Women’s History Heroes’ Trail Blazed

The Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven (JHSGNH) kicked off a tradition Sunday: An annual Judith Ann Schiff Women’s History Program. The event took place at New Haven Museum in conjunction with an exhibit about ​“Trailblazing Jewish Women” from New Haven and Connecticut. The first event honored Schiff herself, the ​“people’s historian” who served the City of New Haven as well as Yale and helped found the JHSGNH, and who died last year at the age of 84. Following is the published JHSGNH tribute to Schiff, written by Carole Bass.

Judith Ann Schiff was a born archivist. She was also much more: an intrepid researcher who loved digging up obscure information; the longest-serving Yale employee in recent memory; and a proud feminist, Jew, and New Havener who worked tirelessly to tell the stories of people and groups typically overlooked in mainstream histories. Her death in July 2022 left holes in the fabrics of multiple communities.

Judy, as she was universally known, spent her entire 61-year career at Yale University. She served as Chief Research Archivist in the Manuscripts and Archives section of Sterling Memorial Library, and for decades wrote a column about Yale history in the Yale Alumni Magazine.

That work has received well-deserved attention at Yale and beyond. This tribute, by the Jewish Historical Society of Greater New Haven (JHSGNH), will focus on Judy’s contributions — largely as a volunteer — in four sometimes overlapping areas: Jewish history, women’s history, New Haven history, and ethnic history.

Jewish History

Judy’s life was steeped in Jewish life and culture and a passion for history. Born in New York City, she moved to New Haven as a small child during World War II. Both parents loved history, and most family vacations consisted of visiting Revolutionary War or Civil War battle sites and historic homes.

With delight, Judy recalled spending summers at a Jewish Community Center day camp and at Milford’s heavily Jewish ​“Bagel Beach.” At Congregation Mishkan Israel, New Haven’s earliest synagogue, Judy ​“fell under the spell” of Rabbi Robert Goldburg and Cantor Harry Sebran. There she began learning Jewish history, with a new book every year — beginning in Biblical times and continuing to the present day. She also learned about current events, including Rabbi Robert Goldburg’s participation in the Freedom Rides and other civil rights protests.

Educated in New Haven public schools, Judy continued to Barnard College. She majored in history, intending to become a teacher. During school breaks she worked in the office of a New Haven company, where her assignments included organizing files. That’s ​“where I realized that I was a born archivist,” Judy told Rhoda Zahler Samuel in a JHSGNH oral history interview.

Nonetheless, Judy pursued her plan to get a master’s in history and become a teacher. To earn money before enrolling in graduate school at Columbia University, she took a job at Yale and fell in love with working with manuscripts and archives. Although she did complete her master’s and teach in Harlem, ​“I kept getting drawn back to the archives.”

There was another reason Judy decided against teaching: the textbooks of that time ​“whitewashed” American history, she said. They presented history through the lives of ​“great white primarily Anglo-Saxon men,” ignoring or demeaning the contributions of women, immigrants, Black people, Jews, indigenous people, and others.

In the early 1970s, Judy went to a symposium in Boston on the value of ethnic archives. There she made two crucial connections. The keynote speaker, historian Howard Zinn, spoke about practicing ​“history from the bottom up”: researching and telling the stories of people who were left out of the textbooks. The notion resonated and guided Judy through much of her subsequent work.

Also at that symposium, Judy met fellow New Havener Harvey Ladin. An accountant by profession, Ladin had been collecting material about New Haven Jewish history for years. Some were housed at the Jewish Home for the Aged on Davenport Street in New Haven, but most were in Ladin’s home. Together, the two archivists decided to create an organization to preserve, organize, and publicize New Haven’s rich Jewish history.

With several others, they founded JHSGNH in 1976 — the year in which America celebrated the bicentennial of its declared independence from the British Empire. Like other ethnic groups at the time, they proclaimed that their once marginalized history is, in fact, American history.

Over the years, Judy worked on numerous grant applications to help expand and organize JHSGNH’s collections. She spearheaded an oral history project and served as an officer, including a term as president.

In her day job, Judy discovered that Yale Manuscripts and Archives included the papers of several prominent Jews. Yet the library had no staff assigned to Jewish collections. With staff from the Near Eastern section, Judy organized an exhibit of Judaica at Yale. She also helped get a Judaic studies program approved in 1982.

Women’s History

In her day job, Judy Schiff researched and brought attention not only to some of the library’s less-noticed collections, but also to the history of marginalized groups at Yale itself.

“My personal interests as a historian — women’s history, Black history, ethnic history, and New Haven history — are important to Yale and its mission,” she noted in an interview marking 60 years on the university staff.

