Obituaries

Aaron Feuerstein, ‘Mensch of Malden Mills’ who paid his workers even after his factory burned down, dies at 95

Asaf Shalev

(JTA)—Aaron Feuerstein, who became known as the Mensch of Malden Mills for continuing to pay his workers even after the textile factory he owned burned to the ground, died at 95 on Thursday, November 4.

The devout Orthodox businessman died at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, after being injured in a fall several days earlier, The Boston Globe reported.

“He did not suffer,” Feuerstein’s son, Daniel Feuerstein, told Boston 25 News. “He lived a long, vibrant and exciting life. His community was everything to him; from his Jewish community in Brookline, and equally important was the manufacturing community in the Merrimack Valley [of Massachusetts].”

Malden Mills was a textile manufacturer in Lawrence, Massachusetts, best known for its line of synthetic fleece products called Polartec.

In December 1995, the company’s redbrick factory complex caught on fire, causing one of the largest blazes in Massachusetts history. Work for the factory’s 1,400 employees stopped, but Feuerstein kept paying them.

Feuerstein also bucked the trend that saw industrial manufacturing leave the area by rebuilding the family-run factory.

At the time, the Globe quoted Feuerstein as saying, “I’m not throwing 3,000 people out of work two weeks before Christmas.” Feuerstein also explained after the fire that he was guided by Jewish tradition. “When all is moral chaos, this is the time for you to be a mensch,” he said.

Feuerstein’s grandfather, Henry Feuerstein, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary, founded Malden Mills in 1906, with grandson Aaron taking over in 1956.

The company survived the fire of 1995, rebranded as Polartec, and stayed in the family’s hands until 2007. But by then, the business had seen a downturn and Feuerstein took it into bankruptcy.

A private equity firm then bought the factory, shut down and moved the brand’s manufacturing to Tennessee. In 2019, industrial manufacturing company Milliken acquired Polartec.

A graduate of Yeshiva University, Feuerstein belonged to the Brookline congregation of Young Israel. Jewish teachings informed how he treated his workers.

“You are not permitted to oppress the working man, because he’s poor and he’s needy, amongst your brethren and amongst the non-Jew in your community,” he said on 60 Minutes during an episode titled The Mensch of Malden Hills that aired in 2003.

Feuerstein’s wife Louise died in 2013.

They are survived by their sons Daniel and Raphael and their daughter Joyce.

Aaron Feuerstein.

Justus Rosenberg, professor and last surviving member of group that smuggled intellectuals out of Nazi-held Europe

Shira Hanau

(JTA)—Justus Rosenberg, a professor whose long career teaching literature was preceded by a remarkable tenure in the French resistance during World War II, died last month at the age of 100.

Rosenberg was a professor at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York for decades where he taught literature and languages, including German, French, Yiddish, Russian and his native language, Polish. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-70s that he began to speak about his experiences during the Holocaust, when, as a Polish-Jewish refugee in Paris, he worked as a courier for a rescue effort led by the American journalist Varian Fry to save intellectuals, writers and artists stuck under Nazi rule.

Even Rosenberg’s wife Karin, who he first met in the 1980s, was unaware of her husband’s heroic past until 1998. “I believe he was a hero. But he did not think of himself as a hero. To him, he was just doing what needed to be done,” Karin told The New York Times.

Rosenberg was born in Danzig, Poland in 1921 to a well-off Jewish family that was not particularly religious. After being forced out of school as a teenager due to new laws barring Jews from the schools, his parents sent him to Paris to continue his studies. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Rosenberg lost all contact with his parents and sister, who he would only learn had survived after the war ended. He was finally reunited with them in 1952 when they made their way to Israel.

When the Nazis took over Paris, Rosenberg fled to Toulouse where he met a woman who recruited him to join Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee-sponsored rescue effort in Marseille. Rosenberg, who was blonde, appeared younger than his age and spoke French, worked as a courier for Fry, ferrying forged documents and accompanying some refugees across the border to Spain. The rescue effort saved about 2,000 people, among them the writers Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Mann and artists Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp.

When Fry’s efforts ended in 1941, Rosenberg, himself a refugee, was on his own again and was soon sent to a prison camp outside Lyon. When he learned that his fate and that of the other prisoners was to be sent to a labor camp in Poland, Rosenberg feigned an illness that would get him sent to a hospital. But even after having his appendix removed due to his nonexistent illness, Rosenberg was still slated to be sent to the camp. Devising a new plan, he sent a message to a group of priests that worked with the Resistance who brought him a bundle of clothing and a bicycle, which Rosenberg used to escape before he had recovered from surgery. After his recovery, Rosenberg joined the French Resistance and later worked as a guide for the American Army.

He described his wartime experiences in a 2020 memoir, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground.

