Schwab: The press starts reporting on her breathlessly. They go wild with nicknames. She’s referred to as the girl rabbi of the Golden West, the Jewess in the pulpit, a latter-day Deborah, . like the most popular Jewish woman in America.
Schwab: From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the show where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: I’m Yael Steiner and I am particularly thrilled to be able to just sit back, listen and learn from Dr. Professor Jonathan Schwab with another tribute to an amazing Jewish woman.
Schwab: Yes, Yay another episode focusing on a Jewish woman. Before we dive into the story, just want to say we’ve gotten a lot of great emails and comments from you, nerd nation, so definitely keep them coming.
Yael: Our email address is nerds at unpacked.media. We also love to interact with you through reviews and ratings wherever you get your podcasts and drop us a line.
So Schwab, now that I’m all cozy comfy, settled in to hear a great story from you, who are we talking about?
Schwab: Yeah. great. You’re gonna love this one. We’re talking about a woman named Ray Frank, and I wanna start with the pivotal moment in this story. It’s 1890. It’s Rosh Hashanah. It’s the high holy days, and this is in Spokane Falls, Washington. So it’s the American West, 1890 in Washington state.
Yael: Hmm.
Schwab: And Ray Frank, the woman who we’ll be talking about today, is there on journalistic assignment. She’s in her 20s. She’s been traveling around the American West. And she’s there to write an article about Spokane Falls, which, like many places she had been to, is a mining boomtown. But being a great young Jewish woman from a traditional and Orthodox background, she asks, where can I
Yael: Nice
Schwab: go tonight for high Holy Days services And she’s told by the Jews that she asks, we actually don’t have a synagogue here, despite the fact that we have a number of Jews here in the town, She’s very disturbed by this, but her reputation also precedes her.
And one of the Jews she speaks to says, look, if you want to address the congregation, because I know you’re a known teacher and journalist and people will be really interested to hear what you have to say, we can get some people together and we’ll make a service if you would grace us with a speech.
Yael: Okay, so she has a reputation as a journalist or spokeswoman, orator, or leader perhaps.
Schwab: Orator is a great term for it, yeah.
Yael: and she is clearly traditional enough that she is seeking out a high holiday service. How in 1890 did a traditional Orthodox Jewish woman get, who presumably wasn’t born in the Northwest, get, oohSchwab (05:34.281)
Yeah. What’s yeah. Yeah. That’s going to be the yes.
You have immediately hit on. But the question you’re getting to of how did a traditional Jewish woman come to be a renowned orator so that people want to hear her speak from the pulpit.
Like they want to hear her speak on Rosh Hashanah. This isn’t like we want to hear your perspective on the state of journalism. That’s like the crux of this episode.
Schwab: her life arc is, is a really, really interesting one. and as you noted at the top, I think has a lot of connections to a lot of people that we have profiled So
Yael: Awesome.
Schwab: She agrees to this and word spreads very quickly. So the special afternoon edition of the newspaper that was quickly printed had an announcement. There’s going to be Jewish services tonight. We’re renting out the opera house and Ray Frank is going to be speaking.
a very large crowd assembles to hear her. Orthodox Jews and Reform Jews, and that’s a tension that will get into a lot. And even a number of non-Jews, such was her reputation that there were a number of non-Jews, Spokane residents who come out to hear what she has to say. And she ascends, yeah.
Yael: This is like the secret Mumford and Sons concert that happened in Brooklyn this week. Like a half an hour before it started, it was announced and all of a sudden every hipster I know was there.
Schwab: Yeah. Probably, but I feel like 2026 hipsters and 1890s Spokane Falls, Washington residents probably look a lot like each other.
Schwab: So she gets up to the pulpit and she speaks the title of her sermon is On the Obligations of Jew as Jew and Citizen. And yeah, in case you’re wondering, we’ll talk about her incredible talent to
Yael: amazing! Crazy!
I love that.
Schwab:to write and give speeches because it seems like she just was amazing at it. And what she encourages them to do is that they need to address the most pressing issue in their community, which is they need to build a synagogue. They need to build a synagogue because they need to think about their past and they need to think about their future. They need to connect to the God of their fathers, as she refers to it, and they need to…
create the space so that tradition can be passed on to their children. And she very directly references how they need to drop the dissensions in their community and set aside the differences. And she’s talking about the tension between the Orthodox and Reform Jews there. And she’s saying, like, very, very directly. Stop arguing about whether to don your hats and join hands in prayer.
