by Madeline Shepherd, NCJW Legislative Aide

The year after I graduated from college I waited tables and worked in retail, just like my parents always hoped I would. Kidding! Truth be told, I had always envisioned going to law school but hesitated once it came time to send in a deposit. I hadn’t given much thought to the other options I had, and the commitment of so much time and money made me think twice. So after graduating Phi Beta Kappa, I donned an apron and slip-resistant shoes and got down to work.

I learned a great deal over the next few months working at a restaurant. My coworkers had mostly grown up in the area and still carried their high school rivalries. Some had gone to college and were waiting tables to subsidize their income from another job; others bounced from cook line to cook line in the area’s restaurant district and talked about going back to school. All of them were used to hardship, and faced it on a daily basis as they balanced taking care of family members, paying their bills, and seizing every opportunity to work a shift at our restaurant.

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By Jody Rabhan, Deputy Director of Washington Operations

Age 10, Topeka, Kansas; Age 62, South Pasadena, Florida; Age 15, Columbus, OH; Age 44, Tulare, CA.

Different ages, different places. What unites them is how they died: by a gun.
The names of these victims and others were read aloud beginning on Wednesday, April 10, when families of gun-violence victims began continuously reading names of those killed by guns since the tragedy in Newton, Connecticut. This campaign was launched as the Senate was expected to begin debate on a gun violence prevention measure – the first time gun legislation would be debated in Congress since the 1990s. A handful of Republican Senators threated to stifle or filibuster this debate, and thus a campaign was born: Filibuster the Filibuster.

On Thursday, I joined the families of victims and survivors of gun violence as well as gun-violence prevention advocates on the national Mall to help read the names. Readers included Lori Haas, who spoke at NCJW’s Washington Institute about her daughter who survived the Virginia Tech shooting; Jillian Soto, whose sister Vicki Soto died shielding her students at Sandy Hook Elementary School; Emily Nottingham, the mother of former Rep. Gabby Giffords’ (D-AZ) staffer Gabe Zimmerman who was shot and killed in Tucson, Arizona; Steve Barton, survivor of the Aurora, Colorado, shooting; and Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT), who represents Newtown.

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by Madeline Shepherd, NCJW Legislative Aide

A few weeks ago, almost 400 women from across the country headed to Capitol Hill as part of their participation in the National Council of Jewish Women’s (NCJW) policy conference. And in more than 150 visits, comprehensive immigration reform was one of the key issues discussed with congressional offices. Over the course of the weekend, we had debated, discussed, and shared stories about several policy topics, and talked extensively about immigration. From California to Minnesota, Florida to Ohio, women came to Washington and shared their personal stories about immigration. One woman spoke about her own experience as an immigrant to the US from South Africa during the apartheid era, another shared how her local NCJW group got involved teaching English to immigrants in their community while still others recounted stories about their immigrant parents or grandparents. All of their stories reflected the underlying Jewish value of welcoming the stranger, a notion emphasized throughout the Torah, which reminds us that we were once strangers too.

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By Alicia Kimi, NCJW Legislative Intern

For me and my husband, $11,000 would be a tremendous help. I am a recent law school graduate and barred attorney in Massachusetts with my DC bar pending. Shortly after I passed the bar, my husband, an auditor, was offered a position in Washington, DC. We made the decision to move even though I had not secured a job in the area. Although I am currently volunteering, my job search continues, and the thought of being denied equal pay because of my gender in 2013 is almost impossible to comprehend.

President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law almost 50 years ago in an attempt to abolish wage discrimination based on gender. Today, however, women still make an average of 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, totaling around $11,000 in lost wages every year — a loss based on nothing more than an individual’s gender. 

This gap affects women from all education levels. According to the National Women’s Law Center, in 2011 women with educational backgrounds ranging from a high school diploma to a bachelor’s degree still only made around 74 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.

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by Rela Mazali, author and Israeli peace activist

There is a widely accepted “truism” about gun control in Israel: Israel isn’t the US. Gun licensing laws and their enforcement here are stricter by far than those of the States. They rule out the kind of virtually unchecked small arms proliferation that has plagued the US.

Yet many foreign visitors to Israel are shocked by the quantities of arms they encounter here. While it’s indeed the case that Israel’s gun licensing laws, and some of its practices, are considerably stricter than those in much of the US, Jewish Israelis’ complacency about entrenched militarization causes the virtual invisibility of unconcealed guns to Israeli Jewish eyes. Guns are perceived by many of the Jewish majority as benign, protective, there solely for “our security” — and not a risk.

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by Jody Rabhan, Deputy Director of Washington Operations, NCJW

After all these years in Washington, I finally attended my first bill signing – the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). I was thrilled to join Nancy Kaufman, NCJW CEO and Sammie Moshenberg, Director of NCJW’s Washington Office, to represent NCJW at what felt like Washington, DC’s version of the Oscars.

Imagine a room filled with advocates and members of Congress — so many the bill signing had to be moved from the White House to an auditorium nearby at the Department of the Interior. The audience hooted and hollered when the Vice President spoke about working with Representative John Conyers (D-MI) almost 20 years ago, when they envisioned and passed the original Violence Against Women Act in 1994.

