Ruth Bader Ginsburg — judge with roots in the Russian Empire
Joan Ruth Bader was born on 15 March 1933 at Beth Moses Hospital in Brooklyn, the second daughter of Nathan and Celia Bader, who lived in Flatbush. Her connection to the Russian Empire runs through her father.
Nathan Bader was born in 1896 and grew up in the Russian Empire; Ginsburg said that he left Odessa for the New World in 1909, at the age of thirteen. One genealogical record gives his birthplace as Proskurov, today Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine. He never attended high school in America and later made a living in the fur trade. Her mother, Celia Amster, was born in New York in 1902, a few months after her parents arrived from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and graduated from high school at fifteen. A memorial resolution of the Supreme Court Bar described Ginsburg as a first-generation American on her father's side and barely a second-generation American on her mother's.
Her elder sister, Marilyn, died before Ruth was two. When she started school there were several other girls called Joan in her class, and her mother had her called Ruth instead. Celia Bader was ill with cancer through her daughter's high-school years and died the day before Ruth graduated from James Madison High School in 1950.
She studied government at Cornell, then law at Harvard and Columbia, graduating from Columbia Law School in 1959 tied for first in her class. After a clerkship and a research post on Swedish civil procedure she joined the Rutgers law faculty in 1963, and in 1972 became the first woman to hold a tenured professorship at Columbia Law School. The same year she was founding counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project, and between 1973 and 1976 she argued six cases before the Supreme Court. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. After thirteen years on that court she was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton and sworn in on 10 August 1993, the second woman to sit on it.
She served on the Court for twenty-seven years. In an essay for the book I Am Jewish she summed up the distance between her mother's life as a garment-district bookkeeper and her own as "one generation".
She died on 18 September 2020, aged eighty-seven.
"Father Nathan Bader left Odessa for New York in 1909, aged thirteen; one genealogical source gives his birthplace as Proskurov (now Khmelnytskyi)."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Odessa (now Odesa, Ukraine)
Her father, Nathan Bader, left Odessa, then in the Russian Empire, for New York in 1909 at the age of thirteen; she described herself as a first-generation American on his side. Her mother's parents came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Father Nathan Bader (born 1896), a Jewish emigrant from Odessa in the Russian Empire, later in the fur trade. Mother Celia Amster (1902-1950), born in New York to Jewish parents from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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Odessa (now Odesa, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."