Stop the discussion of like decorum, you know, or even liturgy and like focus on Jewish unity. A message that they’re so, yeah, you’re, yes, yes. She speaks again the next morning and she’s invited to speak again a few days later on Yom Kippur when they again hold.
Yael: I love her already. I’m gonna be her for Purim. Amazing.
Schwab: services, this time an even larger crowd. And people are so moved by her speech that this is, I’ll say this as like an asterisk caveat throughout, a lot of the information we have comes from press about her at the time. And the press of 1890 was a little more prone, I think, to getting excited about things and telling the most colorful anecdotes. So I don’t know if we’ve take at face value every single thing that’s reported. Is this exactly what happened? But she is approached by a non-Jewish member of the audience, a Christian man who comes forward after her speech, the Yom Kippur address, and says, I will donate the land for the building of this synagogue here’s the space.
Yael: That is super intense and I want to view it so beautifully but the cynic in me is like that’s odd so she stays?
Schwab: Yeah. Great question. One other thing I want to say about this speech on Yom Kippur, she very directly talks about how sort of odd and rare and groundbreaking this is. She says, now I’m gonna quote from the notes that we have from her speech, which are later published by her husband.
My position this evening is a novel one from time immemorial. The Jewish woman has remained in the background and it is well that it has been so for while she let the strong ones do battle for her. She has gathered strength and courage to come forward in an age of progressive enlightenment to battle for herself. If necessary, to think that tonight I am the one Jewish woman in the world may be the first since the time of the prophets to be called to speak to such audiences. So she’s very aware that she didn’t grow up hearing a woman speak from the pulpit like she knows.No other woman in the world is speaking from a Jewish pulpit that night. She thinks maybe nobody has done this for thousands of years. I mean, yeah, there’s Deborah the prophet right like who she’s very aware of and gets connected to her often But she didn’t speak in a synagogue because there were no synagogues at the time. So like she’s Ray Frank is like there
Yael: One, yeah.
Schwab: the first woman ever to speak in a synagogue, although listen to our podcast, Ray Frank, because we’ve highlighted a couple characters who might have something to say about that.
Yael: I didn’t want to cut you off on the, the arc of how she gets from, you know, arriving in town one day, presumably on a train, to becoming potentially the de facto spiritual leader, maybe? De facto rabbi of this community.
Schwab: De facto rabbi is a great, yeah. this, again, that’s gonna be like the crux of our discussion.
Yael: But where was she from?
Schwab: So she is exactly as you think. She’s offered the chance then to lead this congregation. They say, great, we’ll build a synagogue. We want to build it around you. We want you to be our leader. She says no. And she says no many more times to that offer to many other offers. She speaks often from the pulpit, but she never has a pulpit. And it’s not because it wasn’t offered to her. She always denies it, does not accept the title that others are very willing to give to her. She corrects people when they refer to her as rabbi. And this is like one of the things that’s very fascinating and confusing and a little bit contradictory, I think, in some ways about her. So now, yeah, now let’s talk. Like, OK, where was she before?
Yael: interesting.
Schwab: Spokane.
Schwab: She’s born in San Francisco in 1861, 1864, or 1865, depending on the sources. she’s, yeah, Civil War era, but San Francisco, which is rapidly expanding due to many factors, but mainly because of a gold rush that you probably know the exact year it happened. Yes. So.
Yael: Okay, Civil War era.
Yael: 1849.
Schwab: Her parents, who were Polish Jewish immigrants that we would call Orthodox now, they probably call themselves Orthodox even then. Certainly, Ray Frank uses that term a number of times, and already at a very young age, it’s apparent that she is incredibly talented as a teacher, as an educator.
She starts out really, really young, teaching in, in a bunch of places in the West. She goes to Berkeley for a little bit. She spends a couple of years in Nevada. Her older sister moves to like another, I think Ruby Hill it’s called like, another gold mining town in Nevada. When her sister gets married, she moves with her sister to help with the family ends up running basically the local Jewish school is the sort of person where like every room she walked into, every schoolhouse she entered, everybody dropped everything they were doing and were like, do you want to be principal of this school now?
