Born March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the high court on June 14, 1993, the second woman (the first was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor) to serve there. The first Jew to serve on the high court since Abe Fortas resigned in 1969, Justice Ginsburg served as a United States circuit judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit between 1980 and June 1993. Prior to that, she was a law professor at Columbia and Rutgers Universities.

Ruth Bader was born in 1933 in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Her father Nathan was a furrier and worked in clothing stores. Her mother Celia stressed to Ruth the importance of achievement and independence. Celia Bader encouraged her daughter to read by taking her to a public library atop a Chinese restaurant off King's Highway in Brooklyn. Ever since, Ruth has associated the aroma of Chinese food with the pleasure of reading.

Ruth was the second daughter; her older sister, Marilyn, who nicknamed her Kiki, died of meningitis at the age of six.

At Public School 238 in Brooklyn, Ruth edited The Highway Herald and editorialized the meaning of the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights. She graduated from James Madison High School.

Ginsburg grew up with the Holocaust always in the background. She wrote in January 1993: "World War II raged on during my grade school years. Jews fortunate enough to be in the United States during those years could hardly avoid identifying themselves with the cause of the Jewish people."

In high school, Ruth twirled batons and belonged to the "Go-Getters," wearing a black satin jacket with gold letters while selling tickets for football games. She ran for student government but lost.

Her mother died at the age of forty-seven of cervical cancer, on the day before Ruth's high school graduation in June 1950. Ruth, scheduled to speak, missed the ceremony.

In 1954, Ginsburg graduated from Cornell University, where she had the reputation of being very beautiful, popular and exceptionally smart. At Cornell, she met Martin D. Ginsburg, a fellow pre-law student; they were married in June 1954.

She attended Harvard Law School from 1956 to 1958, part of which time she took care of her new daughter, Jane.

One of nine women in a class of over 500 students, Ginsburg attended a dinner in honor of women students that was a major turning point for her. She was aghast at the words of the dean, who was host, as he asked each woman to explain what she was doing at the law school occupying a seat that could have been filled by a man. "When my turn came," recalled Justice Ginsburg, "I wished I could have pushed a button and vanished through a trap door."

When her husband obtained a job at a law firm in New York, Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School. She was named to the law reviews at both Harvard and Columbia. Her husband became one of the pre-eminent tax attorneys in the country. Ross Perot was one of his clients.

In 1959, Ginsburg graduated from the Columbia Law School. She was tied for first place in her class.

Ginsburg, upon discovering that women were not welcome in New York City's major law firms, clerked for Federal Judge Edmund L. Palmieri of the U.S. District Court Southern District of New York from 1959 to 1961. "Not a single law firm in the entire city of New York bid for my employment," she said in 1993.

In 1960, the dean of Harvard Law School, Albert Sachs, proposed that Ruth Ginsburg, whom he considered one of his star pupils, work as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Saying that he was not yet prepared to hire a woman, Frankfurter declined to employ Ruth Ginsburg.

Ginsburg became an assistant professor of law at Rutgers Law School. Pregnant with her second child, she feared her teaching contract would be terminated. "I got through the spring semester without detection, with the help of a wardrobe one size larger than mine, borrowed from my mother-in-law," she noted. Her son James arrived that fall, just before classes resumed.

In 1963, Ginsburg found herself irked that her salary was smaller than that of her male colleagues at Rutgers. She helped in the effort to make the legal case that led to the large increase she and other women faculty members received.

When complaints of unequal treatment were referred to her by the New Jersey affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, she began to take an interest in cases dealing with sex discrimination.

Ginsburg had not entered the law, she insisted, to strike a blow for women's rights, but, "for personal, selfish reasons. I thought I could do a lawyer's job better than any other. I have no talent in the arts, but I do write fairly well and analyze problems clearly."

Ginsburg became a full professor at Rutgers in 1969. Three years later, she became the first tenured female professor at Columbia. Her daughter Jane, an authority on copyright law, is now on the faculty there.

In 1972, Justice Ginsburg became a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union Women's Rights Project through which she sought to demonstrate that the law discriminated between males and females and often was unconstitutional in doing so.

Later in 1972, in Struck v. Secretary of Defense, Ginsburg successfully challenged the discharge of a pregnant officer in the Air Force before the U.S. Supreme Court. From 1973 to 1976, she argued six women's rights cases before the Supreme Court, and won five, thus greatly changing the law as it affected women.

Susan Deller Ross, a Georgetown University Law School professor who worked for the Women's Rights Project during the 1970's, put it this way: "She made the equal protection clause a meaningful vehicle for the analysis of sex discrimination laws."

Constitutional scholar Erwin Griswold once singled out two lawyers in modern times who had altered the nation's course - Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg drew criticism from the Jewish community in 1992 when she was part of a three-judge appellate panel that rejected jailed spy Jonathan Pollard's appeal of his life sentence. The panel held that the district court did not exceed the large discretion it had over sentencing.

The culmination of her already impressive career came on June 14, 1993 when President Clinton selected Ginsburg to take the Supreme Court seat vacated by Byron R. White.

In announcing his choice, and with Ginsburg standing by his side in the Rose Garden at the White House, Clinton said he believed that "she will be able to be a force for consensus-building on the Supreme Court."

Tears rolled down the President's face when Judge Ginsburg paid tribute to her late mother. "I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived to an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons."

The day after Ginsburg's appointment, the media focused on her seemingly ambiguous views on abortion, noting that she had ruled in favor of abortion rights, but had also criticized the 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion a Constitutional right, saying it went too far, too fast.

Justice Ginsburg is an opera fan, reads the mysteries of Amanda Cross and Dorothy L. Sayers, loves old movies, and likes horseback riding, water skiing and golfing.

In preparation for her Senate confirmation hearing in late July 1993, Justice Ginsburg was scrutinized by the media thoroughly. That was the big change in her life. When asked on August 8, 1993 what had changed most for her, she said unhesitantly, "All this publicity."

She passed the Senate hearings with flying colors and was sworn in as a Supreme Court Justice on August 10, 1993. The Supreme Court had always seemed beyond her reach. "I never thought of the possibility of being a judge," she said, "when I got out of law school and began to teach, women were only three percent of my students." Soft-spoken, smiling frequently, clearly pleased at what was happening to her, Justice Ginsburg said happily: "This is a great time in my life."

Having two women on the Supreme Court, she believed, would make a difference "because it will seem natural. If you are the only woman, eyes are on you all the time."

In January 1994, Justice Ginsburg experienced the dream of many opera buffs: Along with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, another opera lover, she donned a white powdered wig and played an extra in the Washington Opera's initial performance of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, about eighteenth-century high-society Vienna. On stage for eighty-five minutes, Justice Ginsburg neither spoke nor sang for this one-time performance.

"Great Jewish Women" Elinor Slater and Robert Slater Jonathan David Publishers, Inc.

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