Alice Shalvi was a renowned Israeli professor, Educator and feminist who was often regarded and
revered by many as a founding mother of modern Jewish feminism in Israel. She played a leading role in
progressive Jewish education for girls and advancing the status of women an well as advocating for
equal treatment for women in marriage, employment, education and more. Shalvi was born in Germany
and moved to England with her family in 1934 to escape the rise of Nazism. After completing her
edu... moreAlice Shalvi was a renowned Israeli professor, Educator and feminist who was often regarded and
revered by many as a founding mother of modern Jewish feminism in Israel. She played a leading role in
progressive Jewish education for girls and advancing the status of women an well as advocating for
equal treatment for women in marriage, employment, education and more. Shalvi was born in Germany
and moved to England with her family in 1934 to escape the rise of Nazism. After completing her
education in London, she immigrated to Israel in 1949, shortly after its founding. In Israel, she dedicated
her life to promoting gender equality and social justice. Shalvi served as the principal of the Pelech High
School in Jerusalem, where she introduced innovative teaching methods and promoted a feminist
curriculum. She established the Israel Women's Network, an organization that advocates for gender
equality in Israeli society. Shalvi was also a professor of English literature at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem . Additionally, she played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Schechter Institute of
Jewish Studies, an institution that promotes pluralism and progressive Jewish education in Israel. Shalvi
Shalvi received the Emil Grunzweig Human Rights Award, as founder of the Israel Women's Network and the Israel Prize for her lifetime achievement.
Cicely Tyson was a stage, screen and television actress whose vivid portrayals of strong African-American women shattered racial stereotypes in the dramatic arts of the 1970s, propelling her to stardom and fame as an exemplar for civil rights. In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned black people. Cicely Tyson won two Emmys for her performance in the 1974 civil rights-era film The Autobiography of Miss Jane P... moreCicely Tyson was a stage, screen and television actress whose vivid portrayals of strong African-American women shattered racial stereotypes in the dramatic arts of the 1970s, propelling her to stardom and fame as an exemplar for civil rights. In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned black people. Cicely Tyson won two Emmys for her performance in the 1974 civil rights-era film The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. She also became the first black woman to take on a main role in the TV drama East Side/West Side in the 1960s. Tyson was nominated for a best actress Oscar and Golden Globe in 1973 for Sounder, about a family of poor black sharecroppers in the midst of the Great Depression in 1933 Louisiana.
In a remarkable career of many decades, her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.” At 93, she won an honorary Oscar, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020.
Cicely Tyson was born in East Harlem, the youngest of three children of William and Theodosia (also known as Frederica) Tyson, immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her father was a carpenter and painter, and her mother was a domestic worker. Her parents separated when she was 10, and the children were raised by a strict Christian mother who did not permit movies or dates. At 10, Cicely sold shopping bags on the streets of East Harlem. After graduating from Charles Evans Hughes High School, she found work as a secretary at the Red Cross, and later Cicely became a model at the advice of friends, appearing in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and elsewhere. In the 1940s, she studied at the Actors Studio. Her first role was on NBC’s “Frontiers of Faith” in 1951. Her disapproving mother kicked her out. By 1957, she was acting in off-Broadway productions and went on to gain small roles in feature films before she was cast as Portia in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1968.
Tyson’s monumental catalog of work spanned six decades. Ms. Tyson played Stephanie Virtue, a prostitute, for two years, and won a Vernon Rice Award in 1962, igniting her career. In Cicely Tyson’s ground-breaking role in the 1974 television movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—for which she won two Emmys (Actress of the Year and Best Lead Actress in a Drama)—she played a woman who was born into slavery and lived to participate in the civil rights movement in 1962 at the age of 110. Her work on the small screen covers the TV era in full, from 1960s shows such as Naked City and Guiding Light through House of Cards and beyond; she was also nominated for an Emmy for portraying Binta, Kunta Kinte’s mother, in the epochal 1977 miniseries Roots. And on the big screen, Tyson starred in more than two dozen films, including The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968); Sounder (1972), for which she was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar; Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), in which she played the story’s secret heroine, Sipsey; several of Tyler Perry’s blockbuster comedies; and the 2011 megahit The Help, in which Tyson co-starred with Viola Davis—on whose epic TV series, How to Get Away With Murder. She also appeared as Coretta Scott King in the 1978 NBC mini-series “King,” about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final years; as Harriet Tubman, whose Underground Railroad spirited slaves to freedom, in “A Woman Called Moses” (1978); and as a Chicago teacher devoted to poor children in “The Marva Collins Story” (1981). In 1994, she won a supporting actress Emmy for her portrayal of Castalia in the mini-series Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. She appeared in Broadway plays, television episodes and minor movie roles, including “Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright” (1962) and “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” (1969). In “The Corn Is Green” (1983), an Emlyn Williams play set in Wales, Ms. Tyson received mixed reviews as Miss Moffat, an English schoolteacher in a coal-mining town who awakens the minds of impoverished youngsters. After a three-decade absence from Broadway, Ms. Tyson returned in 2013 in a production of “The Trip to Bountiful,” playing Carrie Watts, an old woman, also conceived as a white character, who yearns to see her hometown before dying. Her performance won the Tony, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle awards. Her later television roles included that of Ophelia Harkness in a half dozen episodes of the long-running ABC legal drama “How to Get Away With Murder,” for which she was nominated repeatedly for Emmys and other awards for outstanding guest or supporting actress (2015-19), and in the role of Doris Jones in three episodes of “House of Cards” (2016).
