which would add 3,400 homes to the municipal boundaries of the city of Ma’aleh Adumim by building on an underdeveloped hilltop. The Palestinian Authority and the international community, including past U.S. administrations, have warned that the project would block contiguous Palestinian development in that area and thus make a Palestinian state untenable.
Miliband referenced that viewpoint when speaking to the House of Commons on Tuesday, explaining that E1 development had long been considered a “red line,” because the project “cuts through the heart of the West Bank and risks making a Palestinian state unviable.”
He affirmed the U.K.’s commitment to a two-state resolution, explaining that his government would not stand idly by while that vision was being destroyed by Israeli actions on the ground in the West Bank.
In a harshly worded attack on the U.K. and Miliband in August, Sa’ar on X warned that UK’s statements on Israel were fueling antisemitism in Great Britain and emphasized that the Jewish people had a right to build anywhere in their ancestral homeland.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post UK to ‘reset policy’ on West Bank settlements, Miliband tells parliament appeared first on The Forward.
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How the Yiddish project took root in the U.S. after the Holocaust
How did the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research find a new home in the United States after the Holocaust? Kalman Weiser (York University, Toronto) narrates this dramatic story in a new book, Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America.
Initially, YIVO’s success wasn’t a sure thing. It was “hardly clear to YIVO’s staff and supporters in the 1940s that an organization dedicated to serving the intellectual and cultural needs of a global, Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation could take root in the radically different circumstances of postwar America,” Weiser writes.
Before the war, YIVO already had an American branch in New York but its main goal was raising money for the institute in Vilna. Several YIVO activists also focused on researching Yiddish culture and history — but again, mainly in Eastern Europe.
The truth was, most American Jews had little interest in Yiddish and didn’t think highly of Jewish studies at all.
After the Holocaust, YIVO stood at a crossroads: It could either become an archive dedicated to Yiddish life destroyed in Eastern Europe, or it could further develop Yiddish scholarship to give Yiddish a new lease on life in America.
Weiser guides the reader through the fierce debates among YIVO’s associates over the direction the institute should take. Yudel Mark maintained that YIVO should focus primarily on Holocaust research, while former Bundists argued that it should study the conditions of the Jewish masses in America.
Max Weinreich, YIVO’s intellectual godfather, had an altogether different vision. He believed that American Jewry could actually play the leading role in the Jewish world after the Holocaust. At the same time, though, he didn’t think they were ready to assume this responsibility. They needed the Yiddish-speaking refugees and immigrants, such as himself and other East European intellectuals, to guide them.
According to Weinreich, YIVO should concern itself not only with visnshaft (scholarship), but with visn vos shaft (“knowledge that creates”). In other words, Yiddish scholarship needed to enable American Jews to preserve their Jewishness and secure the continuity of Yiddish.
The success of this monumental undertaking depended on the Yiddish language itself. Yiddish needed to serve as a bridge between generations of Jews, a spiritual and intellectual connection between the old country and the new.
For this reason, Weinreich held that the American Jewish intellectual leaders needed to be “de-assimilated,” and the prestige of Yiddish needed to be raised in American academia.
But despite Weinreich’s efforts, YIVO remained on the margins of the Jewish mainstream and received limited support from major Jewish philanthropic organizations. Relations between YIVO and the American Yiddish literati were also strained.
The normative, standard Yiddish that YIVO wanted to promote drew criticism from some American Yiddish writers and journalists. They argued that “YIVO Yiddish” differed considerably from the authentic, natural Yiddish they were raised with.
In his articles in the Forward, Isaac Bashevis Singer ridiculed neologisms as kadmen-yidish (proto-Yiddish) and breyshes-yidish (old Yiddish), linguistic concepts that Weinreich had invented to describe different historical phases in the development of the Yiddish language.
At the heart of the conflict between YIVO and Yiddish writers, Weiser explains, was the question: “To whom does Yiddish belong?” YIVO’s goal was to create a normative language that could be taught like other foreign languages. In this way, the future of Yiddish could be secured even if a living community of Yiddish speakers no longer existed.
The tensest chapters in YIVO’s history revolved around the struggle to recover the materials that formerly belonged to the institute in Vilna.
The Nazis sent some of the books and documents to Germany for the archives of the museum the Nazis were planning, “Institute for Research on the Jewish Question.” After the war these materials fell into the hands of the American military administration in Germany.
Recovering these materials was an incredible feat on the part of Weinreich and his colleagues, among them Lucy Schildkret (better known by her married name, Dawidowicz), who later made her name as a Holocaust scholar. Legally, the American military administration was obligated to return the plundered materials to Poland or the Soviet Union. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem was a claimant as well.
Weinreich worked his contacts among the American elite, and in 1947, YIVO recovered the archives. He also succeeded in presenting YIVO as the heir to other cultural institutions in Vilna. As a result, YIVO received the collections of the renowned Strashun Library and the S. Ansky Historical and Ethnographic Society.
The second chapter of YIVO’s history occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. A significant collection of YIVO materials was discovered in Lithuania, thanks to a Lithuanian librarian who had hidden it in the warehouse of the national book chamber.
