The Woman in the Room

Born into a poor, immigrant family, Naomi B. Levine grew up in the Bronx and on Manhattan’s storied Lower East Side in an era when women were not encouraged to have lives of their own. Nevertheless, she managed to raise herself to prominence as a leader of Jewish affairs, champion of civil rights, and expert fundraiser.

Poignant, direct, and inflected with Yiddishkeit, The Woman in the Room is the story of how Levine went from living in a crowded tenement with a shared bathroom to penning an amicus brief that was crucial in Brown v. Board of Education, assuming the Executive Directorship of the American Jewish Congress, and saving NYU from bankruptcy with the first billion-dollar capital campaign for a university.

A lover of history, Levine describes not just her life but also articulates how the major historical events of the time emboldened her to take social and political positions that were in many circles unacceptable. She was an activist and a feminist before those concepts became part of our everyday parlance. The Woman in the Room not only illuminates the decades Levine lived but furnishes future generations with the strength and courage to face the challenges before them.     

Naomi B. Levine was a celebrated attorney, activist, and fundraiser. She graduated from Columbia Law School at a time when few women were admitted and went on to pen amici briefs that were essential to the civil rights cases Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and Brown v. The Board of Education Topeka (1954). She was the first female director of the American Jewish Congress and played an active role in the Civil Rights movement from that position. She later became an Executive Vice President of New York University, where she orchestrated the first billion-dollar capital campaign. She passed away in Florida in 2021 at the age of 97. She was a life-long New Yorker.

Sofia Ergas Groopman is a writer and editor from New York City. A graduate of Harvard College, she earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she received the Hopwood Award for Fiction, the Hopwood Award for Nonfiction, and the Chamberlain Award for Creative Writing. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vice, The Paris Review Daily, Joyland, and The Gettysburg Review. Before turning to writing, she worked in trade publishing for five years, most recently as an Associate Editor at Harper/HarperCollins. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, their son, and their sassy dachshund.