Tyson's memoir Just As I Am, written with Michelle Burford, was published in January 2021, days before her death, tells about her life story and her iconic roles. Tyson's book talked about her having a baby girl called Joan at 17, and raised her largely out of the spotlight. She also had an early marriage to Kenneth Franklin which was later dissolved. Tyson was also godmother to the singer Lenny Kravitz, having been friends with his mother, as well as to Denzel Washington's daughter Katia and actor, director, producer and writer Tyler Perry's son Aman. She was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a runner, a meditator and, from 1981 to 1989, the wife of the jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis.
Cecily Tyson will be remembered for inspiring Black-American women to embrace their own standards of beauty — including helping to popularize the Afro. She was always reticent about her age, charity work and other personal details, like being a good-will ambassador for UNICEF in 1985-86. She helped found the Dance Theater of Harlem after the 1968 assassination of Dr. King. In 1994, an East Harlem building where she lived as a child was named for her; it and three others were rehabilitated for 58 poor families. In 1995, a magnet school she supported in East Orange, N.J., was renamed the Cicely Tyson School of Performing and Fine Arts. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. And in November 2018, a month before she turned 94, Ms. Tyson received an honorary Oscar, a Governors Award of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In an emotional acceptance speech in Los Angeles, Ms. Tyson, whose highest accolade from the film industry had been her Oscar nomination in 1972, paid tribute to her mother, who had opposed her plan for a career as an entertainer.
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, was a cultural hero and arguably the most beloved justice in American history. Ginsburg’s protection of equality and the advancement of the rights of all people, particularly women, helped to transform American society.
Working at the American Civil Liberties Union in 1972, she founded the Women’s Rights Project. She researched and argued... moreRuth 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, was a cultural hero and arguably the most beloved justice in American history. Ginsburg’s protection of equality and the advancement of the rights of all people, particularly women, helped to transform American society.
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 for the District of Columbia. President Bill Clinton nominated her to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice Byron White in 1993. Clinton interviewed Ginsburg and later said he was instantly impressed, submitting her nomination to the Senate the next day.
Born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933 in New York City to Celia and Nathan Bader, she grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and graduated from James Madison High School in 1950. Bader Ginsburg’s undergraduate education at Cornell from 1950-54 served as a strong foundation for her subsequent legal education and notable career. Noted for her precisely worded decisions on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg, in public talks credited two influential Cornell professors: Robert Cushman, professor of government, and Vladimir Nabokov, then a professor of European literature for the importance of choosing the correct word and word order.
Joan Ruth Bader majored in government in the College of Arts and Sciences. As an undergraduate, she worked for Cushman as a researcher tracking entertainment industry blacklists for Cushman during the McCarthy era, and she cited Cushman for elevating her own awareness of the Constitution and prompting her to apply to law school. Before that, Ginsburg said, “I didn’t want to think about these things; I really just wanted to get good grades and become successful – but Cushman was both a teacher and consciousness raiser.” After graduating from Cornell near the top of her class, Bader married Ginsburg, whom he met on a blind date – and followed him to Harvard Law School, becoming one of nine women there in a class of 500. After her husband graduated, joining a law firm in New York City, Bader Ginsburg finished her final year of law school in 1959 at Columbia University.
Ginsburg received attention in American popular culture for her passionate dissents in numerous cases, widely seen as reflecting paradigmatically liberal views of the law. Notably in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. (2007), Ginsburg's dissenting opinion was credited with inspiring the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2009, making it easier for employees to win pay discrimination claims. In the 2013 landmark Supreme Court case, Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529, the court struck down two key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, in a 5-4 decision. Ginsburg wrote the dissenting opinion. New York University law student Shana Knizhnik was dismayed by the decision, but heartened by Ginsburg’s dissent. Knizhnik created a Tumblr blog, naming it “Notorious R.B.G. – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in all her glory.” The blog helped turn octogenarian Ginsburg into a cultural icon for youth and young adults, creating a modern hero. Knizhnik and journalist Irin Carmon then turned the blog into a book, “The Notorious R.B.G.” that landed on the New York Times bestseller list, spawning T-shirt sales and other sundries, including a “dissent” jabot sold by Banana Republic that replicates Ginsburg’s lace ruffles adorning her judicial robes.
By 2018, the associate justice’s life story was turned into a major motion picture, “On the Basis of Sex,” with Felicity Jones portraying Ginsburg as a young lawyer. Martin Ginsburg predeceased her in 2010. She was survived by her daughter Jane Ginsburg, a professor of law at Columbia University, and son James Ginsburg, a music executive.