This article is also available as a weekly newsletter called “Life Stories,” in which we remember those who have had an extraordinary impact on the Jewish world – or simply made their community a better or more interesting place. Subscribe here to get “Life Stories” in your inbox every Tuesday.
Hettie Jones, 90, one half of a power couple of the Beat Generation
Growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in Laurelton, Queens (her mother was president of local Hadassah chapters), Hettie Cohen dreamed of other places.
After college in Virginia, she immersed herself in the bohemian jazz, beat poetry, and left-wing politics of Greenwich Village and met and married an aspiring black poet and playwright named LeRoi Jones. Together they founded an influential magazine and publishing company and raised two daughters.
In 1964, Jones divorced her and changed his name to Amiri Baraka, as he aligned himself with the Afro-nationalist politics of the time. Hettie Jones She went on to write more than 20 books – including an acclaimed autobiography called “How I Became Hettie Jones” – and taught poetry and mentored other writers. Her books for children and young adults often featured people of color.
“With these and other works, Hettie followed a path that was so sensationally followed by artists such as Jacqueline Woodson today: Children need to learn about diversity because we live in a diverse world,” wrote critic Hilton Als.
A fixture in Manhattan’s East Village. She died on August 13 in Philadelphia at the age of 90.
Rodney Mariner, 83, a leading British Reform rabbi
Rabbi Rodney Mariner was head of the Beit Din of the British Reform movement and the European region of the European Union for Progressive Judaism until his retirement in 2012. (EUPJ)
Rabbi Rodney Marinera Reform rabbi who led London’s Belsize Square Synagogue from 1982 to 2011, died this month. He was 83 years old.
Born in Australia in 1941, Mariner worked as an engineer and teacher before becoming a rabbi. As head of the Beit Din of the Reform Judaism movement, he spent 22 years assisting people in conversions and helping immigrants from the former Soviet Union clarify their Jewish status.
“He was a model of common sense and humor, two religious qualities whose importance is often underestimated,” Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain, the current head of the Reform Beit Din, told the Jewish Chronicle“As a community rabbi who often presented status cases to him, I learned a lot from him, both about Jewish procedure and, just as importantly, about humanity.”
Milton Rube, 99, Cleveland rabbi who rebelled against tradition
In 1975, Rabbi Milton Rube founded Congregation Bethaynu in Cleveland, which grew to 600 families. (Cleveland Jewish News)
As a student at Yeshiva Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn – then one of the most prestigious Orthodox institutions in the country – Milton Rube told his rabbis that he wanted to become a physicist because he could not tell them the truth: that he wanted to become a conservative rabbi.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from Brooklyn College, he enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary and subsequently served in various pulpits in the Cleveland area, including the Temple on the Heights in Cleveland Heights and Congregation Bethaynu, which he founded in 1975.
At Bethaynu, he again bucked tradition when he hired Kathryn Wolfe Sebo as cantor, at a time when few Conservative synagogues did so. She served alongside Rube full-time at Bethaynu for the next 14 years, until he retired in 1999. He “was part of changing the mindset of future generations,” Sebo said. told the Cleveland Jewish News.
Rabbi Rube died on August 14 at the age of 99.
Peter Stein, 87, sociologist who survived Nazi-occupied Prague
Peter J. Stein was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at William Paterson University in New Jersey and a Holocaust educator. (Holocaust Speakers Bureau)
When German troops invaded Prague in 1939, Peter SteinThe family lost all faith that their lives would return to normal. His Jewish father and Catholic mother were considered a “mixed marriage,” and while his father was spared the raids that killed much of his extended Jewish family, he was forced into labor and deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1945.
The family survived years of terror and numerous near-misses and arrived in New York on November 3, 1948. Peter attended City College and then Princeton University, where he earned his doctorate in sociology.
In 2018 he wrote “A boy’s journey: From Nazi-occupied Prague to American freedom.” Stone was co-director of the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Center at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where he was a sociology professor, and helped establish the Holocaust Speakers Bureau in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. While in Washington, DC, he worked as a volunteer at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Stein died August 9. He was 87.
“In every society we know, there have been some people with more power, and they have been able to use that power to label other people as different, as outsiders,” he said. an interviewer in 2022. “So I would simply like to see more tolerance and more understanding for other people.”
Susan Wojcicki, 56, Jewish philanthropist and former CEO of YouTube
Susan Wojcicki speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 at Pier 48 in San Francisco, September 14, 2016. (TechCrunch/Wikipedia)
As one of Google’s first employees and oldest woman Executive – and later CEO of YouTube – Susan Wojcicki was a “role model throughout her industry and a link to the earliest and humbler days of her mighty company,” Tech journalist Adam Lashinsky recalled.
She was also valued for her ability to communicate within a diverse and sometimes sensitive workforce; in 2021, she mediated between employees representing different sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “Given the ongoing anti-Semitic sentiment around the world, it is our responsibility to do everything we can to make YouTube a better platform for the many communities that use it every day,” said Wojcicki, who along with her husband Dennis Troper, a mlong-time Google manager, supported Jewish causes in the Bay Area, including the Oshman Family JCC and Gideon Housner Jewish Day School — wrote at that time. “This is a priority shared not only by me but also by…the entire Google leadership team.”
Wojcicki resigned from her position at YouTube in 2023, saying she wanted to focus on her family and health. Beginning of the year Her son, Marco Troper, 19, died of a drug overdose in Berkeley, police reported..
Wojcicki, 56, died on August 9th. In a Facebook post, her husband said she had been battling cancer for two years.
Howie Stein, 81, “Mad Man” who wrote famous campaigns for Alka Seltzer
“The best lines come from real life. You catch one, shine a light on it and put it in the right situation,” says copywriter Howie Cohen, who created a series of unforgettable campaigns for Alka Seltzer. (Courtesy of Jerry Cohen)
Howie Cohen was given a tape recorder for his bar mitzvah, and at 13, the Bronx native used it to make his own versions of popular commercials. It stuck: In the 1970s, he and a partner at the Manhattan advertising agency Wells Rich Greene invented two slogans for the antacid Alka Seltzer that made advertising history: “Try it, you’ll like it” and “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing.”
The campaigns revitalized a flagging brand and went “viral” years before the term became synonymous with a pop culture earworm that couldn’t be ignored.
“TThe LA Times called me ‘a real Don Draper,'” Cohen wrote in his blog titled “Mad Human” in an homage to the AMC series about the advertising industry of his youth. “I’m a little more Jewish than he is, but I understand the comparison.” Cohen retired from an agency he founded in 2017. He died on March 2 at his home in Los AngelesHe was 81.