After the war, Rosenberg continued his studies in Paris before immigrating to the United States in 1946. He earned his PhD at the University of Cincinnati and went on to teach literature at several schools before settling at Bard College in 1962. During his years in Cincinnati, he supplemented the meager Jewish education he received as a child by conducting his own study at the Hebrew Union College’s library.

He continued to teach literature classes at Bard after his official retirement in 1992 until his death and was buried at the Bard College Cemetery. Bard College president Leon Botstein wrote of Rosenberg’s love of teaching in a letter to the Bard community.

“For Justus, learning and study were instruments of redemption, remembrance, and reconciliation. He possessed a magnetic capacity to inspire the love of learning,” Botstein wrote.

Rosenberg and his wife established the

OBITUARIES

Justus and Karin Rosenberg Foundation in 2011 to fight hate and antisemitism. In 2018, the foundation endowed the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. The foundation also supported the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene.

In 2017, Rosenberg was honored as a Commandeur in the Légion d’Honneur by the French ambassador to the United States in recognition of his work with the French Resistance.

Speaking to the New York Jewish Week in 2016, Rosenberg said his survival during World War II was “bashert.”

“It was a fortuitous twist of fate,” he explained.

Even so, he didn’t consider his work for Fry particularly worthy of note.

“I didn’t consider it particularly heroic,” he told the Jewish Week. “It was just part of my life. I regret that we did it for only a limited amount of people. There were so many people who did much more and were much more heroic.”

JONI ANN GOODMAN BROOKS

BELLEVUE, NEBRASKa—Joni Ann Goodman Brooks 62, of Bellevue, Nebraska, peacefully passed away on Wednesday, November 3, 2021.

Joni was born on February 25, 1959 in Norfolk, Virginia to the late Martin and Blanche (Scheinberg) Goodman.

Joni was a child advocate for her entire adult life in the Special Olympics and was also a big part of Child and Family Services in Norfolk, and The Hope Center in Chesapeake. Later, she was PTA treasurer and PTA president in Bellevue, Neb. and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Bellevue Public Schools. She also was an event coordinator for craft and vender shows.

She had worked in various fields culminating in the Cellular Telecommunications Industry designing then launching new networks in Virginia, New York, Colorado, and Utah. She followed this up by returning home to be close to family and started another career working where she ended up as a regional manager for multifamily properties at SL Nusbaum in Norfolk.

Joni is survived by her husband Scott Brooks; sons, Shawn (Ashley) Lemke, Brad (Kjerstin) Lemke and Braden Brooks; daughter-in-law Ashley (Kyle) Wilson; eight wonderful grandchildren; brother Jeffrey (Andi) Goodman; niece Tracey (Whit) Watson; nephew Josh (Nathalia) Goodman; very close friend Cathy Scribner, many cousins, close friends and countless people whose lives she touched during every stage of her life.

A graveside service was held in Woodlawn Memorial Gardens with Rabbi Israel Zoberman officiating. Online condolences may be made to the family at hdoliver.com.

Memorial donations may be made to: University of Nebraska Foundation 1010 Lincoln Mall Ste 300, Lincoln, NE 68508. Note that it is for Fund #01144590 and in memory of Joni Brooks or on the web at https://nufoundation.org/ fund/01144590 noting it is in memory of Joni Brooks.

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WHO KNEW?

John Oliver just celebrated ‘Look for the Union Label,’ a ’70s labor jingle with deep Jewish roots

Andrew Silow-Carroll

(New York Jewish Week via JTA)—If you watched television in the 1970s and early 1980s, chances are you can sing a few bars of Look for the Union Label, a jingle sung on commercials for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. The infectious song was meant to prop up what was then the sagging American-made clothing industry, and the ads featured actual union members singing the praises of union-made garments.

The song was more memorable than effective: Labor unions never recovered from a host of trends that shifted power from organized labor to management, as John Oliver recently explained on an episode of his Last Week Tonight show on HBO. Oliver began his segment on union-busting with a clip of Look for the Union Label, an early version showing a multicultural cast of women singing the iconic lyrics:

Look for the union label, when you are buying that coat, dress, or blouse.

Remember somewhere, our union’s sewing, our wages going to feed the kids and run the house,

We work hard, but who’s complaining? Thanks to the ILG we’re making our way,

So always look for the union label, it says we’re able to make it in the U.S.A.!

The song always felt vaguely Jewish to me, especially that line, “but who’s complaining?”—which sounds like it was translated directly from the Yiddish. It turns out I was right, up to a point. While the Yiddish trade union roots of the ILGWU are undeniable, and the song’s lyricist was a pioneering Jewish advertising executive, the jingle also has a back story that touches on gender, feminism, and the civil rights movement.

The song was discussed in 2019 at an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, “Ladies’ Garments, Women’s Work, Women’s Activism.” ILGWU, founded in 1909 to unionize workers who made women’s garments, was instrumental in organizing immigrant women, particularly Jews, who worked in the “rag trade.” David Dubinsky, a Russian-born Jew who came to New York as a teenager, served as its president from 1932 until 1966.

