Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Northampton, MA

JUDITH BEREK

interviewed by

KATHLEEN BANKS NUTTER

January 3–4, 2004 Canaan, New York

This interview was made possible with generous support from the Ford Foundation.

© Sophia Smith Collection 2004

Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Narrator

Judith Berek was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 8, 1943, the daughter of Ida Kantrowitz, a bookkeeper, and Leo Berek, a machinist at Brooklyn Navy Yard, later in its employee training area. Her father also was an ESOL teacher at night. Both parents graduated from Brooklyn College as night students, as did Berek herself. Her paternal grandfather taught her to sew. Berek has one brother, Peter, three years her senior. Raised a Jewish agnostic, Berek was briefly married in her twenties and has no children. She first worked as a lab tech (1962–68) at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn. In 1968 Berek became an organizer for District 1199, National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, AFL- CIO; she later served as vice-president and director of Legislative & Professional Programs, 1972–83. In 1983 Berek went to work for the State of New York Department of Social Services: until 1987 she was Director, Office of External Affairs, Special Assistant to the Commissioner on Intergovernmental Relations; from 1987 to 1991 Deputy Commissioner, Division of Adult Services, New York State DSS (both positions based in Albany). From 1991 to 1994, Berek worked for New York City Human Resources Administration as Executive Deputy Administrator for Personnel Administration. Since 1994, she has worked for the federal government in Medicare & Medicaid Services as a Senior Advisor (Washington, D.C., 1994–97), and Region II Coordinator (New York City, 1997–2002). Since 2002 Berek has been the Principal Advisor for National Policy Implementation, Office of the Administrator, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, based in New York. In 1986 she managed Herman Badillo’s campaign for New York State Comptroller and in 1989 was director of operations for David Dinkins’ mayoral campaign. Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Berek was a founding member, board member, and co-chair of the National Legislative Committee, and president of the New York City chapter of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW).

Interviewer

Kathleen Banks Nutter was for many years a reference archivist at the Sophia Smith Collection. She is currently adjunct faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She is the author of ‘The Necessity of Organization’: Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892-1912 (Garland, 1999).

Abstract

The oral history focuses on the various phases of Berek’s life but is especially strong on her union activities within 1199 and the founding of CLUW.

Restrictions

None

Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Format

Interview recorded on miniDV using Sony Digital Camcorder DSR-PDX10. Four 63-minute tapes.

Transcript

Transcribed by Luann Jette. Audited for accuracy and edited for clarity by Kathleen Banks Nutter. Reviewed and approved by Judith Berek.

Bibliography and Footnote Citation Forms

Video Recording

Bibliography: Berek, Judith. Interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter. Video recording, January 3–4, 2004. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Judith Berek, interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter, video recording, January 3, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 2.

Transcript

Bibliography: Berek, Judith. Interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter. Transcript of video recording, January 3–4, 2004. Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection. Footnote: Judith Berek, interview by Kathleen Banks Nutter, transcript of video recording, January 3, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, pp. 22–24.

Sophia Smith Collection Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Judy Berek, interviewed by Kathleen Banks Nutter Tape 1 of 4 Page 1 of 66

Voices of Feminism Oral History Project Sophia Smith Collection Smith College Northampton, MA

Transcript of interview conducted January 3-4, 2004, with:

JUDY BEREK Canaan, New York

at: above

by: KATHLEEN BANKS NUTTER

BANKS NUTTER: Thank you again, Judy, for being here.

BEREK: Well, welcome to my house. Thank you for coming this huge distance.

BANKS NUTTER: Oh, it’s not so far and more than worth it. You were great about giving me that bio statement with all kinds of great information and I wanted to start first with your childhood, first by starting with your parents. If you could just tell me a little bit about them, their values, their backgrounds, their politics?

BEREK: My parents were both born in New York City, both the oldest of four. My mother’s parents were both born in Russia and my mother was raised speaking Yiddish because her mother did not speak English, which is quite common in immigrant families for an oldest child, and learned English in school. My father’s mother was actually born in the United States. She was Hungarian and she, in terms of creating a little feminism in you, she was of a very small group of women who lost their citizenship because they married foreigners, in around 1912. And the law was eventually found unconstitutional but they never restored the citizenship of the women. They had to go get naturalized. And so, my grandmother was a naturalized citizen born in Detroit, Michigan, because she had married my grandfather who was from somewhere along the Russian-Polish border. My parents were both lefties. They were never Party members but certainly many of their friends were. There was a very strong political commitment to peace, to justice — I was raised in a very, you know, anti-violent, integration-is-the-right-thing-to-do atmosphere, which was a time when that was both radical and dangerous. My father worked for the federal government and my parents were always very nervous, but still did what they were going do. I was on picket lines in a baby carriage. So my politics were instilled in me from a very young age. I

