All About Change - "Never In Anger" - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with Director Julie Cohen

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

'RBG', Julie Cohen & Betsy West's 2018 documentary about Justice Ginsburg, was the first documentary about a sitting Supreme Court Justice. Jay & Julie explore RBG's personal approach to legal... activism, and her rise to Internet stardom. Music Credits: "Ginsburg's Hobby Lobby Dissent," Jonathan Mann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGfGsWR0mwMSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 All Inclusive, a podcast on inclusion, innovation, and social justice with Jay Ruderman. Hi, I'm Jay Ruderman, and this is All Inclusive, a podcast focused on inclusion, innovation, and social justice. justice. I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks. We welcome today Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She's become such an icon. Would you mind signing this copy? I am 84 years old and everyone wants to take a picture with me. Notorious RPG. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:01:00 When you come right down to it, the closest thing to a superhero I know. Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed the way the world is for American women. Finding success as a film director is never easy, and it is probably twice as difficult for creators of documentary films. Yet RBG, a documentary about the life and work of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was an extraordinary success. It was one of the highest-grossing independent films of 2018 and holds an approval rating of 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, a popular review aggregation website for film and television. RBG's directors, Betsy West and Julie Cohen, spent countless hours researching Ginsburg's life,
Starting point is 00:01:48 interviewing her peers, friends, and also managed to get a rare peek into the Justice's personal life. Here with me today to talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's legacy and cultural icon status is documentary filmmaker and television news producer, Julie Cohen. Julie, welcome to All Inclusive. Supreme Court justices are notoriously media shy. In fact, RBG is, as far as I can tell, the first documentary about a living justice. Why did you and Betsy decide to go the hard way and focus your attention on Justice Ginsburg? Well, I mean, you know, we wanted, it was a story that felt like it would be really interesting to tell. And yes, you're right. We were the first doc done about a sitting
Starting point is 00:02:39 Supreme Court justice, but we just were extremely eager to tell Justice Ginsburg's incredible story, mainly because she was getting so much attention. She was becoming a pop culture figure in the US in a way that Supreme Court justices generally don't, certainly in a way that women in their 80s generally don't, because of a series of stinging dissents that she wrote, particularly in 2013 and 2014, as the court was moving further to the right. And she was writing strong dissents saying that she thought that some major decisions that the court was making were moving in the wrong direction. And she was writing them to be understood not only by lawyers and judges, but also by the general public. She sort of used the platform of a dissent to teach, which is she thought that the Supreme Court was going the wrong way on issues like voting rights in particular, women's rights, abortion rights,
Starting point is 00:03:54 civil rights, just all kinds of areas where she wasn't, you know, she was concerned, as many Americans were, with what the court was doing. So she writes these dissents. She's writing them in sharp language that the public is going to both understand and maybe get a kick out of. And so some young, particularly young women law students kind of picked up on this, started calling her the Notorious RBG after the Notorious BIG. And like all of a sudden, after the notorious VIG. And like all of a sudden her face is on posters and leaflets and internet memes with a little crown on it. And even a couple people got RBG tattoos. And Betsy and I were aware from previous things we'd worked on and the studies of the women's rights movement, the absolutely huge and essential role that Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a young lawyer had played in securing women's rights under the U.S. Constitution at the Supreme Court, where she'd argued six cases in the 1970s, all on gender