Whatever vision you have, whatever position we can offer you is yours because her reputation preceded her, but also because it was just apparent whenever anybody would meet her that she just was this talented.
Yael: This seems like a really seamless transition from Rifka Tiktinner. And I think that we spoke about in the context of that episode,
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Rivka Tiktiner.
Yael: what is the end goal of women’s learning and whether or not learning in and of itself is of value and maybe teaching in and of itself is of value. And it seems like Ray Frank is very happy and pleased to share her Torah and her.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: world wisdom with the community, but she very much wants to make it clear that that doesn’t mean that she’s a rabbi. One can be an extremely learned person who serves the community without officially being at the pulpit as a rabbi of that community. And I think we have a lot of women like that now in the modern Orthodox world. And she seems
Schwab: Yes.
Mm-hmm.
Yael: perhaps like a prototype for that role.
Schwab: Yes. Very much so. I’ll add one thing to what you’re saying is, I think you were very careful of saying like someone can be learned and a great teacher without being a rabbi. She is pretty insistent that a big part of that is because she’s a woman and she has a lot to say about like what the place of a woman is. Again, a lot of connections to Rivka Tiktiner, to other people we’ve also talked about and that we talked about in the Rivka Tiktiner episode of like as somebody who balances what we would now call progressivism and conservatism, she has views that we would not call feminist on the place of women.
And it’s not the pulpit, generally.
Yael: But that being said, it’s not behind closed doors and it’s not behind a curtain. It is at the front of a room talking to women and men, presumably.
Schwab: Yeah. definitely women and men. unlike Rivka Tiktiner, who focused a lot on teaching fellow women, Ray Frank does not spend a lot of time, like exclusively teaching women. It’s very clear that her audience is a wide one of Jewish men and women. And like I said, non-Jews as well, who are very interested in what she has to say.
Yael: Did she have any sort of prescribed Jewish education?
Schwab: She was taught a lot by her parents it seemed but she went she didn’t go to a Jewish school as far as I can tell she went to Sacramento high school, right? Yeah There’s no Jewish high school for women. but it’s also this is in San Francisco So it’s pretty far from Poland like this also is pretty different from the East Coast like the American West
Yael: I mean, I don’t think Jewish schools for women really existed before another woman we talked about, Sarash, like this is pre-Schenirer.
Schwab: has a frontier attitude, things are developing and changing very rapidly. We could do a whole episode on the Jews in the American West.
Yael: Can we watch Fievel goes west in conjunction I think it’s about a Jewish immigrant going west in the form of a mouse
Schwab: Yeah, that’s a really good. I, yeah. Yeah.
Yes, but things are are developing more rapidly and and there’s a lot more fluidity as opposed to I think a very institutional way of approaching things on the East Coast in very established Jewish communities. Even as tons of new Jews come in, everything is new in San Francisco and everything is a little more open to change.
Yael: one of the things that I was going to say when you were talking about the rapid trajectory of her rise, so to speak, in Spokane Falls is that it really is amazing what you can do when you don’t have the barriers of institutional Jewry stopping you. Like these people met a woman who had something to teach and they wanted to learn and therefore they facilitated a situation in which
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: they were able to make that happen.
Schwab: Yeah. And I think like even yes to everything you’re saying and Jews who wanted to learn. And this is the person who can teach. Like if you’re in Ruby Hill, Nevada, and you want your kids to have a Jewish education, you’re not going to quibble about, you know, does this person have have the right credentials or lineage? Speaking of lineage for a moment, her father does trace his lineage to the Vilna Gaon, to the very famous
Rabbi Elaj. that is, yes, so like she does come from a very prestigious rabbinic line. She, after a couple of years in Nevada, returns to Oakland, California and studies philosophy at UC Berkeley. While she’s there, she also
Schwab: teaches part-time in what’s called the Sabbath school, what we would now probably call Hebrew school at a local congregation. Like there too, her classes immediately become incredibly popular. like she’s teaching young kids, but adults also want to hear from her. She becomes the principal of the school very quickly. She’s also,
writing a lot and becoming a more well-known journalist. Newspapers in 1890 were a rapidly expanding industry, not a dying industry. So there were a lot of opportunities and People really wanted to hear what she had to say. So her career is taking off in a lot of different directions.
