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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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They told Willy Loman he was everything; ’twas a great American lie
The great innovation of Shakespeare’s King Lear is that its patriarch has no sons. This problem — Lear has a vast estate, and only daughters to inherit it — marks the onset of a disaster. Because the king has no obvious heir, he is able to remake his world as he sees fit. But his choice to split his kingdom between his three daughters, based on the degree of fealty they express toward him, is catastrophic. It can be argued that Lear suffers from an excess of liberty. Without a rulebook to follow, he wreaks destruction on the country he had hoped to preserve in his image.
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is a kind of American Lear. In the midcentury United States, every man can be his own king, leaving Willy Loman suffering from a version of Lear’s affliction. Willy has arrived at a time in life at which he is keen to secure his own legacy. Unlike Lear, he has only sons, and is painfully committed to having his first-born take on his mantle. But in the land of the free, he has perversely and perhaps unconsciously spent his life glorying in his ability to make the wrong choices.
Spoilers: Willy’s choice of how to bequeath his kingdom, such as it is, will work out almost as tragically as Lear’s.
A new Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, starring an excellent Nathan Lane as the archetypal failed American father, leans into the quasi-Biblical nature of this story. It is a tale for Americans to pray over: May we become wiser and stronger as a people by learning from our forefather’s mistakes. And it is a tale to atone over, as well. Just shy of eight decades since the play’s debut in 1949, there is a great and ever-mounting body of evidence to suggest we have done very little learning at all.
Death of a Salesman follows two days in the life of the Loman family, who live in Brooklyn and have, at long last, very nearly paid off their mortgage. But they have perhaps never felt more insecure. Bills are piling up. Willy’s job as a traveling salesman has stopped paying him a salary. In his 60s, he is beginning to feel his age, and as he works for scant commissions, he’s started to exhibit a faltering grasp on reality, and an increasingly vigorous drive toward self-destruction. His wife Linda — played by Laurie Metcalf, who is, as always, stellar — senses terrible possibilities just around the corner.
Meanwhile, adult sons Biff (Christopher Abbot) and Happy (Ben Ahlers, although I caught Jake Silbermann in a fine understudy performance) are in the midst of the sort of drawn-out coming-of-age crisis that each generation seems to invent anew. They don’t know who they are. They can’t see a way toward making enough money. They’re unwilling to commit to anything or anyone. They yearn for big American lives — cattle ranches, an endless stream of available women, the dream of finally pulling one over on the boss — and are only just beginning to question whether that yearning has anything to do with the big American emptiness they feel.
The pressure created by the family’s unfulfilled dreams — of financial security, a sense of purpose, a bit of rest — turns most explosive between Willy and Biff. Willy yearns for his eldest son, once a promising boy who idolized his father, to become the business bigshot he never quite managed to become himself. But, at 34, Biff no longer seems able to stand anything about his father — up to and including the flashy American brilliance Willy sees himself as bequeathing. The tension between the father with a dream, and the son who refuses to fulfill it, comes to tragedy.
In this way, Willy’s problem is an inversion of Lear’s: His obsession with his firstborn son drives him and his family to a kind of ruin. (Youngest child Happy’s story is the quietest tragedy in Death of a Salesman; he is an overgrown boy, developmentally frozen by his desire for Willy’s never-forthcoming approval, or even attention.) And as Shakespeare’s great tragedy illustrated certain formative flaws in the English national character — I cannot recommend James Shapiro’s The Year of Lear enough — so Willy’s obsession casts a damning light on the country that created him.
Willy is all-American: He loves cars, football, fantastic get-rich-quick schemes and womanizing. He sees his chosen profession as evincing great American values: “respect, and comradeship, and gratitude,” not to mention the glory of the open road.
He’s also an individualist who has abundantly reaped the costs of that posture. He has exactly one friend, a neighbor called Charley, whom he appears not to actually like. He sees himself in constant competition with his fellow man, and carries a strain of exceptionalism that borders on the delusional. His conviction that he lives in a land of boundless opportunity has poisoned him against reality. He understands, on some level, that he hasn’t completely succeeded in achieving glory, but he can’t let himself accept that understanding. As it turns out, he would rather die.
These flaws are particularly painful to encounter at this moment, when the country has less a president than a salesman-in-chief. Willy’s preoccupation with a certain kind of smoke-and-mirrors business success now seems less like a reflection of the country Miller knew than a prediction of the ways in which it would decline. The fallacy that liberty is inherently tied to financial success has warped the nation, just as it warped Willy himself.
Biff rejects the exceptionalist mindset Willy strives to instill in him: “Pop, I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you!” he rages in a climactic argument. But Happy buys into his father’s worldview, celebrating him as a great possessor of “the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man.” When Happy insists that he will follow in Willy’s footsteps and “beat this racket” — the obscure American system that seems to keep the common man down, despite the country’s promise — the audience can easily imagine what will follow: a lifetime of disappointed entitlement, and, in the end, a legacy as meager as his father’s.
