Agents of Change
Every day, the world around us is changing in countless ways, and we in turn are changing the world. In that way, we are all agents of change, and the twenty women we have chosen to honor in the Washington State Jewish Historical Society's 50th anniversary exhibit "Agents of Change: 20 Remarkable Jewish Women of Washington State" are representatives of us all as they make changes great and small. This exhibit was presented in 2018. It is our hope that the women in this collection will inspire you to be the agents of change our people have always aspired to be, taking the spirit of tikkun olam out into our communities and doing the hard work it takes to repair the world.
Amy Lavin
When Amy Lavin was just about 18 months old, her father’s medical residency brought her family from Chicago to Mercer Island, where she attended daycare at the Stroum Jewish Community Center. Forty-odd years later, her life came full circle when she became the SJCC’s CEO in 2017. In between those two milestones, she grew up in the Seattle area’s Jewish community before heading back to her native Chicago to get a degree in civil engineering from Northwestern, followed by an MBA from Duke. Returning to Seattle, and later Mercer Island, she settled in for a ten-year stint at Microsoft, eventually becoming Director of Marketing for the Health Solutions Group. In 2012, she joined Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to create what eventually became Obliteride, Fred Hutch’s annual bicycle ride to raise funds for cancer research, which she led for nearly five years before taking the helm at the SJCC.
Becky Benaroya
Rebecca "Becky" Benaroya is a philanthropist and pillar of the Seattle community. Her husband, Jack, was a self-made real estate developer who established the Benaroya Company, which would go on to become the largest warehouse and office developer in the Pacific Northwest. He funded the Benaroya Hall, a facility for the Seattle Symphony, which opened in 1998, and the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, which opened in 1999. The couple has supported a number of charities and other enterprises, including the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International, the University of Washington Medical Center, Children's Hospital and Medical Center, and the Jewish Federation and Council of Seattle. Benaroya is also a patron of the arts, having supported the Tacoma Art Museum and Pilchuck Glass School.
Bobbe Bridge
Bobbe Bridge is a former Associate Justice of the Washington Supreme Court, and a dedicated volunteer and philanthropist who has been honored with numerous awards for her civic involvement and service to children and youth. Justice Bridge was appointed to the Washington State Supreme Court in 1999 after serving ten years as a King County Superior Court Judge. In 2006, she retired from her judgeship to assume the role of Founding President and CEO of the Center for Children & Youth Justice (CCYJ), a private nonprofit organization that does work with child welfare and the juvenile justice systems in Washington State.
Barbara Rothstein
Barbara Jacobs Rothstein grew up in Brooklyn, New York, graduated from Cornell University in 1960, and enrolled at Harvard Law School at a time when women were a relative rarity in the prestigious institution. She graduated in 1966, and after a brief stint as the first female attorney at a small Boston law firm, joined her husband in Seattle, where he was completing his medical residency at the University of Washington. She worked in the Consumer Protection and Antitrust Division of the Attorney General’s Office from 1968 until 1977, when she received her first judicial appointment to the Washington State Superior Court. In 1979, she was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to a seat on the United States District Court, and has since served on the federal bench in both Washington State and Washington D.C. From 2003-2011, she was Director of the Federal Judicial Center, the educational arm of the federal courts responsible for the education of federal judges throughout the national federal court system.
Carrie Brownstein
Born in Seattle and raised in Redmond, Carrie Brownstein was a legendary Washingtonian long before she put Portlandia on the map. She cemented her status while she was still a student at Evergreen State College, studying sociolinguistics by day and starting the seminal riot grrrl band Sleater-Kinney with classmate Corin Tucker by night. Sleater-Kinney released seven albums before going on hiatus in 2006, at which point Carrie turned her attention to writing and acting. She co-created the Emmy Award-winning comedy show Portlandia with Fred Armisen, and in 2015, she published her acclaimed memoir Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl. She has also appeared in the Amazon show Transparent and the movies Carol and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. Carrie is an Emmy-nominated TV director and is developing her own show.
Doreen Alhadeff
Doreen Alhadeff’s family has lived in the Greater Seattle Area since 1906, when her grandmother immigrated and became the first Sephardic woman in Seattle. Growing up, her family was faithful to its Sephardic roots and spoke Ladino at home. In college, as a Spanish major, she studied in Spain, which strengthened her ties to the Sephardic culture. In 2015 she became the first American to complete the process which allows Sephardic Jews to become Spanish citizens, which has been an effort of reconciliation after the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain. Since then, Alhadeff has co-founded the Seattle Sephardic Network, and through that she provides a space for Sephardic Jews to celebrate and learn about their culture. She also helps other American Sephardics pursue the path to Spanish citizenship which she took.