Yael: was nothing from her communal life or family life impeding this track. It wasn’t her parents weren’t saying you’re a girl, you’re a young woman, you can’t be off traveling to Spokane Falls for the high holidays. You’re supposed to be here with us finding a husband and having children.
Schwab:.So she’s not married and she does not get married for for quite some time. I don’t know. We don’t have like her parents didn’t write a memoir. So we don’t know what her parents were thinking,So we’ll get to it, but she does she does not write a memoir, but her her husband collects her work.
Yael: Did she write a memoir? Okay, yeah, sorry. Okay, continue.
Schwab: in what’s like one of the best sources about her. I want to talk a lot about their relationship because it’s really interesting to me. that, no, no, I actually think it’s a beautiful story, but we have a while till we get there still. Reportedly, although like big caveat on this, I could not find the actual primary source making
Yael: Good job. Good husband picking, Ray.
Okay. Is it gonna depress me?
Schwab: making sure this is the case, but Gertrude Stein did go to the Sabbath school that Ray Frank taught at. So presumably Ray Frank taught Gertrude Stein, Yael (25:10.509)
Mm-hmm.
Yael: That is astounding. I love that factoid. That is on par with the Trotsky-Frida Khalo affair factoid.
Schwab: Yes, there’s another one coming that you might like even more, but I don’t know, you might be a bigger fan of Gertrude Stein than this other person, but.
Yael: Okay, amazing.
Yael: I’m just a big fan of that whole ex-pat 1920s in Paris scene. Like, I just want to hang out with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Picasso, and T.S. Eliot and just chill.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Midnight in Paris. Yes. Yeah, yeah.
Schwab: Soagain, she’s tied in to the journalistic world, so this is part of it. But after Spokane, she gives this sermon. And her career really takes off after that point, the press starts reporting on her breathlessly. They go wild with nicknames.
Yael: Yes, midnight in
Schwab: She’s referred to as the girl rabbi of the Golden West, the Jewess in the pulpit, a latter-day Deborah, which she’s aware of that and references it. She is referred to more than once as the most talked-of Jewess of the day, like the most popular Jewish woman in America, which, yeah.
Yael: mean, low blow to Emma Goldman.
Schwab: She and Emma Goldman, who we did a great episode ona while ago, they are contemporaries. There’s an amazing article on the Jewish woman as celebrity, like around this time. And it compares the way that Emma Goldman is talked about and the way that Ray Frank is talked about. They’re both written about a lot. I don’t think they ever met each other, but they certainly were aware of each other. Like they, I think, were competing for that, like most talked about Jewish woman and presented to very different models of a Jewish woman.
Yael: as soon as you started describing Ray Frank, I immediately started thinking that she sounded very similar to Emma Goldman, not necessarily in her messaging, right?
Schwab: Right. Of this person who draws huge crowds. But totally opposite method. Whereas Emma Goldman is avowedly secular, an anarchist, is talking about politics. Like, Ray Frank, it’s always about religion for her. And she’s very, very religious in her outlook. She’s…
Yael: I give her a lot of credit for knocking Emma Goldman off that number one perch. That’s very impressive.
Schwab: Yeah. So she starts basically going on a nonstop speaking tour And all scholars are trying to keep track of where she was when. But it seems like she was just everywhere on the Pacific coast all the time, including up to Canada, British Columbia, like just up and down all of these rapidly expanding cities speaking constantly.
She connects with a booking agent like slash promoter a guy named Samuel Friedlander in Portland and he I think really, really helps that expand even further, but she’s an extremely in demand speaker. the way that the press is reporting about her they talk about how wrapped the attention of the audience is striking her voice is. There’s a lot of very dated like she’s this remarkably beautiful Jewess. And I was like, we don’t usually talk that way. We definitely don’t use the word Jewess anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she has very, very striking dark hair and dark eyes, which is like a very coded way of talking about Jewish women. Because that was, I guess like so exotic and remarkable.
Yael: Inside and out.
