Cora Weiss, who was active for more than half a century in support of gender equality, international peace, the anti-Vietnam War movement, civil rights and nuclear disarmament, and who helped organize some of the most important mass demonstrations of the 1960s, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her son, Daniel Weiss.
In 1961, Ms. Weiss was raising her children in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx when she was told about Women Strike for Peace, a new group organizing demonstrations against nuclear weapons testing.
Would Ms. Weiss be interested in joining the Riverdale chapter?
She was. With other women across the country, she soon found herself reading up on the deadly ingredients of an atomic bomb and sending off her children’s baby teeth to be tested for radioactive isotopes resulting from nuclear fission.
Many of the teeth were found to have elevated levels of strontium-90, a carcinogenic element associated with nuclear testing that had also been detected in food. That finding boosted the group’s visibility, attracting attention to its campaign to ban nuclear tests. By October 1963, President John F. Kennedy had signed an agreement with Britain and the Soviet Union to prohibit atomic testing in the atmosphere, space and under water.
“I believe in civil society, and my experience of Women Strike for Peace led to that strong belief, because we managed to get things done,” Ms. Weiss said in an interview for this obituary in 2021. “I don’t know if we ever woke up in the morning and said we didn’t know how to go further. I think we just kept plowing.”
As a result of her involvement in Women Strike for Peace, Ms. Weiss was propelled into the convulsive world of social justice activism and eventually onto a global stage. By the late 1960s, the group had shifted its focus to opposing the Vietnam War.
At one protest in front of the Pentagon, women held up posters reading, “Not Our Sons, Not Your Sons,” while Ms. Weiss and others banged on the doors of the Defense Department headquarters with their high heels. At another demonstration, in New York, she joined a long line of women lying on Park Avenue with signs on their chests bearing the names of Vietnamese dead.
Within a few years, Ms. Weiss had become co-chairwoman of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam and had helped organize one of the largest antiwar protests in the United States.
On Nov. 15, 1969, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington, demanding that the United States withdraw its troops from Vietnam. Coretta Scott King spoke. Mary Travers, of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary, sang. And Senator George S. McGovern, Democrat of South Dakota and a future presidential nominee, walked with Senator Charles E. Goodell, Republican of New York.
The rally concluded with some protesters burning flags and police officers firing tear gas. Still, the day was hailed as significant in helping to turn public opinion against the war.
Soon after, Ms. Weiss flew to Hanoi to meet with the North Vietnamese Women’s Union, proposing to carry back mail from prisoners of war. The trip led to the creation of the Committee of Liaison With Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam. Ms. Weiss served as co-chairwoman of the organization, which eventually ferried thousands of letters and packages back and forth.
She also helped organize a major antinuclear demonstration in Central Park in Manhattan on June 12, 1982, drawing a crowd of about a million.
“She was courageous and brave and patriotic,” Darren Walker, the former president of the Ford Foundation, said in an interview, “and demonstrated that one can have love of country and still challenge America to be better.”
For her part, Ms. Weiss told the Columbia Center for Oral History in 2014, “I wasn’t making a revolution, I was just working hard and long.”
Cora Rubin was born on Oct. 2, 1934, in Manhattan, the daughter of Vera D. Rubin, an anthropologist specializing in Caribbean studies whose work on marijuana use in Jamaica landed her on an early cover of High Times, the magazine about cannabis culture. Her father, Samuel Rubin, owned a cosmetics company.
When Cora was young, the family moved to Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., in Westchester County. Raised in a liberal Jewish household, she was exposed to animated political discussions with guests like Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, who would drop by to chat and help with fund-raising. (Ms. Roosevelt would often spend time at her Hudson Valley retreat in Hyde Park, N.Y.)
“We talked community politics, what was happening in Croton, in the community,” Ms. Weiss recalled. “Antisemitism was rife, racism was rife, the war was rife.”
She became an activist early on, helping her mother roll bandages for the Red Cross, taking coffee and doughnuts to young men preparing to go to the front lines of World War II, and knitting clothes for relief efforts. Those experiences inspired her interest in bringing an end to war, she said.
After graduating from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, she met a newspaper editor leading an effort to recall Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the crusading anti-Communist who was attacking the loyalty of political opponents. She helped set up the Madison headquarters for a campaign called “Joe Must Go” and began going door to door to gather signatures for a petition.
It was an early lesson in the frustrations of grass-roots political organizing. Despite getting enough signatures, the recall effort floundered when many were deemed illegible.
She met Peter Weiss, a lawyer, during her work as chairwoman of the university’s international speakers club, recruiting social justice activists to talk on campus. As head of the International Development Placement Association, a precursor to the Peace Corps, Mr. Weiss had been invited to speak. They married in 1956, the same year she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology.
Mr. Weiss died in November at 99. In addition to their son, Ms. Weiss is survived by two daughters, Judy and Tamara Weiss; five grandchildren; and a brother, Reed Rubin.
A lifelong supporter of the United Nations, Ms. Weiss was particularly proud of her work in helping to draft United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which affirmed the importance of the role of women in the peace process and in protecting their security. It was unanimously adopted in 2000.
Later in life, as president of the Hague Appeal for Peace, a coalition of antiwar groups, she became involved in global peace education.
“I’ve decided that it’s the only sustainable thing,” Ms. Weiss said. “You can march, you can protest, you can make phone calls, you can write letters. But education is the closest thing, I think, to a sustainable form of social change.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
The post Cora Weiss, Lifelong Champion of Social Justice, Dies at 91 appeared first on New York Times.