Judy conducted oral histories of prominent Yale women, including acting president Hanna Holborn Gray, the first — and to date, the only — woman to lead the renowned university. She organized exhibits on the milestone anniversaries of Yale women and the 150th birthday of Emily Dickinson (whose papers Judy personally helped acquire). Her ​“Old Yale” column for the Yale Alumni Magazine frequently focused on women’s achievements — and not just during Women’s History Month. She gave a talk about ​“Three Centuries of Women Working for Yale.” In the world of academia, she explained, ​“everyone seems interesting, whether they mow the lawn, plant flowers, write out checks, or are historians or professors.”

Outside of Yale, Judy pursued the history of women in New Haven, Jewish and otherwise. She wrote about Minna Kleeberg, a German-born Jewish poet who died at age 37, just months after moving to New Haven with her rabbi husband. She served as president of the New Haven chapter of the League of Women Voters, and spoke about the local women’s suffrage movement at a New Haven Museum event commemorating the 19th Amendment. She researched and taught about the women buried in the centuries-old Grove Street Cemetery, resting place of male luminaries such as Noah Webster, Eli Whitney, and telegraph inventor Samuel Morse. 

And Judy’s interest in promoting women extended beyond historical research. Editing a draft of rules governing the Jewish Historical Society’s archives, she noted: ​“I have tried to de-sex the language” — for example, changing ​“he” to ​“the reader.”

Ethnic and New Haven History
Perhaps it was that focus on inclusion that led Judy to collaborate on the founding of a multi-ethnic-history organization in New Haven.

In 1988, the city of New Haven celebrated its 350th ​“birthday”: the anniversary of the founding of the New Haven Colony. The celebrated 1638 founders were, of course, white Anglo-Saxon men — specifically, Puritan ministers — and their families.

Three and a half centuries later, New Haven was a diverse city embracing multiple waves of immigrants and their descendants from Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The city also included many African Americans: some descended from a small, historic community of free Black people, and some with roots in the Great Migration from the American South.

As part of the 350th, five groups — dedicated to preserving the history and culture of local African Americans, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Jews, and Ukrainian Americans — came together to form an ethnic heritage archive. Judy Schiff was a founder. Now known as the Ethnic Heritage Center and housed on the campus of Southern Connecticut State University, the organization hosts archives, exhibits, Walk New Haven: Cultural Heritage Tours, and research.

Judy carried her interest in Black history to her work at Yale. With faculty member Curtis Patton, she brought to light the extraordinary story of physicist Edward Bouchet, the first known Black person to graduate from Yale College. Born in New Haven in 1874 to a man formerly enslaved by a Yale student, Bouchet became the first Black PhD recipient in the United States (but spent his career teaching high school, because universities would not hire him). In 2011, Yale created an Edward Bouchet Legacy Award and gave the inaugural honor to Judy.

Judy served on the board of the New Haven Museum, where she presented and participated in many events and exhibits. In 2012, she became New Haven’s official City Historian, the first woman to hold that volunteer position. Working on New Haven history brought all of Judy’s interests together.

In the 1980s, she wrote a chapter on social history in New Haven: An Illustrated History, focusing on women, immigrants, and Black people. During that same decade she helped investigate a time capsule from an early New Haven synagogue, discovered by a construction crew.

When a storm toppled the city’s landmark Lincoln Oak in 2012, exposing human bones among the tree roots, Judy helped determine that they were colonial-era remains from New Haven’s original burying ground.

At the Grove Street Cemetery, where Judy served on the board, she not only publicized the stories of women buried there. She also researched the famous episode in which African captives mutinied aboard the schooner Amistad and ended up in New Haven, where they were freed after a trial. Judy’s efforts confirmed that six of the captives, who died while waiting for the courts to decide their fate, were buried at Grove Street. She helped get a marker installed in their memory.

A proud Jew from a modest New Haven family, Judy was seemingly comfortable in the elite worlds of Yale and the Grove Street Cemetery. In an oral history, she said she faced more discrimination at Yale as a woman than as a Jew.

Judy embraced her own heritage and everyone else’s, never pitting groups against one another. Explaining the need for a Jewish historical society, she noted: ​“American Jews have profoundly shaped, and been shaped by, American culture. Yet American history texts have largely ignored the Jewish experience.” 

But there was more to it than scholarship and setting the record straight, Judy argued: ​“In an age of mass culture, the study and enjoyment of our individualized, yet interactive ethno-religious pasts make people feel special and instill a sense of pride.”

In other words, history from the bottom up is good for the country, it’s good for communities, and it’s good for the soul. And that was Judy Schiff’s life work.