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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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University of Michigan in Row Over Professor’s Endorsement of ‘Pro-Palestinian Student Activists’
The University of Michigan Union. Photo: Dominick Sokotoff/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor is a house divided after a professor used his commencement speech to praise pro-Hamas activists, dozens of whom participated in a destructive wave of protests that scarred Jewish students and prompted the intervention of the federal government.
“Sing for the pro-Palestinian student activists who have over these past two years opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza,” university faculty Senate chair Derek Peterson, whose governance position makes him one of the powerful people on campus, said on Saturday.
Hours later, university president Domenico Grasso denounced the remarks for having “deviated” from what Peterson had submitted for review before taking the stage. Expressing regret that Peterson had caused “pain … on a day devoted to celebration and accomplishment,” he stated that the Senate chair’s expressed views do not represent the institution’s, and, moreover, violated its commitment to neutrality on divisive political issues.
“Commencement is a time of celebration, recognition, and unity,” Grasso continued. “The chair’s remarks were expected to be congratulatory, not a platform for personal political expression. Introducing such commentary in this setting was inappropriate and did not align with the purpose of the occasion. In the coming weeks, I will work with university leadership to review and refine future commencement programming.”
The matter did not end there. Grasso’s statement rankled the school’s anti-Israel element, and within just over a day some 1,000 professors signed a petition demanding that Grasso retract his commentary and apologize not to any Jewish students who were outraged by the speech but rather to Peterson, whom they thanked “for his care and insight.” Firing off a litany of anti-Israel accusations confected by the Jewish state’s enemies, the petition concluded by turning the table: Grasso, it charged, had violated the university’s commitment to institutional neutrality.
“We can only conclude that there is nothing neutral about the institution’s supposed commitment to institutional neutrality,” the petition stated. “The institution’s supposed principles on diversity of thought and freedom of expression cease to operate when a faculty member expresses a ‘forbidden’ view.”
Peterson responded to this outpouring of support on campus by doubling down.
“It should not be controversial to have one’s ‘heart opened to the inhumanity and injustice of Israel’s war in Gaza,’ which is what I credited activists with doing,” Peterson told The Michigan Daily. “Having an open heart to other people’s suffering is a fundamental human virtue, and it is a quality that I hope we teach our students, whatever their political posture might be.”
For several years, spanning before and after Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, The Algemeiner has reported daily on campus antisemitism incidents which involved identity-based physical assaults, verbal abuse, and others acts of discrimination.
Committed by the “pro-Palestinian student activists” whom Peterson extolled, they included spitting on Jewish students at the University of California, Berkeley while calling them “Jew”; gang assaults at Columbia University’s Butler Library; swastika graffiti; the desecration of Jewish religious symbols; and the expulsion of a sexual assault survivor from a victim support group over her support for Zionism. In another incident, a Cornell University student threatened to murder Jewish men, whom he called pigs, and to rape Jewish women, and perpetrate a mass shooting at the campus’ kosher dining hall.
Professors, while operating largely behind the curtain, assumed roles as purveyors of anti-Jewish content too. At Harvard University, a “Faculty for Palestine” group shared an antisemitic political cartoon which named Jews and Israel as enemies Black and Brown people. At Cornell, a professor said Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre, in which the group murdered children and pets while raping both women and men, as “exhilarating.”
On Tuesday, Alyza Lewin president of US affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM), told The Algemeiner that “the activists Derek Peterson endorsed are the same students responsible for normalizing a campus climate that equates with evil those who recognize Jewish peoplehood and the Jews’ ancestral connection to the Land of Israel.”
Lewin represents most of the Jewish community and its allies, many of whom have said in recent days that Peterson’s choosing commencement to proclaim solidarity with such a controversial and extremist political movement is indicative of a deeper problem in higher education.
“Protests on campus have repeatedly crossed the line: encampments, disrupted ceremonies, demonstrations at officials’ homes, clashes with police,” Nikki Haley, who previously served as governor of South Carolina and US ambassador to the United Nations, said in a statement on Tuesday. “The First Amendment must be protected, but it doesn’t absolve any one of consequences. Universities have deep culture problems they must address. If they don’t, they should face repercussions.”
Meanwhile, Ted Deutch, chief executive officer of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), said the “graduation is about more than commencement; it’s about campus culture.”
He continued, “Ensuring that moments like this and the broader campus environment reflect the university’s highest values require clear, consistent leadership from the university’s president and the Board of Regents, and I urge them to lead.”
Commencement speeches are a coveted theater for anti-Zionist activists searching for notoriety ahead of their transition to the real world. More often than not, the performances make them infamous, not least because pulling off the act requires deceiving the professors and administrators who approved their being conferred the high honor of addressing the graduating class.
Last year, New York University withheld the diploma of a Gallatin School of Individualized Study student who “lied” to the administration about the content of his commencement speech to conceal its claim that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, a falsehood parroted by both jihadist terrorist organizations and neo-Nazis. New York University promptly denounced the student.
Days later at George Washington University, one of its students, Cecilia Culver, not only uttered the same claim but added that her school’s hands are stained with “blood.”
George Washington University noted that Culver had been “dishonest” too and banned her from campus. The university also stripped Culver of her status as a “distinguished scholar.” Culver, whose misstep cost her a job Ernest & Young, is now suing the university for “defamation” and “retaliatory suppression of her protected expression.” The suit adds that her “professional reputation in the economics and policy community in Washington, D.C. and beyond … cannot be remedied.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Tucker Carlson Praises JD Vance, Signals Increasingly Distant Relationship: ‘No One’s Seeking My Counsel’
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Far-right commentator Tucker Carlson is signaling continued personal support for US Vice President JD Vance even as their differences over Israel and Iran come into sharper focus and questions arise about the current status of their relationship, a divide with implications for US national security policy and the future of Republican leadership.