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went on a youth march for integrated schools when I was in elementary school. I marched against strontium-90 in milk, which you are probably even too young to remember, which was basically an antinuclear testing march from the George Washington Bridge to the U.N. when I was probably 12, and Pete Seeger and the Weavers were my heroes, the same way kids now, you know, will follow, I don’t know, J-Lo or somebody. So that was sort of how I was raised with a very strong bent. My mother was a bookkeeper and was actually never in a union. My father started out in the International Association of Machinists at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was a machinist at the navy yard. And both my parents went to school at night. My mother’s father, who interestingly, she worshipped — he died when I was about three or four, so I really didn’t know him well — she worshipped him, but one of the things she talked about that I can remember my entire life, is her father saying to her when she graduated from high school, “If you were a boy I would send you to college, but you’re a girl and you can go to work.”

BANKS NUTTER: And your mother would tell you this as a way of-?

BEREK: My mother would tell me this — she would just tell me this. She actually — I will tell you and I loved her and miss her — she was quite sexist in terms of the way she treated me versus my brother and she had two sisters and a brother and she and both her sisters worshipped her brother because he was the boy. So it was sort of very interesting, to watch the sort of funny patterns of sexism while saying don’t, you know, don’t give into sexism. So I figure she balanced it enough, because I came out OK. So that was sort of how I grew up and I was involved in politics. I was in the Girl Scouts. I was actually an extremely active Girl Scout and when I was meeting for the first time to talk about going to work for 1199, the person who was hiring me said to me, “Were you in any organization where you played a major leadership role?” And he said, “You don’t have to tell us the name of the organization if you don’t want to reveal it.” [laugh] and I started to laugh, and I said, “Yes, the Girl Scouts of America.” In some ways, it’s very embarrassing, but I got into real trouble in the Girl Scouts in the ’50s for carrying integration petitions, because the Girl Scouts were a segregated organization. My mother was my Girl Scout leader, and my mother hooked up with a Girl Scout leader in Bedford Stuyvesant and we would go away for weekends, Girl Scout weekends together with a black troop and a white troop which was, you know, wildly radical.

BANKS NUTTER: What did it feel like to be in Brooklyn in the 1950s and holding as a family unit in your neighborhood these family politics?

BEREK: I grew up in a neighborhood — and I wish I could remember the name of the book that was written about the neighborhood. I grew up in a

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wonderful neighborhood. It was virtually entirely white and virtually entirely Jewish. But it was a neighborhood filled with people with very similar political values. And in fact, there was a big fight in our elementary school between the socialists and the communists and the PTA at one point, which is what got written up.

BANKS NUTTER: Which PS was it?

BEREK: PS 99. It’s the same elementary school that Woody Allen went to.

BANKS NUTTER: Oh, really?

BEREK: He went to PS 99 and Midwood, which is the same high school, and in fact, just as a complete, stupid aside, if you ever saw the movie Zelig?

BANKS NUTTER: Oh, yes.

BEREK: Remember the name of the psychiatrist in Zelig? Eudora Fletcher, which sounds like a wild name he made up. She was the principal of our elementary school. [laugh] When I went to Brooklyn College, we were sort of — the people who were at that point — I started college in 1960 and what people refer to as the ’60s were really the late ’60s, early ’70s. And in the early ’60s, if you gave out antiwar material, which is what I was mostly doing at that point, you were ostracized. People didn’t take them, they didn’t talk to you, it was a very apolitical time in terms of the campus. So I was a little ahead of myself. I was a founder in Brooklyn College of something called Student Peace Union, which became SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] chapter in Brooklyn College when SDS was founded. I was already out, so, yes, and it was very weird in college but it was not — in elementary school and high school, it was not the least bit odd.

BANKS NUTTER: That’s interesting. You would think that things would be the reverse. So you said something about your mom, in terms of treating you and your brother differently, when you were growing up? How did that work?

BEREK: Well, it was always boys got deferential treatment.

BANKS NUTTER: He’s older than you?

BEREK: He’s older than I am. He’s three years older than I am. And he is, at this point, one of my very closest friends in the world, as is his wife, so it has had no, sort of, lasting problem. And, we have similar politics although, I think, politics are not as important to him as they are to me. My brother is an academic. I spent a lot of time saying to my brother, so why isn’t Mount Holyoke doing things like this? [laugh]