Joan Marks
Joan Marks, a pioneer in the field of genetic counseling, the practice of helping patients understand their risk of an inherited medical condition, died Sept. 14 at her home in Manhattan. She was 91.
Ms. Marks was the director of the graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, for 26 years. During her tenure, she developed it into the largest such program in the country, which it remains, and helped to establish a new health care field. Today, there are thousands of certified genetic counselors in the U.S., trained to help patients and their families confront a variety of inherited conditions.
Genetic testing was once primarily used for diagnosing genetic defects in fetuses and newborns. But by the mid-1990s, testing was able to predict the risk of developing a variety of adult conditions, including breast cancer and ovarian cancer. Today, more advanced tests can detect more than 6,000 genetic disorders, according to the Genetic Disease Foundation. The need for trained counselors to help patients understand the test results has increased exponentially.
Murray Schisgal
Murray Schisgal, a playwright and screenwriter who took his offbeat brand of humor to Broadway in the Tony Award-winning comedy “Luv” and to Hollywood in the hit farce “Tootsie,” died Oct. 1 I Port Chester, NY. He was 93.
Over a six decade career in theater, Mr. Schisgal employed elements from the theater of the absurd to write about such domestic themes as marriage, sex, family, loneliness and failure. His one-act plays were favorites of regional and community theater groups, which found them easy to stage and popular with audiences.
He once told The New York Times, “The theater is not a place for propaganda or where one seeks consolation. What we should seek is an aesthetic experience.”
Claude Vigée
The Alsatian Jewish poet Claude Vigée died in Paris on Oct. 2. He was 99. Vigée was descended from a family of Alsatian cloth merchants. Displaced from Alsace by the invasion of the Germans in 1940, he published his first poems in the underground magazine Poésie 42. He fled to the U.S. in 1943, where he obtained his doctorate in romance languages and literature. He taught French language and literature at Ohio State University, Wellesley College, Brandeis University, and finally at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until his retirement. Since 1950, he has regularly published his poetry in France.
Among other subjects, Vigée’s poetry discusses the suffering of the Jews and the Alsatians, also with the fleeting beauty of the simple, rural heritage and the pursuit of peace.
He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Preis (1984), the Grand prix de Poésie de la Société des Gens de Lettres de France (1987), the Prix de la Fondation du Judaïsme francais (1994), the Grand prix de Poésie de l’Académie francaise (1986), the Würth Prize for European Literature (2002), and the Elisasbeth Langgässer Literature Prize (2003).
Maynard Solomon
Maynard Solomon, a musicologist and record producer best known for his influential biographies of Beethoven and Mozart, died Sept. 28 at his apartment in Manhattan. He was 90.
Maynard and his brother, Seymour, founded Vanguard Records. Over time, Vanguard and its Bach Guild label released an impressively diverse catalog of valuable recordings, especially folk music, blues and jazz. The classical repertory included English madrigals, Bach cantatas, masses by Haydn, and a landmark survey of the complete Mahler symphonies with Maurice Abravanel conducting the Utah Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Solomon taught regularly at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Columbia, Harvard, Yale and the Juilliard School.
Bernard Cohen
Bernard Cohen, the lawyer in the landmark Mildred and Richard Loving case, died Oct. 12, at an assisted-living center in Fredericksburg, VA. He was 86.
Mildred Loving was black, and Richard Loving was white. They had married in 1958. Five weeks later, they were in their home in Caroline County when the county sheriff and two deputies burst in and arrested them. They pleaded guilty to violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act, and were sentenced to a year in jail.
After preliminary legal work, Cohen brought the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose legal career in the fight for women’s rights, equal rights, and human dignity, culminated with her ascent to the U.S. Supreme Court, and who — as an octogenarian — became a cultural hero and arguably the most beloved justice in American history, died from complications of cancer, on Sept. 18, in Washington, D.C., at the onset of Rosh Hashanah. She was 87.
Working at the American Civil Liberties Union in 1972, she founded the Women’s Rights Project. She researched and argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s, winning five.
