(JTA) — Bert Pogrebin and Letty Jo Cottin were married in 1963, barely six months after they met. Over the following 60 years, they modelled a symbiotic marriage that was not simply the envy of their pals on New York’s Higher West Facet, but that additionally had political weight: A robust labour lawyer and one of the crucial influential figures within the girls’ motion, the couple demonstrated how two bold spouses may elevate youngsters, pursue careers and assist each other without malice or bruised egos.
“He doesn’t just show his masculinity or big-foot others to feel like a person,” Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the creator and a founding editor of Ms Journal, wrote of her husband in her 2022 memoir, “Shanda.” “He’s a Harvard-educated lawyer with a stellar, decades-long profession below his belt. However, I’ve never heard him brag about himself (solely about his youngsters, grandkids, and me).”
Bert Pogrebin, 89, was a longtime accomplice at Littler Mendelson PC who represented the administration in labour negotiations and wrote a vital textbook on the topic. He died on March 25.
Pogrebin was additionally a co-founder and board member of the Appleseed Community, a nonprofit community of 18 public curiosity justice facilities within the US and Mexico based by members of Harvard Legislation College’s Class of 1958. Finally, his daughter, the author Abigail Pogrebin, and son-in-law David Shapiro created the Bert Pogrebin Appleseed Fund for Justice, specializing in the group’s work in New York.
At a memorial service on March 28 at New York’s B’nai Jeshurun congregation, he was remembered by his household. He shut pals from the intersecting worlds of liberal politics, feminism, legislation and Jewish life, together with Hillary Clinton, the actress Marlo Thomas, the singer Peter Yarrow and Rabbis Burton L. Visotzky, Angela Buchdahl and Felicia L. Sol.
“He was there to be supportive of [Letty], however way more and deeper: supportive of the type of world that they each needed for his or her youngsters and their grandchildren,” Clinton, the previous Democratic presidential nominee, secretary of state and senator from New York, stated on the memorial service. “And we want folks like Bert greater than ever.”
Bertrand Pogrebin, son of Abraham and Esther Pogrebin, was born on April 10, 1934, in Brooklyn. The family later lived in Roosevelt, New Jersey, a rural cooperative neighbourhood constructed by the Franklin Roosevelt administration primarily for Jewish garment staff. “I experienced anti-Semitism in my rural high school, where all the scholars from my largely Jewish hometown confronted hostility from the youngsters who weren’t Jewish,” he told the Ahead in 2016.
Labor lawyer’s legacy
Pogrebin attended Rutgers College and Harvard Law School and was a senior accomplice at Rains & Pogrebin, a law agency in the Lengthy Island suburb of Mineola, New York, for a few years.
Representing administration as what his daughter Robin joked was the “good man on the unhealthy aspect,” he earned a reputation for equity and civility that impressed even adversaries. Legal professional Bruce Millman recalled working at Pogrebin’s legislation agency and being taught by his mentor “to admire and respect… labour and the aspirations of working women and men and to be moral in every little thing we do.”
In her memoir, Letty Pogrebin recalled that as a younger suitor, Bert would choose up a guitar and belt out labour union classics, like “Which Facet Are You On?” and “Solidarity Perpetually.”
Pogrebin was co-author of “Labor Relations: The Primary Processes, Legislation and Observe,” a treatise for attorneys and law students. He taught labour law at New York College Law School, Hofstra College Law School, and Yale College Law School. He also served on the board of editors of the New York Law Journal.
Mourners at B’nai Jeshurun recounted the highlights of his profession; however, he repeatedly returned to the subject of the partnership between the Pogrebins.
“It’s truthfully close to unimaginable to explain their romance, the unadulterated enjoyment of one another’s firm, their mutual admiration, by no means a merciless phrase, by no means a sliver of daylight between them,” Abigail Pogrebin recalled in her eulogy. “And no, I didn’t want to listen to as many instances as I did how attractive mother was.”
He and his spouse lived on the Higher West Facet starting in 1970 and have a house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where he handed away.
His survivors, his spouse, and twin daughters have a son, David, and six grandchildren.