Starting point is 00:05:01 equality, and won five of those six. So she had played this huge role in women's rights, and yet that was not very well known by the general public. So myself and Betsy West, my directing partner, kind of took the notorious RBG fame and all the interest in her in a pop culture way as an excuse, basically, to do a deep dive into this very interesting piece of history about how the women's movement proceeded under law. Most people that know about the US women's liberation movement know quite a bit about kind of the marches in the streets and the Gloria Steinem half of what women's activism did in the 70s. But, you know, RBG
Starting point is 00:05:49 played just a crucial role in that movement. More quiet because she's a more quiet person, but also because she was doing behind the scenes work in appellate, you know, courts where cameras aren't rolling. We went and actually looked back at some of the news coverage of those cases for the 70s. And first of all, there was very little coverage. And second of all, when there was coverage, it almost never mentioned Ruth Bader Ginsburg by name. She was not famous for this pretty important role that she played in securing women's rights. And we kind of wanted to change that and also explore the kind of amusing side of a woman in her 80s becoming a bit of a rock star. Right. It's an amazing film, and I would encourage anyone who's not seen it to see it. So I have to ask you, how did you
Starting point is 00:06:46 and Betsy manage to convince Justice Ginsburg to cooperate with you on the project? Yes, well, it was a long, it was a very long process that needs a little bit of history going into it. The first, you know, of course, getting cooperation and access of a subject is kind of a key first step of almost all documentary films. And in this case, the first part of that is actually getting a situation where the person is actually going to see your request. And in that case, we had a big leg up because actually both Betsy and I had interviewed Justice Ginsburg previously. We each had relationships with Justice Ginsburg's office that meant that we knew we were going to be able to get a request to her that she would read. We made that request in January of 2015. And the justice got right back to us within a day or so. And her initial answer was essentially
Starting point is 00:07:46 not yet. We looked over that email very carefully. And we noted that two words that did not appear in it were no or and never. So we kind of took the not yet to be like a maybe someday. We went back to her to say, oh, we understand that you don't want to participate in a documentary yet, but it actually takes a number of years to get a project like this together. And we were wondering if you would essentially give us your blessing to go forth and start interviewing some other people about you, you know, with the hopes that someday you might want to participate in this. And her answer that time was, well, I wouldn't be ready to sit down with you for an interview for at least another two years. But if you want to move forward with some of these other people, I noticed that there are three people who are not
Starting point is 00:08:43 on your list that I think would be worth talking to. And so we basically took that as our yes. We were basically like, okay, she's giving us her blessing to move forward with this documentary. And she's saying that she will sit down for an interview in two years. It wasn't exactly what we had hoped.
Starting point is 00:08:59 She was 82 at that point. So we now know that we're waiting till she's 84. So we got enough funding to do five interviews. And we made sure that we were interviewing people that Justice Ginsburg really knew with the hope and expectation that they would reach out to her and say to her, oh, you know, I met with these women, they seem very professional, they seem very serious, they have done a lot of research. And this seems like it's going to be a really good, good project. And I will say that of those initial five, three of them were the people that she had suggested, because we're not foolish,
Starting point is 00:09:34 I think, you know, we just thought that would that would make her think that we were, you know, taking seriously, um, what her thoughts were, At the time we were thinking like, oh, we don't have to use these interviews. Like who knows? As it turned out, they were three fantastic interviews. So like Justice Ginsburg turns out to be a great documentary producer among her many intellectual talents.