Hilary Stern
Born in Los Angeles, Hilary Stern spent her early years in Maryland before her family moved to Seattle when she was seven years old. The daughter of a University of Washington physics professor, she spent formative years in Israel as a teenager and Nicaragua after college, and has worked her entire adult life to make a difference for underprivileged and undocumented immigrants in Seattle. Since she founded Casa Latina in 1994, the vibrant worker rights organization has helped thousands of day laborers find work, learn English, and fight for their rights, bringing them off the streets and into a three-building campus in Seattle’s Central District. In addition to directly serving the Latino community in King County, Casa Latina has also had national impact, providing programs, curricula and operations models for day worker centers throughout the country.
Janet Varon
A New York native, Janet Varon grew up in the Bronx before attending Harvard as both an undergraduate and a law student. Finishing law school in 1983, she accepted a job at Seattle’s Evergreen Legal Services, where she primarily represented clients who had lost their health coverage and other public benefits. After 13 years at Evergreen, she founded Northwest Health Law Advocates and has served as its Executive Director for nearly two decades. She also coordinates the statewide legal advocates' Medical Assistance Work Group; serves on the Healthy Washington Coalition Steering Committee; and is a member of the board of the Washington Medical-Legal Partnership. She previously served on the board of the National Health Law Program and chaired the state's Medical Assistance Advisory Committee, and served on the Governor's Certificate of Need Task Force and on the Low-Income Populations Advisory Group to the Joint Select Committee on Health Care Reform Implementation.
Jessica Markowitz
Jessica was just 11 years old when, in 2006, she founded Richard’s Rwanda, inspired by Richard Kananga, a representative from the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda who stayed with Jessica’s family in Seattle in 2006. In addition to the history of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Richard told sixth-grader Jessica about the difficulties Rwandan girls her age had staying in school, and Jessica was moved to create a non-profit that has gone on to fund scholarships for more than 85 girls in the East African country. As of 2017, the organization has started focusing on a metalsmithing vocational program to help young women find sustainable employment. Now an NYU 2018 graduate, Jessica is spending the next year as a JDC Entwine Global Jewish Service Corps fellow in Budapest, Hungary, where she'll be working with the local Jewish community acting as an advisor to the BBYO Hungary chapter and working in the local JCC.
Michelle J. Goldberg
The granddaughter of a New England rabbi, Michelle J. Goldberg grew up in the town of Durham, New Hampshire, and earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and a master’s degree from Harvard University, both in East Asian Studies. She and her husband moved to Seattle in 1997 to work in technology and finance and Michelle started work as an investment banker in mergers and acquisitions before joining the venture capital firm Ignition Partners in 2000. Since then, she has helped raising financing for Ignition’s investment funds and the startups it is invested in, focusing much of her attention on funding and mentoring executives with new ideas in technology. She has also served on the boards of a variety of public companies, startups and non-profits, including the public global asset management firm Legg Mason. Michelle is an active fundraiser and adviser for several non-profits in education and technology. She was a 40 under 40 honoree and has just been named a 40 under 40 All Star by the Puget Sound Business Journal. Michelle is a Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute.
Mina Miller
The daughter of Lithuanian refugees who arrived in New York City as the Nazis were moving across Europe, Mina Miller was born into a world irrevocably shaped by the Holocaust. But faced with that tragedy of inconceivable proportions, she has created an ongoing memorial to its victims in the form of Music of Remembrance, which pays tribute to the artists who were lost to the Holocaust and the artwork they both created and inspired. Mina’s musical journey began alongside her mother, a talented pianist in her own right, and continued at the Manhattan School of Music and New York University, where she earned her Ph.D. Thereafter, she divided her time between academia, as a tenured professor at the University of Kentucky, and performance, playing concerts across North America and Europe. Moving to Seattle in 1997, she founded Music of Remembrance the following year, and has continued to lead the organization as Artistic Director ever since.
Marcie Sillman
Marcie Sillman has been a mainstay at KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate, since 1985, helping create and host the daily programs Weekday and The Beat before settling into her current role as a full-time cultural reporter. Born and raised outside of Detroit, she holds a degree in Chinese from the University of Michigan and a certificate in an intensive Indonesian Language Concentration program from Cornell University. While at Cornell, she started working at the student radio station, fell in love with broadcast journalism, and decided to pursue it as a career. In her thirty-plus years in public radio, she has been a strong advocate for the arts community and women’s rights, and her voice has been heard across many of NPR’s national programs as well as The Voice of America. In 2016, she and photographer Angela Sterling collaborated on the book Out There: Jonathan Porretta's Life in Dance.
Michele Rosen
Michele Rosen was born and raised in Los Angeles, where she first got a taste for political involvement from family, teachers, and the political movements in the '60s when she was growing up. Settling down in Seattle, Michele worked a number of jobs before getting involved with the Young Leadership Cabinet, which taught her how to secure resources for communities in need. This paved the way for her later work with Hillel, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and the Jewish Family Services of Seattle. Currently, Michele is focused on technology distribution and disaster relief work.
