Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” From Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a role model for so many women, including this small, Jewish, middle-class woman who has had to make her way in the world. There is so much to admire about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, including how hard she worked for woman to have an equal footing in the workplace. I am old enough to remember the struggles in the 1970s to provide women with equal employment opportunities and how tenacious Bader Ginsburg was in her application of the law to the fight. There is a lot to admire about her accomplishments, her resolve and her sharp intelligence. Among all this, she was able to work with people who had very different perspectives and to be involved in open discussions of difficult topics. This is the lesson we need to learn from her life right now more than ever, when even her death will lead to a sharp partisan divide in the United States.
I always admired Bader Ginsburg’s friendship with Antonin Scalia, who was as conservative as they come. I wrote about this in the context of the friendship of Shmuel and Rav who spent their lives in respectful dialog of their differing points of view. Here is an excerpt of how I applied the Talmudic discussion to the remarkable friendship between the two Supreme Court Justices in a post from earlier this year:
The friendship between Shmuel and Rav’s serves as a lesson in not just respecting those that have disparate opinions from our own, but in honoring them. They remind me of the friendship between Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the late Antonin Scalia. They were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, with Scalia an unwavering conservative and Ginsburg a liberal. And yet, they were great friends who were able to contain their arguments within the parameters of the law and share their mutual love of opera. Like Rav and Shmuel they provided a strong blueprint for respect of intellectual discourse and opposing points of view.