Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Last Legacy Project: An Interview With Nadine Epstein

Melanie Fine

Jan 24, 2022

What was on Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s mind the last year of her life?

While listening to and adjudicating on upwards of 24 cases per sitting when the Supreme Court was in session, researching and preparing for the upcoming session, spending time with her loved ones, and staving off cancer, Justice Ginsburg shared a little piece of what was on her mind with Nadine Epstein, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Moment Magazine, who in turn, shared it with us.  

On September 18, 2019, exactly one year to the day before she died, Justice Ginsburg was honored by Moment Magazine with its inaugural Human Rights Award. Nadine Epstein commissioned her sister Marcy Epstein to make a special collar for the Justice, with the Hebrew word for justice, tzedek, woven in silk. 

Justice Ginsburg asked Epstein to bring the collar to her chambers so she could wear it at the opening session of the Supreme Court that year. Two weeks later, Epstein arrived at the Justice’s chambers, and the two women got to talking.

“We started talking about the women who had inspired and sustained her throughout her life,” says Epstein. “Henrietta Szold and Emma Lazarus and Anne Frank are three that she talked about. And then I started telling her about how when I was a kid, I read every biography in the school library. [The only women biographies] were Madame Curie, Amelia Earhart, Clara Barton, Molly Pitcher, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, just the regular ones. And that was it. 

“And in Hebrew school, all the stories of women that I read about were martyrs, or victims, or wives. With the exception of Deborah, there were very few that I could identify with.” 

Similarly, Justice Ginsburg writes that “in the public library I visited weekly while my mother had her hair done, biographies of women were rare. It’s still true today that men are more often the central character in storytelling books.”

“Somewhere in this conversation,” Epstein continues, “I said, which as an editor and writer I say at least once a week, ‘We should write a book about this.’ And Justice Ginsburg said, ‘Yes.’”

That is how these two women began their journey to writing RBG’s Brave & Brilliant Women, published in 2021, one year after the Justice’s death.

Role models were really important to the Justice. Just as the women she included in the book were role models to her, sustaining and inspiring her when she was discouraged, she wanted them to do the same for others.   

Epstein added that “it’s really important to have a variety of role models, because what you’re looking for in a role model are traits that you can emulate from different people, and having a wide range of traits is really critical to developing emotional intelligence.”

It was important to the Justice that all the women included be Jewish. It’s not that she didn’t have non-Jewish role models.  One, in particular, who stands out was Pauli Murray, the African American civil rights activist and lawyer who paved the way for Justice Ginsburg’s 14th amendment legal strategy. 

Still, Jewish role models played unique importance to the Justice.  When her mother died of cervical cancer the day after her high school graduation, her Jewish upbringing, years of Hebrew school, and Jewish summer camp did not prepare her for being excluded from reciting kaddish,  the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning, because of her gender. Feeling rejected by traditional Judaism, she rejected it in return and sought solace and tradition in the Jewish women role models.

Initially, the two women came up with a list of 150 women they wanted to include, which they winnowed down to 33.

Three women were particularly significant to Justice Ginsburg personally, whom she named in the introduction. Two “whose humanity and bravery touched [her] deeply” were Emma Lazarus, whose poem “The New Colossus” sits at the base of the Statue of Liberty, and Henrietta Szold, who founded the Jewish women’s organization Hadassah, and “started night schools to teach English and trade skills to the waves of Jewish immigrants coming from Russia and other Eastern European countries in the late 1800s and early 1900s.” Ginsburg remarked that her father, a Russian immigrant, was the beneficiary of such an education.

The third woman was Biblical prophet and judge Deborah. “Like Deborah, I am a judge proud to be a Jew,” Justice Ginsburg wrote.

“A woman’s voice and a woman’s experience have much to contribute to the art of judging. That’s why we need more women judges — and more women on the Supreme Court.” 

The nature of their collaboration

Justice Ginsburg wrote the book’s introduction, and Epstein wrote the first draft. The Justice read every single biography and made extensive notes.

Then, they enlisted some young people to read the draft.  What they learned was that not a single one of the young readers knew that women did not have the same rights as men in the past. 

“They didn't know that their grandmothers weren't allowed to have a credit card in their name and their great grandmothers couldn't buy property,” says Epstein. “And they weren't aware that legally, men still have more legal rights in the United States than women in certain areas, and that there is no one law that gives women equal rights.”

Second, they learned that the book, initially intended for a young female audience, appealed to people of all ages and genders. In subsequent drafts, Epstein made the book’s language and tone more gender-neutral and intergenerational. 

Other women Justice Ginsburg insisted be included were the BIblical women of the Passover story, as well as Fanny Mendelssohn, Lillian Wald, and Bessie Margolin. 

Fanny Mendelssohn was the older sister of the more famous Felix Mendelssohn. Because of her gender, her father forbade her from playing piano in public and publishing her music. As a result, some of her compositions were published under her brother’s name.

Lillian Wald enjoyed a privileged American upbringing and education. Initially trained as a nurse, she decided to improve her skills by enrolling in The Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, founded by Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in the United States.  While still in school, Wald offered a course in home nursing to immigrants on the lower east side. 

One day she was summoned to the home of one of her students to find her lying in a bed drenched with blood. Wald would write later, “That morning’s experience was a baptism by fire.”  Wald left medical school to attend to the health and social needs of the poor, convinced that poverty and disease were intertwined. She established the Henry Street Settlement as a neighborhood public health center, placed nurses in public schools, set up school lunch programs, and special needs classes.  She was even one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Bessie Margolin attended law school at Tulane University and earned her doctorate in law from Yale University at a time when only two percent of lawyers were female. After graduation, she went to work for the federal government, the only employer at the time receptive to hiring a female lawyer.  She worked first for the Tennessee Valley Authority and then the Labor Department, where she staunchly advocated for equal pay for women. Margolin filed 300 equal-pay lawsuits in 40 states on behalf of 18,000 female employees, She argued 24 cases before the Supreme Court, winning all but three of them. When Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, Margolin became responsible for enforcing it.

Here’s a taste of other women included in the book.

The Justice grew up listening to Gertrude Berg’s character Molly Goldberg on the radio. Before media giants such as Lucille Ball and Oprah Winfrey, Berg insisted on retaining ownership and creative control over her work, creating her own media empire in the process.

As an opera lover, Justice Ginsburg insisted on including soprano Roberta Peters whom she had seen perform at the Met a handful of times.

The Justice had personally met Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Jewish-Italian neurobiologist who was forced to leave her academic position due to Mussolini’s anti-Jewish discrimination laws, yet continued her research in a makeshift lab in her bedroom.  Levi-Montalcini was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

And both she and Nadine Epstein had met on separate occasions Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

Neither woman knew that their collaboration would span the last year of Justice Ginsburg’s life, who died unexpectedly on September 18, 2020.  

At that point, it was up to Epstein to remain true to the Justice’s vision, and give birth to her last legacy project. Many drafts later, Epstein is confident that the final version embodies the justice’s content, tone, and original intent.

In these days of strife and division, it has been difficult to come to terms with the loss of such a staunch advocate of equal justice under the law for all as Justice Ginsburg.

Yet, this charming book provides unique insight not only into what the Justice was pondering in the final year of her life, and the heroines that helped shape her worldview, but in the legacy she wanted to leave behind.