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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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For a few terrifying minutes, Israelis were heroes again
For a few terrifying minutes aboard a Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv on Wednesday, a group of Israeli passengers found themselves with a problem that was considerably more immediate than the usual arguments about Israel. Someone in the cockpit had become violent, the airplane was descending rapidly and the people aboard had to figure out what to do. They did.
According to the emerging account, Israeli passengers helped overpower the attacker and restrain him, while pilots traveling as passengers assisted in getting the aircraft safely onto the ground in Saudi Arabia. Other passengers provided medical assistance. A flight that could have ended in catastrophe instead became one of those extraordinary stories in which ordinary people discover that the few seconds available for a decision are the only seconds that matter.
There is something refreshing about the simplicity of the story. The passengers were confronted with a danger that required immediate action, and some of them acted. Israelis watching the story unfold saw a familiar national trait emerge in circumstances where slogans had very little use.
Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy captured the comic quality of it perfectly. “Overall, the probability that a plane full of Israelis will contain a trained assault team, two additional pilots, and, statistically, at least one cardiac surgeon, psychologist, lawyer, and diamond dealer is substantially higher than 50%.”
The joke survives the caution that is always needed with stereotypes because anyone who has spent time around Israelis recognizes the type. Put 180 Israelis in a metal tube in the skies and you have a statistically improbable concentration of people who have served in the military, flown aircraft, treated patients, run companies, handled emergencies, argued with authority and developed the conviction that whatever has gone wrong can probably be fixed if everyone stops panicking and starts doing something.
For Israelis, that quality has long been part of the national mythology. The country was built around the idea that its people would have to improvise their way through circumstances that seemed to offer very little room for error. The mythology produced its own cliches: the engineer who can repair anything, the doctor who appears when somebody needs one, the stranger who immediately assumes responsibility because waiting for an official response seems inefficient.
In the military, it is the officer who shouts “after me” – aharai! – rather than leading from behind.
This is the Israel that was admired after the 1967 Six Day War – or for the 1977 commando raid on Entebbe Airport that rescued over 100 hostages held by pro-Palestinian hijackers.
Sadly, much of the world has encountered a very different Israeli stereotype in recent years. Israelis have increasingly become symbols in arguments about war, occupation, nationalism and international law. Israel itself has become increasingly isolated, and Israelis have experienced insults and worse while traveling abroad.
October 7 added another layer to the picture. The country that had spent decades cultivating an image of military competence suddenly had to confront an astonishing failure of intelligence and security. The image of the Israeli who always knows what to do became harder to sustain when the country itself had been caught so badly unprepared.
And Israel has been widely and wildly vilified around the world – by the far left, by the far right, by antisemites of every stripe and activists who have made Zionism a dirty word and have turned Israel into an avatar for everything that is wrong in the world.
Then came the FlyDubai flight.
The flight’s landing in Israel was top news all over the world. CNN reported the event as a miraculous act of heroism. Even The Guardian, not known for its pro-Israel coverage of late, gushed about the “daring rescue.”
That may explain why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved so quickly to meet the returning passengers. Whatever one thinks of Netanyahu’s politics, his instincts for symbolism are unusually sharp. For a man far behind in the polls ahead of Oct. 27, it was a godsend. He understood the importance of attaching himself to bravery.
There is an old Israeli sensibility that can be difficult to explain to people who have never lived there. It combines self-confidence with improvisation, anxiety with humor and a stoicism before dire circumstances.
The Flydubai passengers offered a particularly vivid demonstration of that quality.
But there is a larger lesson here, although it is a modest one. Countries become caricatures when their people are reduced to the arguments surrounding them. Israelis have been seen increasingly through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and sometimes through the actions of the government that happens to represent them. A plane full of passengers offers a different perspective.
They were scared. They were ordinary. They were resourceful. Some of them were brave. And the world was reminded of another side of Israel.
The post For a few terrifying minutes, Israelis were heroes again appeared first on The Forward.
