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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
The Lieberman clause is a clause included in a ketubah (Hebrew: כתובה Jewish wedding document), created by and named after Talmudic scholar and Jewish Theological Seminary of America professor Saul Lieberman, that stipulates that divorce will be adjudicated by a modern bet din (rabbinic court) in order to prevent the problem of the agunah, a woman not allowed to remarry religiously because she had never been granted a religious divorce. It was first introduced in the 1950s by rabbis in Judaism's Conservative movement.
According to halakha (Jewish law) when a couple gets divorced it is the man who has to present the woman with a bill of divorce, and the woman who has to consent to receive it, called a get. Without one, the couple is still viewed as married, whether a civil divorce is obtained or not. In the past, if a woman was refused a divorce because a man would not give his wife a get, the rabbis of the local Jewish community were authorized, under certain circumstances, to force the husband to do so (e.g., his refusal to be intimate with his wife as well as not giving the get, or other such serious matters). However, since the Haskalah, local Jewish communities lost their autonomous status, and were subsumed into the nation in which they existed. The Jewish community lost its civil powers to enforce marriage and divorce laws. The unintended result was that rabbis lost the power to force a man to give his wife a get, and Jewish law does not allow a woman to give a get to the husband. Without a get, a Jewish woman is forbidden to remarry and is therefore called an agunah (literally "a chained woman").
For decades, traditional voices within the Rabbinical Assembly (RA) counseled that Conservative Jews should take no unilateral action on this issue, and should wait for solutions or joint action from the Orthodox community. While numerous solutions were offered, none were accepted. Eventually, liberal voices within the Rabbinical Assembly won out, and the movement authorized unilateral action.
Lieberman developed a clause to be added to the ketubah (Jewish wedding document). In effect, it was an arbitration agreement used in the case of a divorce; if the marriage dissolved and the woman was refused a get from her husband, both the husband and wife were to go to a rabbinic court authorized by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and heed their directives, which could (and usually did) include ordering a man to give his wife a get.
According to leaders of the Conservative movement, a meeting was held between the leaders of the RA, representing the Conservative movement, and the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), the largest organization of Orthodox rabbis, in an effort to find agreement that the clause was valid from the standpoint of Jewish law, and would be included in both Orthodox and Conservative documents.[1] The premise of the meetings was to create a beth din (rabbinic court) similar to that of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel which would be the supreme authority on all halakhic issues related to marriage and divorce in America for both the Orthodox and Conservative. In addition to the meetings held by the RA and RCA, private meetings took place between Saul Lieberman and Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who discussed the creation of this body. While all the members of the beth din would unquestionably be Orthodox poskim, there was discussion as to the possibility of the Leiberman clause being amended by Soloveitchik in order to make it more acceptable to the Orthodox, so as to facilitate its being included in Orthodox ketubahs. However, the beit din was never formed, and the Orthodox movement never acted to include the clause; all Orthodox rabbis seem to have united in their rejection of the clause as a violation of Jewish law. As a result, it has only been used for wedding documents and ceremonies in some (but not all) non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism.
This clause is still used in many ketubot used by Conservative Jews today. In the intervening years, however, there has been growing concern regarding the legal validity of this clause due to the United States stand on the separation of church and state. For that reason, state courts have disagreed in terms of recognition of this clause, in a religious document, in a civilian legal setting.
As a response to this concern, a separate letter was drawn up, and signed by the prospective bride and groom, acknowledging that the conditions of the ketuba had been explained to them, and that this letter would be recognized by them as a separate civil document, enforceable in U.S. courts.
However, even some Conservative rabbis grew to have misgivings about the religious validity of this approach, eventually leading the joint bet din of the Conservative movement to develop alternative approaches to the problem of the agunah, which include but are not limited to hafka'at kiddushin (Hebrew: הפקעת קידושין), retroactive annulment of the marriage.[1]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
The Lieberman clause is a clause included in a ketubah (Hebrew: כתובה Jewish wedding document), created by and named after Talmudic scholar and Jewish Theological Seminary of America professor Saul Lieberman, that stipulates that divorce will be adjudicated by a modern bet din (rabbinic court) in order to prevent the problem of the agunah, a woman not allowed to remarry religiously because she had never been granted a religious divorce. It was first introduced in the 1950s by rabbis in Judaism's Conservative movement.
Saul Lieberman (Hebrew: שאול ליברמן; May 28, 1898 – March 23, 1983), also known as Rabbi Shaul Lieberman or, among some of his students, the Gra״sh (Gaon Rabbeinu Shaul), was a rabbi and a Talmudic scholar. He served as Professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA) for over 40 years, and for many years was dean of the Harry Fischel Institute for Talmudic Research in Israel and also president of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
The Ineligibility Clause (sometimes also called the Emoluments Clause, or the Incompatibility Clause, or the Sinecure Clause) is a provision in Article 1, Section 6, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution that makes each incumbent member of Congress ineligible to hold an office established by the federal government during their tenure in Congress; it also bars officials in the federal government's executive and judicial branches from simultaneously serving in either the U.S. House or Senate. The purpose of the clause is twofold: first, to protect the separation of powers philosophy (upon which the federal frame of government is built); and second, to prevent Congress from conspiring to create offices or increase federal officials' salaries with the expectation that members of Congress would later be appointed to these posts.
The 2000 presidential campaign of Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States under President Bill Clinton, began when he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States in Carthage, Tennessee, on June 16, 1999. Gore became the Democratic nominee for the 2000 presidential election on August 17, 2000. On November 7, 2000, projections indicated that Gore's opponent, then-Governor of Texas George W. Bush, the Republican candidate, had narrowly won the election. Gore won the national popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote after a legal battle over disputed vote counts in the state of Florida. Bush won the state of Florida in the initial count and also in each subsequent recount at the time. While a NORC study of uncounted ballots released on November 12, 2001, found that with a full statewide hand recount, Gore may have won Florida under revised vote standards (depending on which standard was used, his margin of victory would have varied from 60 to 171 votes), under rules devised by the Florida Supreme Court and accepted by the Gore campaign at the time, Bush would likely have won the recount. The legal dispute was ultimately resolved by the Supreme Court of the United States in a 5–4 decision. Bush won the election by 537 votes in Florida, and won the electoral college vote of 271 to 266. One elector pledged to Gore did not cast an electoral vote; Gore received 267 pledged electors. The election was one of the most controversial in American history. Had Gore been elected, he would have been the first sitting vice president to assume the presidency since George H. W. Bush and the fourth from Tennessee, after Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and Andrew Johnson. Lieberman would have been the first non-Christian (Jewish) vice president and the highest ranking Jewish American in the U.S. history.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
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