Starting point is 00:09:58 She actually didn't have or ask for any editorial control or input into our film beyond suggesting, uh, those three people. And actually at a later date suggesting that we, um, interview her granddaughter, which we were eager to do. Other than that, she had no input in how we shaped the piece. And in fact, she never saw the film until, um, she joined us for the world premiere, um, at Sundance, uh, in 2018, She flew out to see the film, even though she hadn't watched it yet. She just agreed to come. She was eager to see it. And as I say, she actually never asked to see it. Well, as I said, it's an amazing film. And there's a part
Starting point is 00:10:39 that sticks out for me. I want to get into her legal career and the impact of it. But I remember a part of the film when you're showing her clips from Saturday Night Live and Kate McKinnon doing an impersonation of her. So what was that like showing that to her? As her children explained to us, beyond the PBS NewsHour, she really was not interested in television as much as she was like an arts lover. She was not a TV person. We happened to ask her adult children in an interview, like, what does your mom think of that Saturday Night Live impression? And they were like, you know, I don't think she's seen it. And as soon as they said that, we're like, okay, we're bringing that
Starting point is 00:11:19 to the Supreme Court to show to her on camera. We were in a big stately Supreme Court conference room where the public relations apparatus had all sort of joined to watch this thing unfold. And when that clip started to play, because we had told them we were going to show some clips of things from the film, they fortunately didn't ask us what those were going to be. Because if we had said,
Starting point is 00:11:44 like, we're going to show the Saturday Night Live clips clips i'm not really i don't think we really would have gotten a sign off on that but so the clip starts to play she leans in to look at it the whole room kind of gasps um and then she's just like oh is this saturday night live and i said yes and she said is this who's the actress who's playing me and i told her the name and then as we showed in the film she just started to burst out laughing and as soon as she started laughing there was just like a sigh of relief in the whole room and then the interesting thing is that you know we had montaged a few clips together and some of them involved like kate mckinnon doing like a little bit of like dirty dancing and kind of the raunchier it got,
Starting point is 00:12:25 like the harder the justice laugh. She just thought it was funny. She just appreciated like the good, the good comic impersonation of her. And that scene, there's a scene where she's like, you know, in her Popeye like desire for vigor, she's like, you know, scarfing down a whole packet of vitamin C and it's falling all over her face. And she just seemed to love it. She really, it was a truly, truly a fun moment to be there in the room. And I'm really glad we got to capture it on film. That's very, that's very interesting. So let's zoom into her career as a lawyer and activist against gender discrimination. And from 1971 to 1976, Justice Ginsburg argued six landmark cases in front of the Supreme Court and won all but one of them. Looking back at these cases,
Starting point is 00:13:16 what do you think were the key elements to her success? So the key elements to her success, which are true kind of for all of the great appellate litigators who move constitutional law forward, is really carefully picking the cases. cases that Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have taken. She was working at that time for the ACLU. And so potential cases are basically pouring in all the time. And she picked ones that she thought were winnable. 10 and 20 years before, Thurgood Marshall, another fantastic Supreme Court litigator who also had later became a justice, had done the same thing on civil rights cases, had been extremely careful about what cases he picked, didn't overreach, didn't go crazy trying to tear down all of the walls at once, had a very much a step at a time in incremental approach that had been extremely successful. And RBG in her whole, but it was more than 30, you know, and won just the huge vast majority of them also by advancing the ball, you know, very incrementally because like, you know, sort of getting the justices
Starting point is 00:14:58 adjusted to change. Another extremely clever and I think unexpected tactic that the young Ruth Bader Ginsburg used was to take gender equality cases in which the man was discriminated against because of the way that laws that distinguish by gender actually, her argument was, actually hurt both women and men. And so the great example that we use in the film is a man, a New Jersey man named Stephen Weisenfeld, who tragically lost his wife in childbirth. Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, Stephen Weisenfeld's case concerns the entitlement of a female wage earner, a female wage earner's family, to social insurance of the same quality as that accorded the family of a male wage earner. Neither was attending school, and Paula was the family's principal income earner. In 1972, Paula died, giving birth to her son, Jason Paul, leaving the child's father, Stephen Weisenfeld, with sole responsibility for the care of Jason Paul.
