Ruth B. Mandel, a voice for women in politics, died April 11 at her home in Princeton, NJ.  She was an infant when she and her parents fled Germany on the eve of WWII. They were among the 937 passengers aboard the ocean liner St. Louis on what was called the Voyage of the Damned.

Cuba spurned the ship. So did the U.S. and Canada. The ship was forced back to Europe, where roughly a quarter of the passengers would die in Hitler’s death camps. A lucky few, including Ruth and her parents, made it safely to England, and later to the U.S.

After the war, she went on to become director of the influential Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She also became an official with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, preserving memory and educating new generations about how the past can inform the present. She made her name running what is now called the Center for American Women and Politics at the Eagleton Institute, where she was director for two decades. It became the premier research and education institution in the country for the study of women in politics.