Chai Rachel Feldblum (born April 1959)[1] is an American law professor at Georgetown University, author and activist for disability rights and LGBT rights.[2] In March 2010, she was appointed to a position on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) by President Barack Obama,[3] and in December 2010 she was confirmed to a full term on the EEOC by the United States Senate.[4]
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Chai Feldblum was born in New York City to Rabbi Meyer Simcha Feldblum and his wife Esther Yolles Feldblum. She grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in the Washington Heights section of New York City.[5]
Her father was born in a small town in Lithuania . His town's entire Jewish community was killed in the Holocaust with the exception of him and a young girl. He survived by hiding in the forests of Poland and emigrated to the United States after the war. He was ordained as a Rabbi and received his Ph.D. in Talmudic studies.[6]
Her mother was raised in a strict Hasidic Jewish family in Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. and was a professor at Brooklyn College. She focused her career on Jewish-Catholic relations and wrote at least two books on the subject, The American Catholic Press and the Jewish State, 1917-1959 and New Realities: Israel in the Holy Land.[7][8] She died in a car accident in 1974 at the age of 41.[9]
After Esther died, her husband remarried and emigrated to Israel where he died in 2002 of pancreatic cancer.[10][11]
Chai Feldblum attended the Yeshiva University High School for Girls in Queens, New York before majoring in Ancient Studies and Religion at Barnard College.[5] Feldblum received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1985.[12][13] Coming from a long line of Orthodox Jewish rabbis [14] she had hoped to become one herself. When she learned that her family's branch of Judaism did not permit women rabbis, she decided to become an attorney.[11]
After graduating from law school, Feldblum clerked for federal Judge Frank M. Coffin on the First Circuit Court of Appeals. After her clerkship there, she became a clerk for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court.[12]
While working from 1988-1990[15] as Legislative Counsel to the AIDS Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, Feldblum was the lead attorney on the team drafting the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990.[12]
She joined the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC in 1991, teaching classes on "legislative lawyering," a phrase she coined to describe the work of the attorneys who craft or lobby for legislation.[12] She founded and is the director of the university's Federal Legislation Clinic.[12]
Since joining Georgetown, Feldblum has continued her own legislative lawyering career. In 1993, she was the legal director for the Campaign for Military Service, a group which lobbied to overturn policies forbidding gay and bisexual people from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces.[16][17] The CMS was the first organization to air a nationwide television commercial on a gay rights issue.[18]
In 2003, Feldblum became co-director of Georgetown's Workplace Flexibility 2010 project, which works to improve conditions for employers and employees.[13][19] The program focuses on flexible work arrangements (FWAs), including phased retirement, non-traditional scheduling and number of hours worked, telecommuting, and multiple points of exit and re-entry into the workforce.[20][21]
In 2006, she founded the Moral Values Project, with the mission statement:
We believe that moral values matter in the governing of our polity. And we believe that Americans can articulate, and live up to, a more progressive set of moral values regarding sexuality, sexual orientation and gender equity. Sexuality can be a positive, important force in our lives. Heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality are all morally neutral. But the love that is expressed by those who are straight, gay or bisexual is morally good – and all equally morally good. All forms of gender are morally neutral. But lack of gender equity is morally bad.[22]
More recently, she was the lead drafter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit employment discrimination based on someone's real or perceived sexual orientation.[12] She also worked on passage of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, and has testified before Congress on numerous occasions.[13]
In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Feldblum for one of the seats on the five-member Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In response to attacks on her, Obama stated in an October 10 speech to the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign:
Nobody in America should be fired because they’re gay, despite doing a great job and meeting their responsibilities. It’s not fair, it’s not right, we’re going to put a stop to it. And it’s for this reason if any of my nominees are attacked not for what they believe but for who they are, I will not waver in my support because I will not waver in my commitment to ending discrimination in all its forms. [23]
In testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Feldblum testified that she did not believe in governmental endorsement of polygamy or polyamorous relationships,[24] consistent with her own writings in which she had always restricted such endorsement to non-sexual domestic partners.[25] She testified that she has therefore asked for her name to be removed from a document called Beyond Marriage document, which supported legal recognition of a variety of non-traditional relationships besides marriage, including "Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner."[26]
Obama made a recess appointment of Feldblum and three other nominees to the EEOC on March 27, 2010.[27] On December 22, 2010, the U.S. Senate confirmed Feldblum to the seat on the EEOC for a term expiring July 1, 2013.[4]