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Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee appeared at church whose pastor called modern Judaism ‘fake’
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio, campaigned twice at a church whose pastor compared COVID-era restrictions to Nazi Germany and whose members took part in a protest outside the home of a Jewish state lawmaker who described it as an antisemitic act of intimidation.
Ramaswamy, 41, is running against Amy Acton, a Jewish Democrat who faced antisemitic attacks and Nazi comparisons while serving as Ohio’s health director during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Republican candidate most recently appeared on May 21 for a campaign event at Liberty Valley Church in Northfield, which describes itself as a “Bible-Believing Non Denominational Patriotic Church,” for a discussion about “The Future of Religious Liberty.” Ramaswamy appeared alongside the church’s pastor, the Rev. Jeff Tauring, who has preached there for more than two decades, according to the church’s website.
The church drew attention in 2021 after several members showed up outside the home of Casey Weinstein, a Democratic state representative who is Jewish, during protests over the coronavirus restrictions. Weinstein described it as a “show of force” intended to intimidate him and said the explicitly Christian messages — including a “kneel before the cross” banner and a call to “make Casey Weinstein be better” — directed at the home of a Jewish lawmaker made the demonstration antisemitic
Tauring, in an interview with the Cleveland Jewish News at the time, denied that the demonstration was antisemitic or intended to intimidate Weinstein, saying his church supported Jews and Israel. But he added that it was an obligation of his congregation to speak out, likening the vaccine mandates and other government health policies to the policies of the Nazi regime that preceded the Holocaust. “We feel like if somebody would have stood up for the Jews earlier, and it should have been the church, if they would have done that earlier,” he said, “I’m not sure if the catastrophe would have happened.”
Earlier this year during a sermon, Tauring described the modern practice of Judaism as “fake” and called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ”wicked person” because “he doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ and he should.”
At the Ramaswamy event in May, Josh Mandel, a Jewish ally of the pastor who campaigned on “Judeo-Christian values” during his failed Senate bid against JD Vance in 2022, told the audience that Ramaswamy would govern according to the values practiced inside the church.
“I know Vivek. He’s not just going to campaign in churches once he’s governor; he’s going to keep coming back,” Mandel said, according to a recording of the event obtained by the Forward. “And he’s going to govern based on what is worshiped right here in this church.”
Ramaswamy also appeared at the church last December.
In an interview on Wednesday at the campaign’s request, Mandel said he organized the event at the church and described the pastor and Ramaswamy as great friends of the Jewish people.
He wasn’t familiar with the pastor’s past remarks and didn’t address them when the Forward shared them.
Mandel shared a clip of Ramaswamy answering a question at the event about antisemitism, in which he called it a “cancer” in society and said it must be confronted on both the left and by “some people who claim to be on the right.”
“I think that a society that turns towards blaming a successful group of people in our country and in many other cultures in our history is a society that actually is allergic to success,” Ramaswamy said at the town hall. “And a society that is allergic to success, a real victim of that is not just the Jewish people — who are the recipients of that hatred. The real victim is the entire society itself, because it is a cancer that will eat that nation from within.”
Ramaswamy’s complicated record with Jewish voters
Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who has never served in public office, has had his own complicated relationship with Jewish voters and has taken controversial positions on Israel.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Ramaswamy broke with much of the Republican field by proposing that the United States eventually phase out its annual $3.8 million military assistance to Israel after the current agreement expired in 2028. He later softened that position, telling the Forward that aid should end only when Israel was strong and secure enough that it no longer needed American assistance.
Aligned with the “America First” worldview, Ramaswamy developed close relationships with figures like Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has promoted antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories, associated with white nationalists, and called for stripping citizenship from Americans who served in the Israeli army. Ramaswamy was reportedly on a shortlist to become secretary of state in Donald Trump’s second administration, supported by Donald Trump Jr., tech billionaire Elon Musk and Carlson.
Ramaswamy, a Hindu who was a member of Shabtai, a Jewish leadership society at Yale founded in 1996 as an alternative to the “secret societies” at the university, also faced criticism from Jewish groups for appearing on a podcast hosted by Albert Faleski, known online as An0maly, who had promoted antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories. Ramaswamy told the Forward at the time that he had not known about the host’s statements before appearing on the show and argued that speaking with someone did not amount to endorsing that person’s views.