As the NYHS show explained, the union reached the height of its power in 1959, when it claimed nearly a half-million members, mostly in the New York area. But by the 1970s, unionized shops were closing throughout the United States and work was being shipped to factories overseas.

As Nicholas Juravich, at the time a postdoctoral fellow at the NYHS’s Center for Women’s History, explained in an essay, “the new ‘union label’ campaign was imagined as a national, industry-wide strategy to build support for the ILGWU beyond its traditional strongholds.” In 1975, he writes, only 1.7 billion garments left union shops, a decline of nearly 40% in just seven years.

The lyrics were by the ad campaign’s director, Paula Green. Green was a Jewish woman who moved to New York from California and became one of the first woman executives in the advertising industry when she founded what would become Paula Green Advertising. (At the famed Doyle Dane Bernbach agency in 1962, Juravich explains, she created the “We Try Harder” catchphrase and campaign for Avis, which the car rental company still uses.) The music was by Malcolm Dodds, a Brooklyn-born, African-American vocalist and choral leader who sang in the ’50s doo-wop group The Tunedrops.

The campaign had to avoid a pitfall of earlier “union label” campaigns, which were often nativist and racist in urging consumers to buy American instead of foreign-made goods.

“They really avoid that kind of ugly nativism conceit that, certainly in the ’70s and ’80s, was bubbling up in parts of the labor movement and in popular culture around jobs going overseas,” Juravich, now assistant professor of History and Labor Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, says. “The campaign showcases the creativity and the multiculturalism of the union, and it puts workers and their faces front and center. Because so much of the rhetoric, even in the ’80s, around what happened to the American working class focuses on the white male worker. But the ILG ads are gloriously chaotic and full of people from all over.”

In other ways, too, the campaign fought cliches of unions as male-dominated, cigar-munching syndicates. “I felt particularly close to the women in the union,” Green told The New York Times in 2004. “They are real examples of women’s liberation.”

The song left a cultural imprint: Jimmy Carter called it one of his favorites, Al Gore sang it on the campaign trail, and both Saturday Night Live and South Park lampooned it. Cory Matthews sings the first line in an episode of the 1990s sitcom Boy Meets World.

And the Jewish stamp on the song is unmistakable, if not immediately apparent. Juravich cites the work of Daniel Katz, a labor historian at CUNY, who argues in his 2011 book All Together Now that Yiddish socialism helped create a distinctive workers’ culture that embraced various ethnicities and nationalities. “This socialist tradition infuses the ILG,” Juravich says.

Nevertheless, the song didn’t do much either to sell union-made products or bolster organized labor.

“It’s a great song. It’s a great history,” says Juravich. “The depressing thing is that it didn’t inspire the consumer activism it could have, which required policy-level interventions by the U.S. government. But I do think there’s some positives in the way it really engaged the workers and their story in a very public and deliberate way.”

2022 Grammy Awards: The Jewish nominees

Shira Hanau

(JTA)—Some of the music industry’s most popular Jewish artists were included in the 2022 Grammy Award nominations unveiled on Tuesday, November 23.

Here’s a roundup:

Doja Cat, a Black and Jewish pop star-rapper hybrid who has become one of the most listened-to artists in the world— Spotify lists her as the 7th-most-streamed musician on its platform as of Wednesday, November 24—racked up nominations in in seven categories, including Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Pop Duo/Group Performance, Best Pop Vocal Album, Melodic Rap Performance and Rap Song. She has a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish South African father.

Jewish day school grad Jack Antonoff, who wore a Star of David necklace to the MTV Music Awards in 2017, has become one of the most in-demand pop producers in the industry. He was nominated for Non-Classical Producer of the Year for his work with Taylor Swift, Lana Del Ray, Lorde and others.

Canadian Jewish rapper Drake, winner of four past Grammys (in addition to a record-breaking 29 Billboard Music Awards), was nominated for Best Rap Performance for his hit Way 2 Sexy and Best Rap Album of the year for his latest LP, Certified Lover Boy.

Stephen Schwartz, the legendary musical theater writer, was nominated for Best Musical Theater Album for Stephen Schwartz’s Snapshots, a scrapbook musical including songs from a range of his musicals, including Wicked, Pippin and Godspell.

Aaron Dessner, part of the indie rock band The National, was included in Taylor Swift’s nomination in the Album of the Year category for the album Evermore, which he helped write, along with Antonoff. Dessner’s brother Bryce, who is also in The National and was also included in the nomination for helping in the recording.

Israeli cellist Matt Haimovitz was co-nominated for his work on an album up for Best Classical Solo Voice Album.

The awards ceremony will take place Jan. 31 in Los Angeles.