This time, YIVO had to negotiate with the government of the Lithuanian Republic, which had recently become independent. Ultimately, a compromise was reached, and these materials can now be accessed digitally.
Weiser’s history of YIVO is an engaging, well-researched book. Max Weinreich was far from the only European Jewish refugee to find a new home in America and build a successful career there. But he may be the only one who single-handedly rebuilt an important European Jewish scholarly institute that remains active till the present day.
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A great Jewish sculptor gave a gift to America. The Trump administration is taking it away.
By the time Joel Shapiro’s Blue showed up in my morning feed Wednesday, it had already lost its legs. Shapiro’s 24-foot aluminum figure had spent seven years kicking at the sky outside the Kennedy Center in Washington. Now workers were taking it apart. In the photograph, the legs lay on the grass; the rest hung in straps, and a few guys in hard hats were standing underneath it, discussing something.
“Holy shit,” I said, then enlarged the picture, as if one of those men might explain what they were doing to the work of a man I had liked so much. Yes, I know they aren’t legs. That was Joel’s trick, to join a few rectangles and, without a face or a finger in sight, make you worry that some poor guy was about to fall.
The first — and only — time I met Joel Shapiro in 2024, he was eating a Mallomar. Same surname, no relation, though the speed with which he opened my box raised questions. Mallomars are a reporter’s trick of mine: I bring them to interviews during their brief season because they are Kryptonite to Jewish men of a certain age; even if nobody bites, the box gets a laugh. My father, who made it to 99 without losing interest in either nurses or cookies, taught me their power. Later, Julian Schnabel arrived in an all-white jumpsuit and wanted one too. I considered the theory proved.
We were at Pace, two days before his solo show Out of the Blue opened, standing in front of ARK — almost 12 feet of painted wood that looked as if it had thrown out an arm to stop a fall.
“Let’s do something we shouldn’t,” Joel said. “Touch the work.”
The guard didn’t move, so I put my hand on a Joel Shapiro.
I never understood how he did it. You’re looking at a few rectangular forms joined at unlikely angles, and then there it is, a person in trouble with gravity. No face, no hands, and still I worried about the poor thing falling—somehow it was precarious without looking afraid. Nine months later, he was dead.
Joel made Blue for that lawn of the Kennedy Center. It wasn’t on loan, and it didn’t wander in from a warehouse; he built it for the opening of the REACH in 2019 and gave it to the Kennedy Center as a permanent installation, which is to say he gave it to us. On Wednesday, it took a crane and a six-in-the-morning closure of the northbound lanes of Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway to get it off the grass.
The Kennedy Center thanked him, saying it was “deeply grateful” for the years Blue spent “animating our campus” and “honored to have been stewards” of his “enduring legacy.” It added, by the way, that institutions deinstall donated work all the time. I read the statement twice, sure I’d missed the reason. There isn’t one.
Once I might have shrugged and called it housekeeping. Then Trump took the place over, cleared out the leadership and got himself elected chairman by a board of his own appointees, and I stopped being charitable about coincidences.
Josef Palermo, a curator there until he was laid off in March, told Artnet that on Sept. 5 of last year he was called into the office of Richard Grenell, who was running the center then, and told to get rid of all the outdoor art because the president wanted all-new art for the reopening — the one that’s supposed to come after the two-year closure the board sanctioned last month. Palermo says he “delayed and obfuscated” as long as he could. He bought Blue almost another year on that lawn.
Ivy Shapiro, Joel’s daughter, runs the foundation that will now decide where it goes. I met her at Pace that afternoon; she stopped in before the show opened and shared a Mallomar with her father. She has declined to comment.
Joel had no patience for meanings he hadn’t put in the work himself. When I told him Wikipedia connected his blue to Judaism, he laughed.
“I don’t know about that. People love talking about Yves Klein Blue. This is just blue — like the ocean, the sky. It’s not mine, but it’s definitely sublime.”
So I’m not going to tell you Blue came down because Joel was Jewish. There’s no evidence for it, and the suggestion would have irritated him. But his Jewish life is not incidental, and it is not the part of him anyone is going to put in a statement.
He was born in 1941 and spent his first years at Camp Wolters in Texas, where his father was chief of medical services and treated German prisoners of war. The family came back to New York in 1945, and Joel and the other kids played a game they called “Burn the House of Hitler.” Children do that. They take whatever horror the adults have left lying around and turn it into something you can win.
A mile and a half from Blue’s empty patch of ground is his Loss and Regeneration, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: a small house tipped onto its roof and, some distance off, a figure that is also a tree. He made it for the murdered children. It imagines starting over.
Blue wasn’t about any of that and didn’t need to be. It was absurd and intimate and alive, out on the grass with its enormous kick — “a celebration of possibility,” he called it.
Near the end of the afternoon I asked why he was still working so hard when his legacy was long since safe.
“I’m still improving,” he said. Then he told me what he was after: “Work you cannot refute.”
If I could call him for a comment, I suspect he’d check the rigging before saying anything grand, and then say something that wouldn’t have occurred to me. The Kennedy Center thanked him for his enduring legacy after his sculpture’s legs were already on the ground. In the photograph, the straps are pulled tight around what my eyes still insist on calling its chest.
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