Starting point is 00:16:28 sole responsibility for the care of Jason Paul. And his wife had been the main breadwinner, but now he's left raising this little baby and then toddler alone. He wants to be a stay-at-home dad. And when he applied to get, you know, the death benefits that one that he thought, oh, you just get this for death of a spouse. And my wife was the was the breadwinner. So I want to get some some benefits because she's passed away. He was told like, oh, no, no, those are widow benefits. Those aren't widower benefits, like a guy can't get that. And so basically, in his case, sexism, sexism really hurt the man. And RBG just recognized right away that this would be a great case for her to take to the court because she knows like you know little lady that she was she's arguing and if
Starting point is 00:17:13 you've ever been in the supreme court main chamber it's an extremely imposing place and the justices are like a good you know i'd say like five to ten feet above where the lawyer is down there at the podium, you're looking up at these black robed figures before you at this time in the 70s. It's not your arguing case to nine men. And she just thought she was going to have a better shot at making the case that gender distinctions are a problem if she could show them an instance of how this really, you know, hurt a man because she could show them an instance of how this really you know hurt a man because she thought that steven weissenfeld was going to be relatable to these guys and he even told us that she purposely told him to sit near the range for him to sit near the front of uh of the courtroom which isn't usually done in that way and she sort of subtly referenced
Starting point is 00:18:02 him i don't think she said like you know it's not like a regular trial like you see on TV, like, oh, the witness is there. Like nobody's really, you know, referencing. But but but she just wanted the justices to put themselves in his place. Like, oh, how how would you feel if this happened in your family? She just thought she had a relatable. not the only case that she took where a man had been discriminated against and had been the victim of discriminatory laws. Weinberger, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare against Weisenfeld. Under the Social Security Act, when a covered male worker dies leaving a wife and minor children, survivors' benefits are paid both to the children and to the widow.
Starting point is 00:18:57 However, when a covered female worker dies leaving a husband and minor children, worker dies, leaving a husband and minor children, survivors' benefits are paid only to the children and not to the widower. A three-judge district court in New Jersey held that this sex-based discrimination was unconstitutional because in violation of the equal protection component of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. We agree and we affirm. Mr. Justice Powell joined by the Chief Justice. So incrementalness and sort of looking at both women and men being hurt by gender discrimination were her two really great strategic insights. So I think that that was a really ingenious approach, but take us back to the mindset of, of the court at that time in the seventies. And, and you have, um, a very successful and
Starting point is 00:19:58 intelligent, um, litigator in, in justice Ginsburg, who at the time was not a justice, but, litigator in Justice Ginsburg, who at the time was not a justice, but was arguing to a court of men, all men, who were steeped in a different error. And she's talking about gender discrimination. I mean, how accepting was the court at this time to even hear these arguments and to sort of like was the court at this time to even hear these arguments and to sort of like culturally understand where she was going with it? Yes. Well, you know, it was the Supreme Court and it was kind of everyone in society when the women's rights movement were starting just didn't get it. They just didn't understand because the thought was, I don't know what you mean that women are being discriminated against. We're really nice to women. We hold doors open for them. didn't understand because the thought was, I don't know what you mean that women are being discriminated against. We're really nice to women. We hold doors open for them. We treat them,
Starting point is 00:20:50 you know, deferentially, like if we put that we put them on a pedestal. I think it's hard for young people today to understand how deeply the world has changed on these issues in 50 years. There was just a completely different mindset. I mean, it was, you know, the idea that it would be okay for a woman not to be able to have her own credit card, like the husband had to get the card and then like give off, you know, an extra to his wife, or like a woman could not be able to get a mortgage for herself or like yes of course you can fire someone who gets pregnant which is actually something that rbg experienced once and then on in a second and a later uh a later job where she when she got pregnant with
Starting point is 00:21:36 their second child she just wore her mother-in-law's clothes so that well with the hopes that no one would would notice that she was pregnant like. The idea that you could just openly discriminate against women was so accepted that bringing it up was seen as very radical. I mean, at the time that RBG was advancing these ideas, it was quite radical. And I think that that's very obvious in some of the audio tapes that we play in the film of young rbg uh arguing her case to these justices who are often just like openly snickering at her and i think it's okay to be you know very condescending and like you know it's sort of like also like she's a petite person she's so lovely it was sort of like yes you're a cute little lady like
Starting point is 00:22:25 but why don't you sit down dear uh rbg throughout her life had an extreme amount of deliberativeness and patience and she just dealt with that by patience she didn't snap back she didn't like get into an argument she just very calmly and carefully explained her case with a degree of logic and with a degree of reliance on the law that was quite difficult for the other justices, for the justices to argue with. So I want to talk a little bit about your last point about Justice Ginsburg's personal style of activism, which is often described, as you say, as strategic, but she's famously quoted as saying that anger in activism is self-defeating. And this was not a universal view at the time, and probably not today.