Schwab: And this is pointed out almost every time she speaks, she speaks at great length. She speaks very movingly. She never uses notes. She just always seems like it’s completely extemporaneous. She knows exactly what she wants to say.
Schwab: And she starts drawing these huge crowds. She draws a crowd of 7,000 in Portland. And I think a couple of weeks prior or a couple of weeks after William Jennings Bryan, who’s a pretty famous big speaker, also spoke in Portland and did not draw as many people.
Yael: That is insane. He gave one of the most famous speeches in American history and he drew a smaller crowd.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think because it’s really more a testament of, like how much of a draw she was. probably part of that is she’s a woman and doing this and like there’s something very interesting and novel about that, but it sounds like she never disappointed.
Yael: Is it that it’s almost like a freakshow. Women aren’t supposed to be able to do this. Like, come see a woman do this.
Schwab: Well, that’s where…
That’s one of the more skeptical and critical perspectives on her, points to that.
Yael: How uncharacteristic of me.
Schwab: Yeah, her booking agent was, was like a theatrical promoter, you know, and like, perhaps this was being sold as a little bit. I don’t know, like the greatest showman type of thing. Like this is Yeah.
Yael: When you said she had a promoter, I immediately, like my first thought was like, I really hope it wasn’t P.T. Barnum.
Schwab: Yeah, it wasn’t PT Barnum, but I think that’s what some people are like, Samuel Friedlander is like a PT Barnum type character. so so her career really takes off. She she has asked this question then multiple times, like, why are you not a rabbi? And she writes an essay in response to this question in a newspaper titled If I Were a Rabbi.
Yael: He’s trying to get a dollar out of this, more than a dollar.
Schwab: and it’s clear from the way that she writes about it, that she’s from a place, I think, of respect and balance, pointing out the things that rabbis do that she doesn’t want to do. and, you know, she insists that she doesn’t want this role. And she says being a rabbi is a thoroughly masculine profession. She says like, if I were a rabbi, what I would be focusing on. Is helping the needy and comforting people, not like selling the best pews to the highest bidder. And I think you can read that and be like, wow, that’s like a criticism of like what rabbis are doing. But you can also read it and say like, she’s like, I don’t want to do all those other parts of the job. Like there’s an administrative element to this job and I’m not interested in that.
Yael: you said her family was Orthodox right
Schwab: Yeah.
Yael: Did she have any success in Spokane Falls or elsewhere in building bridges between the Orthodox and the Reform?
Schwab: I think so. they did build a synagogue. I wouldn’t say that that’s on her.I think she’s trying to bridge a divide that’s only going to get wider.
Yael: You hear that, institutional Jewry, all you need to bring together the disparate factions among American Jews is to hire a woman. All your problems will be solved.
Schwab: is a woman. Yes.
Schwab
Um, yeah. So while her career is, on the rise this question keeps coming up of like, is she a rabbi? She kind of seems like she’s a rabbi, you know? in 1893, she enrolls at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, which is like the center of the, academic center of the reform movement.
Schwab: Rabbi Isaac Mayer WiseHe’s the president of HUC. He’s one of the most, if not the most powerful and important Jew in America at the time. He champions her in public, and he writes that she can assist the cause of emancipating women in the synagogue and the congregation if she so chooses. Like he, sounds like he’s saying very clearly like we admitted her and we were okay with ordaining her as the first woman rabbi from HUC. people to start calling her rabbi. She again is insistent that she’s not,
Yael: Also. Raises a much bigger theological question or practical question about what is a rabbi? Is a rabbi someone who has a diploma from HUC? Is a rabbi someone who is responsible for the administrative and pastoral elements of a community, the things that she’s saying maybe she doesn’t want to be doing? Or is that a CEO? Or is that a social worker?
Schwab: What is a rabbi?Schwab (37:10.867)
This is a great personal side note. But I like to officiate marriages. To officiate marriages in New York, you can be like a judge or a recognized religious leader. To be a recognized religious leader, the New York City Bureau
Yael: That’s so cool.
Schwab: of some like City Hall Bureau of Certificates or something like thathere are the ways that you can prove that you are a rabbi. You can show your diploma. You can show a like a list from a graduation ceremony with your name on it. Or you can have a letter from a congregation saying they recognize you as their religious leader. So when I was living in an apartment building in Washington Heights that had a number of Jews in it, we had our own
Yael: Vital statistics, probably.
