Two years ago, I asked U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an interview how she wanted to be remembered — when the time came to remember her in the past tense. “Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability,” she replied. “And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has.”
The words had a familiar ring. Ginsburg’s reference to patching a ripped-up planet echoes the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, literally “fixing the world” in Hebrew. She herself has defined it as “the obligation to improve/fix/better the world carefully and steadily, to do one’s part to make our communities, nation, and universe more humane, fairer, more just.” To listen to , an anthology of the justice’s life’s work, with richly reported introductions (narrated by both Ginsburg and actress ) from her official biographers, Mary Hartnett and Wendy W. Williams, is to trace Ginsburg’s devotion to tikkun olam all the way back to her early teens.
“We are part of a world whose unity has been almost completely shattered,” the eighth-grader wrote in the June 21, 1946, edition of the Bulletin of the East Midwood Jewish Center. “No one can feel free from danger and destruction until the many torn threads of civilization are bound together again.”
Even as a child, she keenly observed the horrors of the world, and yet she somehow remained optimistic that, with careful action, it all could be knit back together.
Her complete essay appears in the audiobook as one of several previously unpublished early pieces in which the future associate justice is unmistakably recognizable. Even as a child, she keenly observed the horrors of the world, and yet she somehow remained optimistic that, with careful action, it all could be knit back together.
It is tempting to focus on the irresistibly specific and fresh nuggets in the introductions to My Own Words: glimpses at her life before she donned the robe, at the child and young woman who would become a feminist icon. How early efforts to force a left-handed Ruth to write with her right hand resulted in her first and last D in a class (the well-behaved but iron-willed Bader refused to ever write with her right hand again). How Kiki, as her younger sister nicknamed her, learned to dance playing records she and her cousin bought “in a tiny store in the Times Square subway stop.” How she was wretched at sewing and cooking in home economics class and envied the boys their shop class. How, as her mother got her hair done, the future feminist litigator searched the library for independent-minded heroines and found them in Jo March and Nancy Drew.
Some inside glimpses are more recent, like the tick-tock of Ginsburg’s nomination to the Supreme Court. “Bill Clinton, whatever his problems were, talks comfortably to women,” Ginsburg drolly recalls of her interview with the president before her appointment. It is worth understanding Ginsburg as a person as well as a jurist and a feminist trailblazer.