Starting point is 00:23:27 at the time, and probably not today. You know, many activists at this time, the feminist movement, also other movements, were in favor of very aggressive actions, chaining themselves to fences, and taking very strong actions in the street. And that wasn't what she was about. She was about this quiet activism. So can you talk a little bit about that? And maybe how was she accepted by the feminist community back in the 1970s? In terms of how other feminists responded to her, sometimes I think in their view, sometimes, I think, in their view, too careful and too deliberate approach. There's a big mix. Gloria Steinem is and was throughout just a huge fan of RBG's approach and could see how it kind of provided the yin and yang that it was good to have someone, you know, to have ladies out on the street, like doing loud protests, and as you suggest, some civil disobedience,
Starting point is 00:24:25 but also important to have some people who can quietly step into the halls of power and start making some changes within. She always thought the two things worked out well together. But there were others, including in the feminist legal community, that thought that RBG should be pushing, that we should be pushing more aggressively, like jump right in there and say, let's change everything all at once. And RBG's point was like, no, incrementally is the way to make changes, especially in the law, because otherwise you you're courting a backlash. But you know, that's like a debate that lawyers looking for all kinds of different rights have have argued between them. you know, in many, many different instances. There certainly have been cases in the movement for civil rights and later in the movement for gay rights where legal developments have come out way in front of legislative developments. And then the country and public public opinion has, in fact, caught up with court rulings. So it can work that way. So there was not initially completely
Starting point is 00:25:34 smooth sailing between RBG and all parts of the women's rights movement. That tended to change, especially on the abortion issue. Once she was on the court as a justice, and, you know, again, and again, stuck up quite aggressively for reproductive rights. Let's talk a little bit about Martin Ginsberg, her husband, and, you know, because he had a tremendous influence on on her life. And I think one, I mean, obviously the film really gets into it, but in general folklore, Marty's not talked about a lot and he was an extremely successful attorney on his own. Absolutely. He was one of the greatest tax lawyers in the country, hugely successful and remained hugely successful. But when his wife was appointed by Jimmy Carter to become a federal judge in DC, he made the at
Starting point is 00:26:35 the time kind of shocking decision that like, oh, I know I'll move for her job instead of the wife moving for the husband's job. Like, I'm gonna move for her job. And he left his law firm and became a professor at Georgetown Law School. He had a great career, and yet a priority in his life was his wife's career. He kind of understood what her legal mind was as far as constitutional law was concerned. And he just had had a sense from very early, like, oh, she could be a Supreme Court justice. In fact, they were incorrect on this point, but he had had the thought that, oh, she could be the first woman to be a Supreme Court justice, something that was, I think,
Starting point is 00:27:19 captured for posterity in their daughter Jane's high school yearbook, because it was just something that Marty used to say. And so people, you know, predicted that about Jane. As it turned out, of course, Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed by Reagan and became the first woman Supreme Court justice, but RBG was not far behind. And Marty's, not only his support of her career, his which entailed him doing 50% of the child rearing, and ultimately all of the cooking, um, you know, that was key, but also him kind of pushing her forward, like he was, you know, she's a quiet, she was a quiet person. He was incredibly outgoing, kind of knew everybody in Washington and really was responsible by a lot of accounts, including hers, for kind of putting her name on the list of people who could
Starting point is 00:28:12 potentially become Supreme Court justices once President Clinton had an opening for that. So sticking with the theme of taking someone's exact words and turning them into music. Two years ago when the Hobby Lobby decision came down, Ruth Bader Ginsburg made this amazing thing. And so we're gonna sing about it. Yeah. Religious organizations exist to foster the interests of persons subscribing to the same religious faith. Not so for-profit corporations, workers who sustain these operations. these operations commonly are not... Let's turn for a minute about the attention on Justice Ginsburg's status as a cultural icon, which was expressed in the now famous notorious RBG internet meme, which shows her as a likeness of the rapper, the notorious B.I.G.G., it's an understanding to say that this is pretty rare
