Ruth Gay

Ruth Gay (born October 19, 1922 in New York City , † May 9, 2006 in New York ) was an American librarian , historian , author and journalist .

Life

Ruth Gay, nee Ruth Slotkin, at times Ruth Glazer, was the eldest of the three daughters of Harry Slotkin and Marry Pfeffer Slotkin. Her father was a milk seller, later a delicatessen shop ( Delicatessen ) opened (a type of business that should be the subject of her first article later). She attended schools in the respective place of residence. When the family moved from the Bronx to the borough of Queens , they then attended Queens College , which they graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1943 . In college she was a member of the Avukah Association, a left-wing Zionist student organization. Between 1943 and 1948 she initially worked as an author and editor for various trade unions and trade union magazines.

Starting in 1946, she wrote "Human Interest" articles on contemporary Jewish culture in the Bronx and throughout New York, later with a focus on German-Jewish immigrants in the US and Israel. Her first articles such as "The Jewish Delicatessen" and "The World of Station WEVD" appeared in the "American Scene" section of Commentary magazine .

In 1943 she married the sociologist Nathan Glazer , with whom she had three daughters: Sarah (* 1950), Sophie (* 1952) and Elizabeth (* 1955). Glazer was a graduate student at the time and later became editor of the influential Commentary magazine. In 1958 she divorced Glazer; in 1959 she married the historian Peter Gay , who adopted her three daughters.

In 1969, she graduated from Columbia University's School of Library Service with a Master of Library Science (MLS) degree as a librarian. From 1972 to 1985 she worked on the one hand as a historian, on the other hand she worked as an archivist and librarian at the university library of Yale University . In 1984 she spent three months in Berlin to restructure the archive of the West Berlin Jewish Community . She lived in Manhattan for the last years of her life.

Dispute over Lea Rosh

The publicist Lea Rosh sued against the delivery of Gay's book about the Jews in Germany. Gay had described there that above all institutions and committed non-Jews campaigned for a memory of the victims of the Holocaust. Lea Rosh had mentioned her as the initiator of the Holocaust memorial and described her as a television journalist "who has given herself a deceptively Jewish-sounding (first) name, even though she is not Jewish at all". Rosh complained against it in vain.

Published books

• Jews in America. A short history. Basic Books, New York 1965.
• The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait. Yale University Press, New Haven 1992, ISBN 0-300-05155-7 (German: History of the Jews in Germany from Roman times to World War II . With an introduction by Peter Gay. Beck, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37603 -7 ).
• Unfinished People: Jewish Immigrants to the United States: 1880-1914. Norton, New York 1996, ISBN 0393039919 (German: Narrele, what are you laughing? Ostjuden in Amerika. Siedler, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-88680-717-7 ; paperback edition: Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-442- 76141-7 . 1997 awarded the National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction ).
• Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II. Yale University Press, New Haven 2002, ISBN 0-300-09271-7 (German: Doing the unthinkable. Jews in Germany after 1945. Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406 -47972-3 ; about the more than 250,000 Jews who returned to Allied-occupied Germany immediately after the Second World War).

Translations

• Jacob Gordin : The Jewish King Lear. A Comedy in America. Translated by Ruth Gay, ed. by Sophie Glazer. Yale University Press, New Haven 2007, ISBN 978-0-300-10875-0 (posthumous).

Articles (selection)

• The Jewish Delicatessen , in: Commentary (March 1946)
• The West Bronx: Food, Shelter, Clothing , in: Commentary (June 1949)
• How We Used to Laugh , in: Commentary (October 1949)
• The Jewish Object , in: Commentary (January 1951)
• The World of Station WEVD , in: Commentary (February 1955)
• Counting Jews , in: Commentary (November 1971)
• Baroque Judaism , in: Midstream (April 1972); Baroque Judaism II , in: Conservative Judaism (Summer 1974)
• Reichenbachstrasse 27: The Jews of Munich Today , in: Midstream (October 1975)
• Fear of Food , in: American Scholar (Summer 1976)
• The Tainted Fork , in: American Scholar (Winter 1978–1979)
• Inventing the Shtetl , in: American Scholar (Summer 1984)
• What I Learned about German Jews , in: American Scholar (Autumn 1985)
• A Spa in Germany , in: American Scholar (Autumn 1987)
• Thank you, Herr Doktor: German Jews in Palestine , in: American Scholar (Autumn 1989)
• Berlin and Its Counterworlds , in: American Scholar (Autumn 1992)
• Floors: The Bronx in the 1930s , in: American Scholar (Winter 1995)

Web links

• Literature by and about Ruth Gay in the catalog of the German National Library
• Obituary for Gay in the New York Times
• Paula E. Hyman: Ruth Gay 1922-2006 (article on Ruth Gay of the Jewish Women Encyclopedia)
• Page at Perlentaucher.de about Ruth Gay

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sabine Deckwerth: Lea Rosh loses in court against a book publisher. In: Berliner Zeitung . May 29, 2002, accessed March 30, 2013.