Ruth Gruber (1911–2016)

Ruth Gruber was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. She graduated from New York University as a teenager and won a fellowship to the University of Wisconsin, where she received a master's degree in German and English literature. In 1931, she received another fellowship to study German philosophy, modern English literature, and art history at the University of Cologne. At age 20, she earned a doctoral degree with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf and was said to be the youngest PhD in the world. While in Germany, she also attended Nazi Party rallies and heard the ranting speeches against Americans and against Jews. Returning home during the Great Depression, Dr. Gruber became a pioneering journalist, writing about women under fascism and communism, and was the first American foreign correspondent allowed to fly through Siberia to the Soviet Arctic. During World War II, she turned her attention to the crisis of Jewish refugees: as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Interior in the Roosevelt Administration, she escorted 1,000 refugees from Italy to the USA and reported their stories. Her book about the experience, Haven: The Unknown Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees, was published in 1983. After the war, Dr. Gruber left government and returned to journalism. She gave the world an eyewitness account of how Holocaust survivors and other Jews were forcibly removed by the British from the refugee ship Exodus 1947, refused entry to Palestine, and deportated back to Germany. In 1951, she married Philip H. Michaels, a community leader in the Bronx, with whom she had two children. Dr. Gruber published more than 16 books and received many awards for her writing and humanitarian acts, including the Na'amat Golda Meir Human Rights Award and awards from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance. These included Raquela: A Woman of Israel, which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1979; and Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews (1987). The first volume of her autobiography, Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent, was published in 1991, In 2016, an exhibit of her photographs entitled Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist went on display at the Oregon Jewish Museum in Portland.