In 1980, President Jimmy Carter appointed Ginsburg to the U.S. Court of Appeals Columbia Circuit. President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court to succeed retiring Justice Byron White in 1993.
For most of her 27 years on the nation’s highest court, Ginsburg, the second woman to ascend the court — after Sandra Day O’Connor —± often led from behind the scenes. But in her last decade, she became a favored figure of pop culture known as “Notorious R.B.G.” She was loved for her insight, biting wit, and trademark lace collars.
She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1999, and pancreatic cancer in 2009. She spent nearly a decade in remission. A new struggle began in 2018 when cancerous cells were found in her lungs and, the following summer, a tumor in her pancreas. Earlier this year, she was declared cancer free, but the relief was short lived. In July, her cancer returned. Throughout her illness, the justice remained hopeful and determined.
[May her memory be for a blessing.]
When we say “may her memory be for a blessing,” what exactly does that mean? The blessing is not “may we remember her fondly” or “may her memory be a blessing to us.” The blessing implied is this: May we be like Ruth. Jewish thought teaches us that when a person dies, it is up to those who bear her memory to keep her goodness alive. We do this by remembering her, we do this by speaking her name, we do this by carrying on her legacy. We do this by continuing to pursue justice, righteousness, sustainability.
—The Forward/Molly Conway
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the first woman and the first Jewish person to lie in state in the rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, shown here on Sep. 25, 2020. NYTimes photo
Commentary On The Death Of R.B.G.
Most often, commentaries on events as profound as the death of someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg are well-chosen words of praise for the departed — compelling, insightful. But sometimes, the words cut so deeply to the heart that a simple expression of admiration rises to high art. Such is the case of an op-ed by contributing opinion writer Jennifer Weiner in the Wednesday, Sept. 30, issue of The New York Times. Below are excerpts from that writing:
The Very Jewish R.B.G.
Referring to a characterization in The Guardian that Justice Ginsburg had “abandoned her religion,” it was reported that American Jews were quick to push back against the newspaper. Jennifer Weiner wrote: “The controversy, however, left me with a question: What does it mean to be Jewish in America?
“I can’t answer for R.B.G. But most Jews will tell you that a Jewish identity has little to do with whether you keep kosher or attend services every Friday, and everything to do with your culture, your ethnicity; with the way you see the world and the way the world sees you. It is an identity we can’t slip, even if we want to.
“From what I can tell, Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t want to. She might not have been a regular at synagogue or at Sisterhood meetings, but she lived a Jewish life.
“Jewish values run through her writings like a shining thread. If you’ve been excluded, you fight for inclusion. If you’ve been made to feel less-than, because of your gender or your sexual orientation or your race or your religion, you stand up for others who’ve been denied a seat at the table. The notion of tikkun olam, that the world is broken and that each of us has a role in its repair, is a value that would lead someone to a life like hers. It is a value that overlaps with the highest American ideals.
“I haven’t become significantly more observant in the last four years. But I have never felt more Jewish. The rise in anti-Semitism, the torrents of toxic online abuse directed toward Jewish women, the idea that Jews are not ‘really’ Americans — all of it has only rooted me more deeply in my faith and my identity, and made me more committed to Jewish values.
“In this terrible year of so much sorrow, losing Ruth Bader Ginsburg — and losing her on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, at the start of the High Holy Days, at the end of an old year and on the cusp of a new one — felt especially painful. But I remember the words from the Torah exhortation framed on Justice Ginsburg’s wall and woven into one of her lace jabots: ‘Justice, justice, shall you pursue.’ And another Jewish teaching that she must have known, which says, ‘You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.’
“Giving up is a luxury that none of us can permit ourselves. It is the last thing the Notorious R.B.G. would want — and the least Jewish thing we could do.”
Stephen F. Cohen
Stephen F. Cohen, an eminent historian whose books and commentaries on Russia examined the rise and fall of Communism, Kremlin dictatorships, and the emergence of a post-Soviet nation in the 21st century, died Sept. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.
A professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, Cohen chronicled a Russia of sweeping social upheavals and the passions and poetry of a people who had endured a century of wars, political repression, and economic hardship.
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