Indeed, those were heady days. I can remember representing NCJW in meetings with then Senator Biden (D-DE), as a graduate fellow tasked with covering this issue. The advocates sat around an oval table with Senator Biden in his office, and literally wrote pieces of the bill — including the first National Domestic Violence Hotline. I continued to follow this important legislation for NCJW through several reauthorizations, and came back to it in the last Congress when suddenly it became a political football, not a bipartisan slam-dunk as the legislation had been in years past. VAWA languished in the 112th Congress — a result of partisan politics —awaiting reauthorization for 2 years. I can say with certainty I wasn’t the only person in the room pinching myself that the bill — the Senate-passed version offered by Sens. Leahy (D-VT) and Crapo (R-ID) that ensures protections for LGBT, tribal, campus and immigrant victims — swiftly passed both houses of Congress and was about to be signed by President Obama.

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by Sarah Seltzer, NCJW online community engagement organizer

Just before the start of women’s history month, PBS stations around the country aired MAKERS, a widely watched documentary full of rich interview footage about the women’s movement in the US beginning with the “second wave.” The portrayal of women’s progress was inspiring, but in the film’s final chapter of women’s history, something was missing: the virtual communities that have formed in the last decade or so to fight misogyny or as Katha Pollitt recently put it in the Nation, the “intense, combative nature of online feminism. ”

I firmly believe that the struggle for women and families, to which NCJW is so committed, needs activists marching in the streets and lobbying efforts in the halls of power above all. But these days, our struggle also requires a supplement: a peaceful throng of protesters ready at their keyboards and smartphones.

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The Supreme Court façade is under construction, and so it is covered by a transparent scrim with the image of the stately columns and pediment — a kind of ghost of the court building. On this sunny, unseasonably warm February day crowds — and ghosts — filled the plaza, standing, chanting, speaking out in support of voting rights. Inside the building, arguments in Shelby v Holder — a case challenging Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — had wrapped up.

In the crowd were busloads of people from Alabama (where the case originated), noted civil rights leaders, labor union members, reporters, and representatives of groups like NCJW who came to show their support for what is arguably the most effective civil rights law ever — the Voting Rights Act. Standing there, listening to the speeches, what struck me were the ghosts — the ghost of the court building and the ghosts of those who had given their lives to win voting rights.

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by Wendy Wagenheim, NCJW life member

Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett (the most dynamic woman in the White House next to Michelle), Nancy Pelosi (the most powerful woman in Congress), Lilly Ledbetter and Dorothy Height (two women who changed all of our lives).  How often do you get to see the movers and shakers of a woman’s world?  The truth is that you can do it every three years at Washington Institute. It is, hands down, the best conference I go to.  Every time, I leave feeling excited, energized and loaded with information I can use.  But WI isn’t just about the well-known speakers. It’s about being with NCJW women – the best and the brightest from all over the country.

Remember “Jerry Maguire”?  WI “had me at hello” in 1993. My first meeting was at a meeting full of SPA’s…trying to figure out what an SPA is…what an SPA does and meeting Sammie for the first time. Funny, but I was actually scared.  I remember thinking, what am I doing here, can I really fit in? All these women seemed to be on another plane. Even though I had done some politically active things in my own community, I started to wonder if I were out of my league. I was a volunteer at-home mom thrown into the social justice arena. I met some amazing people, heard some amazing speakers, and, just plainly, had an amazing trip to Washington.

It was really the beginning of a life changing transformation. I give NCJW the credit for giving me a place to test my leadership skills and the confidence to see them through. Just two years later, I had a job. I was the Michigan ACLU Legislative Director driving to Lansing every day.  What an unexpected opportunity! Just thinking about it makes me smile. Never underestimate the power of Washington Institute. An NCJW education is priceless. (By the way, if you don’t know already, an SPA is the State Policy Advocacy Chair for each section.)

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Our day began with a meeting at Tel Aviv University’s NCJW Center for Women and Gender Studies. I was so proud to introduce our guests to Hannah Naveh, founder of the program that began 14 years ago. Hannah recalled, “What NCJW has done for us is unimaginable. No university in Israel had a program for gender studies. NCJW came here when there were no such programs anywhere in this region, invested in teaching students and helped launch a field of study that has transformed knowledge.” She thanked Nan Rich, Susan Katz, and Jan Schneiderman for their vision and their commitment. There are now 135 graduate students in the program.

More recently, the NCJW Women’s Forum has added an important supplementary component, and its head, Professor Daphne Hacker from the Faculty of Law, also spoke with us. The Forum meets on Fridays when hundreds of women come to the campus to listen and learn about a range of topics concerning women’s issues. Four students from the program joined us to discuss their own research and interests. Yifat, one of the students, came to the program after working as a lawyer because she wanted to better understand the issues facing her women clients. Professor Naveh closed the meeting and discussion with a D’var Torah about Purim and Queen Vashti’s role in the Purim story – “she stood up to the King and said no!”

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