OUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE BOROUGH OF KINGS
COURIER LIFE, OCTOBER 15-21, 2021 47
BY JULIANNE MCSHANE
Within the last decade of her life,
the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg became known by a
nickname: Notorious RBG.
The moniker — coined by a secondyear
law student at NYU who was inspired
by a scathing dissent Ginsburg
penned in response to a 2013 Supreme
Court decision that struck down part of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — derived
from that of the late rapper, the Notorious
B.I.G.
Initially taken aback by the prospect
of being known as ‘notorious,’ Ginsburg
— a staunch defender of women’s rights
who those close to her have described
as introverted and a deep thinker —
eventually took to the title due to the
roots that she and her rapper namesake
shared: “We were both born and
bred in Brooklyn, New York,” she told
the late journalist Gwen Ifi ll in 2016.
Those early years of Ginsburg’s life
spent growing up in Kings County are
explored in “Notorious RBG: The Life
and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,”
a new exhibit on view at the New-York
Historical Society, in Manhattan,
through next January. Through photographs,
documents, and other artifacts,
the exhibit charts the highlights of
Ginsburg’s legal career and how growing
up in the Midwood area — as the
daughter of a Jewish immigrant, and
surrounded by Irish, Italian, and eastern
European immigrants — shaped
the values that led her to use the law
in pursuit of justice for all, according
to one of the Historical Society staffers
who helped coordinate the exhibit.
“Her life’s work is all about expanding
who is included in the preamble of
the constitution, of ‘We the People.’ Being
born in this community in Brooklyn
is absolutely something that drove
her her entire life,” said Anna Danziger
Halperin, the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellow in Women’s History
and Public History at the Center for
Women’s History.
Following Ginsburg’s death last September,
of complications from pancreatic
cancer at age 87, Brooklynites honored
her Kings County roots through
a slew of memorials: Ginsburg’s name
now adorns the former Downtown
Brooklyn Municipal Building and
will replace Coney Island Hospital’s
current name as of next summer. In
March, local politicos also unveiled
a six-foot-tall bronze statue of the late
legal titan at City Point shopping mall
downtown.
But her Brooklyn beginnings were
more humble than her legacy has
proven to be: Ginsburg grew up on
East 9th Street between avenues O and
P, and attended PS 238, a block from
her home. There, she was editor of the
school newspaper, “Highway Herald,”
for which she wrote a 1946 editorial,
included in the exhibition, that examined
the signifi cance of the Ten Commandments,
the Magna Carta, the
1689 Bill of Rights, the Declaration of
Independence, and the UN Charter.
That same year, for the bulletin of
the East Midwood Jewish Center, Ginsburg
— an eighth grader who would
have been around 13 years old at the
time — penned an article called “One
People,” also included in the exhibition,
that argued that “for righteous
people hate and prejudice are neither
good occupations nor fi t companions,”
she wrote.
After she fi nished her studies, Ginsburg
went on to teach at Rutgers Law
School and Columbia Law School and
co-founded the Women’s Rights Project
at the American Civil Liberties
Union, where she advocated for gender
equity and women’s rights, winning
fi ve of the six cases she argued before
the Supreme Court — including Reed
v. Reed, which marked the fi rst time
the Supreme Court ever struck down
a law that treated men and women unequally,
the exhibit notes.
These feminist commitments were
also shaped by Ginsburg’s early years
in Kings County, according to Danziger
Halperin.
“Being in a Jewish community in
Brooklyn helped her learn to question
everything and to think about all these
things that would then guide her for
the rest of her life,” she said, pointing
to Ginsburg’s recollection of not being
counted in the minyan — or the quorum
of men required by Jewish law
to be present for communal prayers
— while mourning her mother, Celia,
who died of cancer the day before Ginsburg’s
high school graduation. “I think
she was very cognizant of the kinds of
barriers that she would then spend her
life pushing against.”
Following her work at the ACLU,
Ginsburg was nominated by President
Jimmy Carter to the US Court of Appeals
for the DC Circuit in 1980, and to
the Supreme Court by President Bill
Clinton in 1993.
‘Brooklyn
drove her’
Exhibit spotlights
Ginsburg’s early
years in the boro
LAWFUL GOOD: The life and legacy of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
takes centerstage in “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” a new
exhibit on view at the New-York Historical Society. Photo by New-York Historical Society