October 1929, when the overwhelming economic downturn
took its toll, radical politics made much more sense than reli-
gion to Arthur, who was just twenty years old. It was proba-
bly at this moment of economic collapse that Arthur Cohen
found the American Communist Party, which had its largest
impact during the 1930s, when it organized the unemployed,
protested evictions and cuts in relief aid, and led hunger
marches. In America, both the Communist Party and its
sympathizers grew in numbers. Arthur exchanged one ortho-
doxy for another – his father’s for Marxism. Arthur may have
rejected his father’s religious calling, but not the clear human-
itarian goals his father drew from the
Musar
movement, his
desire to make the world a better place.
Jewish religious observance was practiced in Judy’s extended
family. She also experienced Jewish culture and ritual through
her mostly Jewish classmates at elementary school. Her fa-
ther’s death, when she was just thirteen, prompted her to
turn to the Jewish religion, despite her secular upbringing.
She searched for solace at the
Anshe Emet Synagogue
,
a con-
gregation of the Conservative Movement, near her home.
She recalls going “on and off to temple in Chicago until I
was 16,” for the
Yizkor
memorial service for the dead. Those
reciting
Yizkor
promise to do “acts of charity and goodness”
in the memory of the deceased person and to
be faithful to their teachings. Although the
synagogue’s attempt to raise
donations eventually alienated this teenager
in mourning, who had no funds to offer, she
nonetheless absorbed the lesson of the
prayer, taking to heart the humanitarian
goals of her father’s prematurely abridged
life, which continued to inform her own.
While still in high school, Judy began dat-
ing a rabbinical student with whom she
would remain in touch for many years,
though she quickly realized that she was not
cut out to be a rabbi’s wife. Judy attended
and graduated from U.C.L.A. In her letters
home to her mother, she frequently used
Yiddish words in transliteration, a habit
of speech that was second nature to her.
This unselfconscious use of Yiddish with
her mother also suggests comfort with,
even pride in, their shared Eastern Euro-
pean Jewish heritage. Following her father’s
teachings, during her freshman year at
U.C.L.A., Judy became interested in the
Civil Rights movement and began to work
for the NAACP. She designed posters for
their events and became the corresponding secretary of the
Westwood chapter.
That same year Judy met her first love, Leslie Lacy, an African-
American student at University of Southern California. He
later recalled her in a “fictionalized” memoir,
The Rise and
Fall of a Proper Negro,
pointing out that he did not then
share her radical politics. At the age of twenty-one, she mar-
ried Jerry Gerowitz, whose Jewish parents had moved to
Los Angeles from Chicago. Barely two years later, he died
in an auto accident, but she had taken his name during the
marriage and continued to be known as Judy Gerowitz
after his death in 1963.
Inspired by the feminist movement, Judy went to teach at
Fresno State College in early 1970, eager to explore female
experience and to find and study earlier women’s art. That
summer, she legally changed her name to Judy Chicago,
which, inspired by her accent strongly reminiscent of her
native city, her Los Angeles art dealer had dubbed her. She
took out an ad in
Artforum
announcing why she had made
this change: “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all
names imposed upon her through male social dominance
and freely chooses her own name: Judy Chicago.”
|6
Compressed Women Who Yearned to be Butterflies #3: Mme Deronda
© Judy Chicago, 1974. Prismacolor on rag paper, 24” x 24”.
Collection: Arkansas Art Cente