Schwab: Minyan at the end of Shabbat so people didn’t have to like you know go all the way to Shul. So that little you know organized weekly prayer service we wrote up a couple of letters stating that we recognize Jonathan Schwab as the rabbi of our community, you know, and in my role as rabbi, would say, okay, now it’s time, so let’s pray and then let’s make Havdallah.
Yael: That is so much of a better story than you just being a universal life minister who got ordained over the internet.
Schwab: Yeah, so right, like it’s much cooler than just like giving your credit card information to openordination.org so you can officiate marriages.
Yael: Just so you know, I will now be calling you with all of my rabbinic questions, and by all of my rabbinic questions,
Schwab: My rabbinic expertise is very focused in one area and it’s what time does Shabbat end
Yael: And it is an important thing to know and people do disagree about it.
Schwab: But that gets to that question, like what makes, if a congregation recognizes you as its rabbi, does it matter that you don’t have the diploma or the training? Like people see you as a leader, you are a leader.
Yael: I often joke there are two women who have both been teachers of mine, but who I call friends who are both extremely well known and impressive scholars of in one case Jewish law and in another case Bible studies. And I occasionally jokingly refer to each of them as my Rebbe.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: because I view them as religious role models. Neither of them is a rabbi, though in a different world probably one or both of them might have become one. But they are, they’re Ray Frank. Which is really, I’m gonna call them after this and tell them about her. Do you know about Ray Frank? So she still says no, she enrolls in HUC but to…
Schwab: Yeah.
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Schwab: So she enrolls at Hebrew Union. enrolls in HUC. She’s really only there one semester. It seems like she took the classes she was interested in and moved on. She does not graduate. She does not get ordination. She wants to get back out there teaching people.
Schwab: Everybody speculates like, she was she was planning on getting ordained. then this is again all speculative, then then when Rabbi Wise starts talking about it publicly, like she wanted to do it more quietly. She didn’t want to be the face of this movement.
She never was planning on getting ordained, but wanted to be able to say on her resume, you know, that she went to HUC. we don’t know exactly.
Yael: It’s unbelievable how little the conversation has changed, at least in Orthodox circles,
Yael: you know, this person has these degrees, has studied with these teachers, has this breadth of learning, but she doesn’t want to be a figurehead and she doesn’t want to be the first one through the brick wall and doesn’t necessarily feel as though she needs the title to make the impact she wants to make and therefore has not done it. And I feel like I’ve had that conversation about.
Schwab: Yeah.
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: a bunch of really impressive Jewish women in our world in the past 15 years.
Schwab: Yeah. And at the same time, one thing, one thing that she is continually saying, but is a little confusing is that she says like the place of like she firmly believed the place of a Jewish woman is in the home and as a mother and and but she is still single well into her 30s, you know, and like you’re you’re saying that’s what you ideally want. But that’s not what you
I don’t seem to be spending your, that’s not what your life is right now.
Yael: know if you’ve heard this but men are allegedly intimidated by powerful women.
Schwab: So we’re gonna get to her husband and my take on him. So she’s traveling all around in addition to her preaching and teaching, she’s also writing a lot, a lot of journalism and people really like her. And then she tries her hand at short fiction also. And she’s in touch with a couple of prominent writers of the time, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman who…
Schwab: tries to recruit, if you’re impressed by that, you’re gonna be even more impressed in a second. The Yellow Wallpaper, very good. yeah. Yeah, really, yes. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an activist suffragist and she tries to recruit Ray Frank to the cause and Ray Frank is, I don’t know why this keeps coming up. It’s like true of Emma Goldman also. She is not a suffragist. She does not.
Yael: Yellow wallpaper. Very, very disturbing, very compelling, disturbing piece of writing.
Schwab: want to advocate for women’s right to vote seems like she’s kind of against it but she doesn’t really think women should be voting.
Yael: Emma Goldman wasn’t a suffragist because she was an anarchist. She didn’t think anybody should be voting, but presumably Ray Frank didn’t have a problem with men voting?
