What Would RBG Do About All This Jew-Hatred?

She would have warned the community not to be too
defensive and to find allies against bigotry.

(Sept. 16, 2025 / JNS)

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on Sept. 18, 2020, erev Rosh Hashanah. The surge in antisemitism since then has many wondering whether she reflected a Golden Age of American Jewry that has ended. Perhaps asking “What would RBG do?” can help avert these doomsday prophecies.

Ruth Bader was born in March 1933 in the miracle that is America. She remained forever grateful. Her father fled Jew-hating Odessa in 1909 when he was 13, eventually becoming a modest furrier. Her mother was the first in her family to be born into freedom. Ginsburg often said, “What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s garment district and a Supreme Court justice? Just one generation, my mother’s life and mine bear witness. Where else but America could that happen?”

That’s why in 2018, as some radical voices deemed America systemically and irredeemably racist, Ginsburg still championed progress. “Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than other nations, but rather in her ability to repair her faults,” she explained while swearing in new citizens. Toasting her life, their lives and the United States, she proclaimed: “We have made huge progress, but the work of perfection is scarcely done.”

Ginsburg trusted America’s “growth potential.” She told the story of the Constitution as “the extension … of constitutional rights and protections to once-excluded groups: To people who were once held in bondage, to men without property, to Native Americans and to women.”

Raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., and surrounded by Jews and other immigrants, she lived under the shadow of casual American Jew-hatred and its ugliest expression, the Holocaust. During a childhood vacation in Pennsylvania, she reported seeing signs at a resort that read: “No Dogs or Jews Allowed.”

She devoted her career to weaving those threads. Noticing the “rigid” social segregation at Cornell University between Jews and non-Jews, and then spurned by some Harvard law professors for “taking the place of a qualified male,” Ginsburg realized that you can only fight discrimination against Jews, women or anyone is universally, not particularly. Hate is like pollution, poisoning everyone. It’s not about securing rights or reparations for your group, but demanding justice for all. As a lawyer, her pioneering cases expanded women’s rights by invoking the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection” for all.

Ginsburg understood that Nazism came wrapped in civil masks. Hitler, she noted, created a “Holocaust kingdom” full of “laws deployed by highly educated people, teachers, lawyers and judges, to facilitate oppression, slavery and mass murder.” Describing the Nazis’ “brutal speed” in murdering 424,000 Hungarian Jews in just eight weeks in 1944 with the help of the local population, she said: “Hungary was the first country in Europe to adopt an anti-Jewish law after World War I,” restricting the admission of Jews “to institutions of higher learning.”

In an era when many advanced by assimilating, Ginsburg remained who she was. She declared: “My heritage as a Jew and my occupation as a judge fit together symmetrically,” which is why she displayed a large silver mezuzah on her doorpost and, on three walls of her chambers, in artists’ renditions of Hebrew letters, the command from Deuteronomy (16:20): Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”

A model of civility that is sadly lacking today, she was particularly close with her ideological opposite on the court, Justice Antonin Scalia. The two high-achieving New Yorkers bonded over their shared passions for food, opera and the U.S. Constitution. Scalia once asked about RBG: “What’s not to like … except her views of the law, of course?”

Before she died, spreading antisemitism targeted her, too, as Jew-hating incidents in New York City spiked 22%. She was already “RBG,” the pop star. Vandals defaced a poster at a Brooklyn subway stop advertising a book about her, drawing a swastika and scribbling “Die, Jew.”

Ginsburg admired leading American Zionists like Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah. She also appreciated that the stature of Louis Brandeis, her predecessor on the Supreme Court, reassured the skittish Jews of the 1920s and 1930s that if Brandeis was a Zionist, “then it was OK for them as well.”

In 2018, she accepted a special lifetime achievement award from the Genesis Foundation in Israel. Then, too, she called herself a judge “born, raised and proud of being a Jew,” pursuing America’s and Judaism’s “demand for justice, for peace and for enlightenment.”

Given that—and her sense of “security” as a Jew—it’s hard to believe that Ginsburg would have been silent as so many fellow citizens in her country escalated from criticizing to demonizing Israel, turning “Zionist” into a slur and targeting Jews on the very campuses that shaped her. “In striving to drain dry the waters of prejudice and oppression,” she taught, “we must rely on measures of our own creation, upon the wisdom of our laws and the decency of our institutions, upon our reasoning minds and our feeling hearts.”

She would have warned Jews not to be too defensive and to find allies against bigotry. She wanted them “to rejoice in the resistance of the Jewish people to evil fortune, armed with the courage and faith that has enabled them to survive through centuries of exiles, plunderings and persecutions.”

Celebrating the 350th anniversary of the American Jewish community, Ginsburg rejected the contemporary culture of competitive victimhood. She recalled that Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who shared her faith, once described himself as belonging to “the most vilified and persecuted minority in history.” Yes, she preferred Justice Arthur Goldberg’s “affirmative comment”: “My concern for justice, for peace, for enlightenment, stem[s] from my heritage.”

These days, it’s easy to despair. Five years after her death, RBG still teaches us all to seek the light and generate more of it.

Aliza Lavie is a former member of the Israeli Knesset and author, most recently, of Iconic Jewish Women: Fifty-Nine Inspiring, Courageous, Revolution Role Models for Young Girls.
Professor Gil Troy is an American presidential historian, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and the author, most recently, of “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, AntiSemitism and Jew-Hatred.”