Starting point is 00:29:27 for a Supreme Court justice to become a cultural icon. I can't think of any other one who has become one. But how did she become one? And how did she react to this when she knew that this was happening? Yeah. So in the summer of 2013, she wrote a dissent to a case called Shelby County versus Holder, which was about voting rights. It was about stripping away some of the Voting Rights Act that had been put in place in the 1960s. It's like an incredibly relevant decision and dissent today. And basically, the majority opinion was saying that it was okay to pull back some of the Voting Rights Act because the country has changed so much. And essentially, like, because there's theoretically less racism in the South, we don't need such strong, stringent voting rights protection. And Justice Ginsburg's dissent,
Starting point is 00:30:25 most famously said, to pull back these protections is, quote, like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet. Meaning like, yeah, no, it's because of the Voting Rights Act that there is less voting rights nightmares in some of the different states. The Voting Rights Act, as it existed before this opinion came down in 2013, would have prevented changes like the recent laws that passed in Georgia. Like it wouldn't have been possible because they would have had to check with the justice, they would have had to get Justice Department okay to make changes that would have, that could have prevented people from voting. So this decision, this dissent, which was worded so strongly and cleverly, just caught a lot of people's attention, including a law student at the time at NYU named Shana Knizhnik,
Starting point is 00:31:16 who started a notorious RBG blog, you know, blog, you know, just and started cataloging all of this great, meaningful, but also zingy lines that that RBG was writing in her dissents. And it just caught on with people because politically engaged, liberal law students, particularly women, just started noting like, hey, this woman is like a powerhouse and somebody you know coming up with the clever name uh notorious rbg just really helped it you know helped it grow and then just like you know how the internet is like when something catches on it just goes crazy and the fact that rbg was a very small quiet elderly elderly Jewish grandmother just really helped that because it was like the comparison was funny. RBG probably could have shut it down by like, by like not by acting like
Starting point is 00:32:13 she didn't like it. But she basically used it to go out there and educate people and talk more about constitutional law and the way that she always enjoyed and she would go do these tours. We showed quite a bit of it in our film of her talking to particularly college students and law students. And people would ask her what she thought about being the notorious RBG. And she says, like, I don't see why people should be so surprised that I'm being compared to notorious BIG. Like, we have a lot in common. Like, then she paused. They said, we were both born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and everyone would cheer. And it was just like, and you could see there was like a little glimmer in her eye, like she just she just, the notorious RBG thing had serious substance, but it was also a cheeky little joke. And she got the joke, and she kind of played into it. And that just helped. I mean, her doing that line again and again. And we heard her, we heard her say it at, at, at, at talks,
Starting point is 00:33:05 uh, around the country, like, you know, dozens of times. Um, it just, it just helped it. It just became a thing. So I wanted to just touch on, um, the fact that during the filming, um, of RBG, you spent many, many hours, um, following her and, um, to different events and even filming her in some very rare and personal situations such as working out at the gym. Can you just talk a little bit about the personal experience of, you know, being very close to her, interacting with her and filming her in these personal situations? Yeah, I mean, it was a really amazing experience. Justice Ginsburg was an incredible woman. She was, I would say the most intimidating person I've ever met. She had a very unusual conversational style as friends who have known her throughout her life say in our film, she was like
Starting point is 00:34:00 not a person who made small talk. So she really liked to talk about substance. So if you wanted to engage her in conversation the way that two human beings normally do when they're together in a situation, getting ready for some filming to start or whatever, you couldn't just say like, oh, how are things going? How are the kids?