Willy might see it as an insult for Happy, whom he’s always treated as an afterthought, to seize the title of his true heir. Like Lear, his preoccupation with the question of what he’ll leave behind, and who will treasure it, has prevented him from understanding the truth about his children and himself. Lear is too attached to the concept of his own majesty to bother with effective governance; Willy is so devoted to his false idol of success that he departs the world without knowing much about it. In both cases, the playwrights understood what their characters couldn’t: that children, like countries, learn by example.
The post They told Willy Loman he was everything; ’twas a great American lie appeared first on The Forward.
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UK Counterterrorism Police Investigate Arson at Jewish Memorial Wall
An Orthodox Jewish man walks by at a wall showing pictures of protesters killed during anti-government demonstrations in Iran, in Golders Green, London, Britain, March 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor
Police said on Tuesday they were investigating suspected arson at a memorial wall in a part of north London that is home to a large Jewish community, amid a recent spate of such incidents in the British capital.
London’s Metropolitan Police said the investigation was being led by Counter Terrorism Policing, though it was not being treated as a terrorist incident. They said no arrests had been made.
The incident occurred on Monday at the site of a memorial wall dedicated to people killed in Iran in a bloody crackdown after anti-government protests spread across the country in January. Police said the memorial wall had not been damaged.
“We recognize that this incident will heighten concerns in the Golders Green area, where residents have already faced a series of attacks,” Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams said in a statement.
Over the last month, counter–terrorism officers have arrested more than two dozen people as part of investigations into attacks on Jewish-linked premises, including the torching of ambulances belonging to the Jewish volunteer emergency service Hatzola in Golders Green on March 23.
Police said after an arson attack at a synagogue this month that they were investigating possible Iranian links to the incidents. A pro-Iranian government group has said it was responsible.
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Ukraine in Diplomatic Tussle With Israel Over Grain Kyiv Says ‘Stolen’ by Russia
A farmer operates a combine during the start of the wheat harvesting campaign in a field near the town of Starobilsk (Starobelsk) in the Luhansk Region, a Russian-controlled area of Ukraine, July 9, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
Ukraine and Israel traded diplomatic blows on Tuesday as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy condemned what he said were grain purchases from occupied Ukrainian territory “stolen” by Russia and threatened sanctions against those attempting to profit from it.
Kyiv considers all grain produced in the four regions that Russia claims as its own since invading Ukraine in 2022 as well as Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, to be stolen and has protested over its export to other countries.
Russia calls the regions its “new territories,” but they are still internationally recognized as Ukrainian. Moscow has not commented on the legal status of grain collected in them.
“Another vessel carrying such grain has arrived at a port in Israel and is preparing to unload,” Zelenskiy said on X, adding: “This is not – and cannot be – legitimate business.”
“The Israeli authorities cannot be unaware of which ships are arriving at the country’s ports and what cargo they are carrying,” added Zelenskiy.
Ukraine on Tuesday summoned Israel‘s ambassador over what Kyiv described as Israeli inaction in allowing shipments of grain to enter the country from Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Ukraine‘s foreign ministry said in a statement it handed the ambassador a “note of protest.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said that Kyiv has not provided any evidence for its claims.
“The vessel has not entered the port and has yet to submit its documents. It’s not possible to verify the truth of the Ukrainian claims,” he told a news conference in Jerusalem.
Saar said Ukraine had not submitted any request for legal assistance and rejected what he called “Twitter diplomacy.”
“Israel is a state that abides by the rule of law. We say again to our Ukrainian friends, if you have any evidence of theft submit it through the appropriate channels,” he said.
Ukrainian foreign ministry spokesman Heorhii Tykhyi told reporters that Kyiv has provided “extensive information and proof” that the cargo was illegal before going public. The foreign ministry published a timeline of its actions and contacts with Israeli authorities.
“We will not allow any country in any geography to facilitate illegal trade with a stolen grain that finances our enemy,” Tykhyi said.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on Tuesday, saying Russia would not get involved. “Let the Kyiv regime deal with Israel on its own,” he said.
Traders have told Reuters that it is impossible to track the origin of wheat once it is mixed.
UKRAINE PREPARING SANCTIONS PACKAGE
Anouar El Anouni, EU foreign affairs spokesperson, said the bloc had taken note of reports that a “Russian shadow fleet vessel” carrying stolen grain had been allowed to dock at Haifa. He said the European Commission had approached Israel‘s foreign ministry on the issue.
“We condemn all actions that help fund Russia‘s illegal war effort and circumvent EU sanctions, and remain ready to target such actions by listing individuals and entities in third countries if necessary,” he said.
Zelenskiy said Ukraine was preparing a sanctions package against those transporting the grain and the individuals and legal entities attempting to profit from the scheme.
Zelenskiy said Kyiv has taken “all necessary steps through diplomatic channels,” but the ship had not been stopped.
“Russia is systematically seizing grain on temporarily occupied Ukrainian land and organizing its export through individuals linked to the occupiers,” Zelenskiy said.
“Such schemes violate the laws of the State of Israel itself,” he added.
Ukraine expected Israel to respect Ukraine and refrain from actions that undermine bilateral relations, he added.