Nancy Pearl
The first librarian ever to inspire her own action figure, Nancy Pearl was born and raised in Detroit, where her love of reading was encouraged by Miss Whitehead, her local librarian. She chose her career at age ten and earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Michigan in 1967. Following a long stopover in Oklahoma (where she earned another master’s, in history, while raising a family), she moved to Seattle in 1993, becoming executive director of the Seattle Public Library’s Washington Center for the Book and founding the much-imitated "If All Seattle Read The Same Book" program. A regular book reviewer for NPR’s Morning Edition, Nancy is also the author of the Book Lust series and published her first novel, George & Lizzie, in 2017.
Patty Fleischmann
For Seattle therapist Patty Fleischmann, the impetus for starting StolenYouth was the novel Sold, by Patricia McCormack, about a thirteen-year-old Nepalese girl named Lakshmi who is sold into prostitution in India. Horrified by that fictional story, Patty and a group of like-minded women—including Jane Charles, who was producing a film based on Sold—journeyed to India to learn the truth of the situation, which was just as dire as what McCormack’s novel portrayed. Returning home, she was inspired to investigate the situation in her own back yard, and discovered that Seattle had its own child sex trafficking problem. Determined to help, Patty and this group of passionate women started StolenYouth, a non-profit which raises awareness and funds to grant to groups on the ground helping sexually exploited children. For Patty, whose father survived the Holocaust as a boy (in part by denying his Jewish identity), the idea of helping children in the direst circumstances has a special resonance, and she has continued to lead StolenYouth as its president since its founding in 2012.
Rabbah Rona Matlow
Self-described as “the only nuclear-qualified, transgender rabbi” in the United States, Rona Matlow was born in Arcadia, California, in 1959. After serving 22 years in the Navy, she retired in 2001, at the rank of Lieutenant Commander. In 2003, she entered the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York as a rabbinical student and was ordained as a rabbi in 2009. Due to injuries suffered during her military service, she has not been able to lead her own congregation, but has worked with The Soldier’s Project to provide free counseling to veterans and Trans Lifeline to help transgender people in crisis. In 2015, she became aware of her gender dysphoria and, after discussions with her wife and family, began to transition to living full time as a woman. As an expert on transgender, military, and religious issues, she has spoken about transgender/religious law intersections, and is active as an advocate for the transgender community.
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where she was one of three Jewish children in her class at an Episcopal school and often found herself explaining Judaism to her classmates. Originally planning to pursue a medical career, she was inspired in high school when she met her first female rabbi, and in college decided to pursue rabbinical studies. She moved to Seattle in 2004 shortly after being ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In 2006, she co-founded the Kavana Cooperative, which takes its name and mission from the Hebrew word for “intention” and encourages members to fully engage in their nondenominational community. As one of seven members of the nationwide Jewish Emergent Network, Kavana, under Rachel’s leadership, is at the forefront of creating a new paradigm of communal organization for American Judaism.
Sue Bird
One of the greatest basketball players of all time, Sue Bird has won two NCAA championships at the University of Connecticut; four Olympic Gold Medals with Team USA; and three WNBA titles with the Seattle Storm. At age 37, she’s still at it: the oldest player in the WNBA and the league’s all-time assists leader, she led the Storm to victory in the 2018 WNBA Finals despite breaking her nose for the fifth time earlier in the playoffs. Born in Syosset, New York, Sue actually has dual American and Israeli citizenship, thanks to her father, Herschel, an Italian-born Russian Jew. Sue was a dynamic athlete from an early age, and after leading UConn to a 39-0 record her senior season, winning both the Wade Trophy and the Naismith Award as the College Player of the Year, she was chosen as the first overall pick in the 2002 WNBA draft by the Storm. The rest has been history, including her decision in 2017 to come out as gay, and her joint appearance with her girlfriend, soccer star Megan Rapinoe, on the cover of ESPN Magazine’s 2018 Body Issue.
Suzi Levine
East Coast native Suzi LeVine moved to Seattle in 1993, fresh from earning degrees in Engineering and English at Brown University, the last marketing person hired to work on the MS-DOS team at Microsoft. That led to a position on the team that launched Windows 95, an executive role at Expedia, and an exciting and non-linear career working in both the private and public sector, while also volunteering for a wide variety of non-profits and political campaigns. Self-described as a “Wife, Mom, Citizen, Apprenticeship Advocate, and Catalyst,” Suzi is the co-founder of the cooperative Jewish community Kavana, was a key volunteer on the Obama For America campaign, served as the United States Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein from 2014 to 2017, and is now commissioner of the Employment Security Department for the State of Washington.
Tana Senn
As a working mom with two kids, Tana Senn brings an important perspective to legislative issues, advocating for busy families and seeking solutions to prevent crises before they occur. Her grandparents were Holocaust survivors who relocated to Kenya before coming to the United States. Tana was raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Public Policy and Administration from Columbia University in 1996. After graduate school, she was hired by National Hadassah, rising to the position of American Affairs/Domestic Policy Director. Moving from New York to Washington State in 2000, she worked as a communications consultant for nonprofits and as the marketing director for the Jewish Federation. In 2012, she became a Mercer Island City Councilmember and a State Representative in 2013, fighting for legislation to close the gender pay gap and working to establish common sense gun laws.