Schwab: Right I don’t question the democratic system. don’t, like, that’s not my objection. But she’s not a suffragist. So she’s hesitant to join certain things. Again, some people, like, speculate of, like, she’s very careful about her public image. And, like, that’s not the thing, that’s not the platform that she wants to get on about.
Yael: sounds like there was another celebrity coming.
Schwab: Okay, Ambrose Beers, who’s like the preeminent writer of the time, it’d like, it’s Beers with a B,
Yael: Here’s with a P.
Because I feel like that’s a person I have heard of. Okay, continue.
So Ambrose Beers who’s this like like he’s the biggest writer of the time people are Franklin.
Schwab: are reading everything he’s writing, satire, essays, short stories. He and Ray Frank have quite the correspondence. It’s like mildly flirtatious, which is interesting because he has this very acerbic wit and he’s very critical of stuff, but he’s very complimentary to Ray Frank.
Schwab: and encourages her to write more short stories which by a lot of other accounts just were not good. Like finally she tried her hand at something that she was not that successful at. Yeah, you can’t be good at everything.
Yael: can’t be good at everything.
Schwab: Then in the late 1890s, she goes on assignment, like a partially vacation, but partially like journalistic assignment on this trip to Europe. She’s close to 40. At this time, she not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it will become interesting in a moment.
Yael: Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Schwab: She reports from England where Theodor Herzl speaks in England for the first time and her report on that is really interesting. She talks about Herzl as this like towering figure, how incredible of a speaker he is, how the crowd reacted to him. It’s also the late 1890s, so everybody in Europe is talking about the Dreyfus affair, which
We should do an episode on the Dreyfus affair, I think.
Yael: been talking about it a lot this week.I was watching the men’s gold medal hockey American and U.S. Canada hockey game on Sunday morning. And the ultimate hero of the game for America is a New Jersey Devils player named Jack Hughes. But every time they said his name, I just kept thinking Jack Hughes. And it was like.
Schwab: And he’s Jewish, right? Jack Hughes is it.
Yael: And he’s Jewish. Like every single time they just kept being like, Jack Hughes, Jack Hughes.
Schwab: Yeah, oh, it does really sound like, yeah. So everyone’s talking about the Dreyfus Affair in Europe. I don’t know, like I think, this is like a meet cute. Like she has coffee with this young economics student, young, much younger than her. He’s in his mid-20s, he’s like 26. Yeah, economics student at the University of Munich about the Dreyfus Affair and they both.
Yael: Side note.
Yael: I’m taking notes right now, yeah?
Schwab: They immediately hit it off and just really enjoy talking to each other. And she comes back from this Europe trip, I think already engaged. She met this guy and they get married in London in 1901. She’s somewhere between 36 and 40 years old. He’s 26.
Yael: That makes sense.
Yael: for her.
Schwab: 26 or 27 and he is he’s from Odessa originally and he’s very cosmopolitan he’s studying economics at the University of Munich with the hope of eventually going to America and getting a professorship and then that’s exactly what happens like on a dime her entire life changes she gets married in London in 1901 he gets a position
Yael: Is he cosmopolitan?
Schwab: at the University of Illinois, Champaign, and she becomes Simon Lippman’s wife, just professor’s wife. And she stops touring, she stays at home to maintain his home on campus. She gets involved in the community there. She steps back from a lot of her writing and really is like, she goes from girl rabbi of the Golden West on a train every five hours to speak in another city to domestic homemaker in the Midwest in Illinois. Like almost immediately. And it’s a very sudden change.
Yael; I wonder what Jo March in Little Women would have to say about her because her big fear about marrying the German professor was that she would stop having to be a writer.Schwab (50:52.564)
Mm-hmm.
Schwab: She doesn’t seem unhappy with it. I don’t read this as like Simon Lippman makes her do something. Like she she this is what it seems like she wanted. Soshe wrote much more sparingly after that, she does start to get involved.
Yael: It’s not an unhappy ending.
Did she continue to write at all?
Schwab: in Jewish education, like on campus, she notes in some of her writing that that she sees a lot of Jewish students come to campus and and sort of like still relevant today, leave behind the like religious upbringing that they were accustomed to. And she’s concerned about this and thinks like we really need some sort of space or organization on campus and way to promote Jewish education. And she and her husband both are involved in like an iteration of that on campus.