Jewish conservatives and Republican officials have spent much of the past year publicly confronting antisemitism within parts of the MAGA movement, particularly the growing influence of Carlson, Nick Fuentes and other online personalities who attack Israel and traffic in antisemitic conspiracy theories. An increasingly vocal faction on the far right has made Christian nationalism and antisemitism central to its politics.
Acton’s experience with antisemitism
The tension is particularly relevant in Ohio, where Ramaswamy is running against a Jewish Democrat who has spoken openly about her faith and has faced antisemitic attacks. If elected, Acton would become Ohio’s first Jewish governor.
While serving as Ohio’s health director during the COVID-19 pandemic, Acton became a target of antisemitic abuse and Nazi comparisons as she enforced the state’s public health restrictions.
Earlier this month, an armed man lunged toward Acton while she was speaking at a campaign event. The suspect, Partick Havas, was charged with assault, disorderly conduct and inducing panic. Authorities did not specify whether they believed the incident was motivated by antisemitism. Ramaswamy’s campaign condemned the episode, calling political violence “completely unacceptable.”
While the state has been governed by a Republican since 2021 and has been leaning GOP in recent elections, recent polls show Acton expanding her lead over Ramaswamy.
The post Ohio GOP gubernatorial nominee appeared at church whose pastor called modern Judaism ‘fake’ appeared first on The Forward.
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What is flydubai and will it continue to link Israel and the Emirates?
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – The apparent hijacking attempt aboard flydubai Flight 1073 has put a spotlight on the Emirati airline, which has become a main air link connecting Israelis to the rest of the world.
The incident could also test the relationship between Israel and one of the airlines that has come to symbolize the ties forged by the 2020 Abraham Accords, in which the United Arab Emirates was one of a small number of Arab countries that recognized Israel.
Flydubai, a Dubai government-owned airline, began operating in 2009 and launched regular flights to Israel in 2020, shortly after the UAE and Israel established diplomatic relations.
When war broke out in Israel in October 2023, many foreign airlines suspended flights to the country for extended periods. Flydubai and other UAE airlines continued operating flights to and from Israel through much of the conflict, providing an important connection for Israelis seeking to travel abroad at a time when international air service to the country was severely reduced.
The airline has also become an important hub for Israelis traveling beyond the UAE itself. Through Dubai, passengers can connect to destinations across Asia, Africa and other regions. The airline operates dozens of flights between Tel Aviv and Dubai each week.
According to Ben Gurion Airport data for August, flydubai carried roughly 90,000 passengers during the month. Since the beginning of 2026, more than 420,000 passengers have flown with the airline to or from Ben Gurion, accounting for roughly 4% of the airport’s international passenger traffic and placing it third among international airlines operating at the airport by passenger volume.
The incident aboard Flight 1073 could now put that relationship under scrutiny.
Israel’s Transportation Minister Miri Regev has reportedly asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to immediately suspend flydubai flights to Israel until the circumstances of Wednesday’s incident are clarified, according to Israeli news outlet Ynet.
Regev said flydubai had violated the countries’ aviation agreement, which she described as requiring pilots operating flights to Israel to be citizens of countries with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations. Israeli and international media have reported that the co-pilot who instigated the incident was an Omani national.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the UAE Amir Hayek pushed back against calls to suspend the flights, however. In a post on X, Hayek wrote that flydubai and Etihad were the only two airlines in the world that continued flying to Israel “even during the most difficult times,” and argued that the UAE and the airline should be allowed to fully investigate what happened rather than face action based on speculation.
“I trust them,” he wrote.
The episode comes as Flydubai continues to expand its global network. The airline said this month that it was operating an average of 2,200 flights a week and serving more than 125 destinations in 56 countries. Its partnership with the major airline Emirates gives passengers access to a combined network of more than 214 unique destinations in more than 100 countries, with more than 4,600 possible connections through Dubai.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post What is flydubai and will it continue to link Israel and the Emirates? appeared first on The Forward.