Starting point is 00:34:16 You know, nice weather. You really had to say like, what did you think of last night's performance in the second act of the opera? Like if you talk to her about substance, she would just dive right in and she really liked to talk about it but she didn't really want to make any and if sometimes when you spoke to her like her friends would joke like she's the kind of person that if you said how are you she would pause for a few seconds before again like give you a really thought out answer that would come out in paragraphs like her
Starting point is 00:34:42 intellect was noticeable her eyes were very piercing. So it was sort of intimidating to be with her, but also really delightful, because as we spent more time with her and got to know her a bit, she was a delightful person. She did have a real sense of humor. After our film came out, she sent us a number of just really lovely, touching notes about the impact that it had had on her. And, you know, watching her watch the film was seeing her workout in the gym. We didn't really know what to expect at all. At that point, her workout had gotten quite a lot of attention in the print press, but nobody had ever brought a camera in there. We were taken aback when she agreed to that request. We expected her to say no. We were taken aback when she agreed to that request.
Starting point is 00:35:25 We expected her to say no. We asked her in person because we learned that that was the best way to get yeses. If something had to go through layers of people, the question probably wouldn't even get to her. But we noted that normally when we asked her about if we could film a certain thing to her face, she would say yes. Including even in that opera,
Starting point is 00:35:41 she let us put a little mini GoPro camera, like on the seat in the row in front of her to be catching her face when she was filming. So, you know, but when we when we went into the gym, we didn't know what we would see, we didn't really expect that she could do like long sequences of planks or 20 push ups as it has been reported. I mean, you saw what she looked like, we just we just didn't believe it. And then we went in there and she was doing that with such a fierce determination and seeing her, this small woman, you know, who at that point was 84, putting that the physical paces of a workout was just, uh, like, uh, like I, I cried during, during watching that during the filming of that scene. Cause I, I mean, I know people find it amusing, but I just thought it was incredibly moving. So I just, I want to talk
Starting point is 00:36:38 about Justice Ginsburg's passing, um, having spent so much time, you know, with her and her family. How did she change you? And how do you see her passing impacting the country? I feel like she changed me in a number of ways, but mostly just as the sort of seeing the model of her, the relentless optimism that she took to every situation, be it a personal setback, or political, you know, a difficult political environment for the country, she just always chose optimism in a very deliberate way that I think is a great model. Obviously, she left an incredible legacy with everything that she achieved as a lawyer, as a justice, not only some really meaningful victories that she had when she was arguing before the court and opinions that she wrote as a justice, but even dissents that hopefully sometime in the future will be picked up as the basis for a new direction for the court, which is always what a justice is doing when they're writing an assent. They're writing for history. They're writing in the hopes that maybe their ideas and arguments will be picked up later
Starting point is 00:37:55 so that they will become the law of the land. Well, Julie, it is an amazing film, and I would just encourage anyone who hasn't seen it to see it. It's one of the best films I've seen in recent memory. And not only was she portrayed, and she was an extraordinary human being, but also the personal side of her. personal side of her. The fact that she had a caring family, the fact that her granddaughter called her Bubby, which is a Yiddish term for grandmother. And she was a real person. And I think everything came together in the film, the realness of her, her sense of humor, but her true accomplishments, her relationship with her family. You did an amazing job with the film and really captured her. So congratulations. And I'm sure you've heard it
Starting point is 00:38:53 many times from many people, but it's amazing. And I would encourage anyone to get it and to see it. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you. And I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you. All Inclusive is a production of the Ruderman Family Foundation. Our key mission is the full inclusion of people with disabilities in all aspects of society. You can find All Inclusive on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and Stitcher. To view the show notes, transcripts, or to learn more, go to rudermanfoundation.org slash allinclusive. Have an idea for a podcast?
Starting point is 00:39:40 Be sure to tweet at Jay Ruderman.

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