Jewish Grandes Dames:

LILITH notes the recent passing of three exemplary Jewish women. Painter Theresa Bernstein, whose Realist-style urban tableaux included studies of 1912 suffrage parades, died in February at 111. Bernstein, wrote Douglas Martin In The New York Times, “was both hailed and flailed for ‘painting like a man’ In the 1910s.” In April, Chaike Spiegel, 81, one of the last surviving fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, died in Montreal; she had immigrated with her husband, also a ghetto fighter, in 1948. Ruth Handler, 85, creator of Barbie, the teenage doll whose outré female proportions and glam outfits fed little girls’ fantasies and enraged feminists, died in April. “About feminist criticism, I don’t even respond to that,” Handler told LILITH in a 1994 interview. “The fact that Barbie Is so loved speaks for itself.”