In a new interview with The New York Times, Carlson reaffirmed his support for Vance, reinforcing a longstanding alignment and personal friendship between the two figures. But he also acknowledged that Vance is in a “tough spot” as part of an administration led by President Donald Trump that has taken decisive action, including military strikes, against Iran.
While praising Vance’s character, Carlson suggested that the vice president has been constrained by the limitations of his position. Nonetheless, the podcaster, former Fox News host, and outspoken anti-Israel voice speculated that Vance has tried to redirect the foreign policy objectives of the Trump administration in what he perceives as a more productive direction.
“I know him well and think so much of him as a person. And it is my guess that, based on his past behavior, that he’s doing everything he can to mitigate what he sees as the ill effects of [the Iran war]. But it’s kind of hard to call the shots when you’re vice president, because that’s not in the Constitution,” Carlson said.
Carlson, notably, did not indicate the last time he and the vice president spoke when asked, stoking speculation that the relationship between the two political power brokers has deteriorated.
“Oh, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t want to add to his problems at all,” said the online provocateur, who reportedly played a role in persuading Trump to name Vance as his running mate. “I would just say what’s obvious, which is that I’m hardly an adviser to this administration. And I think it’s also clear that Donald Trump makes these decisions.”
When Carlson was pressed to say the last time he spoke to Vance, he continued to avoid giving a direct answer.
“I don’t know. I mean, I would never characterize that,” he said. “I don’t want to cause him more problems. I would just say I’m not advising. No one’s seeking my counsel. I’m not trying to influence anything. I gave it my best shot. Didn’t work.”
While polling has shown Republicans overwhelmingly supportive of Trump’s military campaign against Iran, the tension between the Trump administration’s approach to Middle East and the Republican base is becoming increasingly central to inter-party discourse.
In the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, many younger voters have, according to recent polling, expressed deep skepticism of US military operations abroad and support for certain traditional allies, especially Israel.
Vance rose politically in part on a more restrained foreign policy outlook, skeptical of overseas military engagement. Now, as vice president, he is tied to policies that emphasize confronting Iran’s regional aggression, including support for US actions aimed at degrading Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities and support for terrorist groups.
Carlson, by contrast, has intensified his criticism of such efforts, reflecting an isolationist strand of “America First” thinking that questions US involvement abroad. His rhetoric has raised alarm bells among many Republicans, including pro-Israel advocates, who argue that reducing pressure on Iran risks emboldening a regime that routinely chants “death to America, death to Israel” and has been, according to the US intelligence community, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism for several years.
Carlson has gone further, however, to increase his criticisms of Israel in the two-and-a-half years following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. He has alarmed and mystified establishment conservatives by condemning Israel’s military operations in Gaza, accusing the Jewish state of committing “genocide,” and seemingly defending Hamas and Qatar, the terrorist group’s long-time backer. The podcaster has even suggested that Israel oppresses and murders Christians, despite the fact that they enjoy full equal rights and high levels of education in the Jewish state. At the same time, he has noticeably not criticized many Islamic countries for persecuting Christians, failing to acknowledge the oppression of Christians throughout much of Africa and the Middle East.
During the Times interview, Carlson chided US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, accusing the official of engaging in “nonstop treachery” against the vice president in service of advancing his own goals.
“There are people in the White House who want to hurt JD Vance and have wanted that since the very first day. They were bitter. They wanted Marco Rubio to be the choice as vice president,” Carlson said.
Republican leaders including Rubio have pushed back forcefully on the view that the US should take an isolationist approach to foreign policy, maintaining that a strong US posture is indispensable.
Against the backdrop of a shifting ideological landscape within the Republican Party, the Carlson-Vance relationship is becoming a defining lens on the party’s internal debate. Carlson’s personal backing offers Vance credibility with a key segment of the Republican base, but their policy divergence, particularly on Israel, places Vance at the center of a contentious debate regarding the GOP’s future posture toward the closest US ally in the Middle East.
Vance has refused to outright condemn Carlson and, on several occasions, has dismissed concerns about rising antisemitism on the political right, where many young voters have increasingly embraced unfounded conspiracy theories regarding the Jewish state.
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Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges
(JTA) — The man charged with firebombing a Boulder, Colorado, march for Israeli hostages in 2025 will plead guilty to killing one person and attempting to kill others in the incident, according to documents filed in the case over the weekend.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, who was arrested at the scene of the June 1, 2025, attack, is asking for his ex-wife and children to be able to remain in the United States as a condition of his guilty plea, according to the documents.
His ex-wife and five children, like him all Egyptian nationals who came to the United States in 2022 via Kuwait, were arrested by immigration authorities shortly after the attack. They were detained until Thursday, when they were released from a detention center in Texas, then briefly detained again on Saturday in Boulder and, their attorneys say, put onto a plane bound for Egypt before being freed once again. His ex-wife, whom he divorced in April, has not been charged with a crime and said she did not know about Soliman’s planned attack.
Soliman is reportedly pleading guilty to all state charges but still faces federal charges in relation to the attack, which he allegedly said he staged to “wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead,” according to an earlier court filing. He has previously pleaded not guilty to the federal charges, for which prosecutors could seek the death penalty.
Thirteen people were physically injured in the attack, which took place on a pedestrian mall in downtown Boulder where supporters of the Israelis then held hostage in Gaza marched weekly. One, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, died weeks later of her injuries.
The post Boulder hostage-march firebombing suspect to plead guilty to state charges appeared first on The Forward.