Schwab: So they’re they’re both involved in creating an organization on campus and starting to educate
Jews, which a couple of years later becomes the beginnings of Hillel, like becomes the first Hillel anywhere at the University of Illinois, Champaign.
Yael: So she has changed the trajectory of American Jewish life, like indelibly forever.
Schwab: Yes, but I don’t want to like oversell it like she hasn’t found the first hillel, but she certainly is is like involved in the group of people that create something that does go on to become that but also it might be like a Forest Gump thing of like, wow.
Yael: The Forrest Gump analogy is excellent because there’s so much overlap there. And then she went to meet the president on TV about her ping pong Olympic medal.
Schwab: Yeah, she does not meet the president, but she is the featured speaker.Like when when the governor assumes office in Nevada, they’re like, what? Who’s the best speaker who has a Nevada connection? Who’s like just would be an amazing get. And it’s Ray Frank. And she’s like the keynote speaker at the governor’s ball in Nevada.
Yael: I’m fangirling over her right now. think I’m gonna, you know, we’re gonna end this conversation and I’m going to be looking for books about Ray Frank.
Schwab: Yeah, okay, so if you want a book about Ray Frank, her husband, like I said, so she, they never have any children. She doesn’t talk about this ever. So I don’t know, speculate what you want. They live very happily together for close to five decades and she dies in 1948. Her husband, Simon Litman, who was like a prominent professor in his own right, and he like pioneers some areas of study in economics. She dies in October 1948 at the age of 87 or so, depending on what year exactly she was born. Her husband decides to put together this book, this memoir about her, the title of it is A Life Dedicated, and it’s, puts together a lot of her writings. It’s interesting because he tries to go back and ltries to reconstruct parts of her life before they met when she was kind of a different person.
My take on reading it is he has such a different perspective than all the press who write about her. It’s clear that he’s so loving. It opens with like the moment of her death and you know how hard her last couple of days were and how alone he felt when she died. And they clearly had like an incredibly close loving relationship and connection. But he doesn’t seem at any point wowed by her celebrity. And this is like totally my speculation. I’m curious, But I think he just really sees her as a person and she would speak for thousands and thousands of people. And then she sat and had coffee with this guy who, didn’t see her like that. And maybe it was the one person in her life who didn’t see her like that.
Schwab: And he talks about how they would disagree about things and like maybe he was the only person who would ever actually argue with her because everybody else was just so taken by her many talents. know, like Ambrose Bierce is encouraging her to be a writer. And like Simon Littman in this book is like, her stories weren’t so great.
I’m like, in a loving, in such a loving way, yeah, but like this was not what she should have been spending her time on,
Yael: in the loving way that a spouse, I loved her, but her stories were kind of boring. But that’s encouraging because I think it’s clear that she was multifaceted. And she was offered positions of power so many times and turned them down. So maybe she needed to be with someone who didn’t put her on a pedestal.
Schwab: and he’s so impressed by her dedication. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. this is I’m this is like my read on this, but that’s that’s what it seems like to me of like every room she walked into. Everyone would be like falling over themselves to be like, what can we make you? What can we give you? And her husband was like, I see you as a person. Yael: I didn’t know that this episode was going to turn into a touching romantic drama.
Schwab: It is it really is.
Yael: Good on you. Good on you, Simon Litman and Ray Frank. I think you both made excellent choices.
Schwab: Yeah. But like, more broadly, she’s just like getting back to the like, what a fascinating character she is. You mentioned this before, like, I forgot what metaphor you used, but I had it in my notes is she opened a door that she didn’t walk through herself. You know, like she, she like creates opportunities, but doesn’t take it herself. I thought a lot about Moses, like leading leading the children of Israel through the desert, but he doesn’t go to the promised land himself. And that’s not his choice. That’s a punishment in the story. So it’s a little bit different. again, she sets the stage, even though it will be a number of years, until women start being ordained by the various denominations. And we’re still in that, I think. But she sets the stage for it.
Credits
Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael: If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review.
Schwab: Check out unpacked.media for everything unpacked related and subscribe to our other podcasts and our YouTube channel. Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: and by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rivky Stern. Thanks for listening. See you next week.