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RESUMEN

Alice Goldmark Brandeis (1866 – Oct. 11, 1945), advocate for the legal rights of women, organized labor, and children, was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of ten children of Regina Wehle Goldmark and Joseph Goldmark, Jewish immigrants to the United States. Regina was from Prague in Bohemia (Czechia), while Joseph, born in Hungary, was a physician, chemist, and liberal member of the Austrian Reichstag, exiled from his homeland in 1849 due to his radical political views. The family’s significant wealth derived from Joseph’s invention of a mercury compound used in armaments during the US Civil War.

Alice Goldmark was raised in a home that cultivated their children’s intellectual, cultural, and political interests. She read widely in classic German literature, but came of age (the mid 1880s) in the decade before her younger sister Josephine (Bryn Mawr, 1898) became one of the first female, Jewish college graduates. Alice was also exposed from an early age to the Brandeis family, also secular, reforming Jewish exiles from the Austrian Empire. Her mother was a cousin of Fredericka Dembitz Brandeis and her brother Henry attended Harvard College in the late 1870s, at the same time as Fredericka’s son, Louis Brandeis, attended Harvard Law School. Alice and Louis, now a rising attorney in Boston, had known each other as children, and met again at Louis’ parents’ home in March 1890, shortly after his sister committed suicide.

They shared a love for German literature and European culture and a passion for social justice, and married a year later, on March 23, 1891 in a civil ceremony at her parents’ home in New York City. They then moved into Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, where they would raise two daughters, Susan Brandeis Gilbert, born in 1893, and Elizabeth Brandeis Rauschenbush, in 1896.

Alice supported her husband’s decision to devote his life to social reform causes and assumed an increasing role advising him on strategies for promoting progressive change. Her activism was limited by her health, which fluctuated in life, but she was prominent in Boston’s early women’s suffrage movement and made common cause with other reform-minded philanthropic women she met through her husband’s Harvard connections, like Elizabeth Glendower Evans. Goldmark Brandeis’ views on American relations with Cuba are not recorded, but her support for the 1900 Harvard Summer School for Cuban teachers (a $50 donation) reflected a broadly anti-colonial and anti-imperial mindset.

When President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis to the United States Supreme Court in 1916, the Brandeises moved to Washington D.C. where, despite their status as one of the Capitol’s “official” families, they maintained a notoriously modest life-style. They were among the last in Washington society to abandon a horse and carriage for an automobile, for example. Her husband’s official duties did not dampen Alice’s political activism, and she remained in touch with political developments by inviting young Washington liberals to the Brandeis home. In the 1920s, she assisted in the campaign on behalf of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants controversially convicted of murder during an armed robbery in 1920 and executed in 1927. She also embraced the 1924 third-party Progressive presidential campaign of Robert La Follette (who considered Louis Brandeis as a running mate) but returned to the Democratic Party fold in 1928 as vice chair of the Progressive League for presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith.

During World War II she stirred controversy by associating herself with militant critics of American policy toward the fate of European Jews and by becoming more vocal in defense of an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine. She also translated from the original German: Carl Goldmark, Notes from the Life of a Viennese Composer (1927), a memoir of her father’s brother, Karl, who had remained in Europe and was one of the leading composers in the Austro-Hungarian empire. After her husband’s death in 1941, she translated her mother’s memoirs from German into English for her daughters and their children.

Alice Goldmark Brandeis died of a heart attack at her Washington home on October 11, 1945.

Further Reading

Information about Alice Goldmark Brandeis can be found in the Goldmark family papers, 1865-1975, Columbia University Archives, New York and in the Louis Brandeis Papers at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and the Harvard Law School Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1. Medoff, Rafael, “Alice Goldmark Brandeis.” Jewish Women’s Archive Online https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/brandeis-alice-goldmark

2. Rosen, Jeffrey. Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet (2016).

3. Urofsky, Melvin I. Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (2009).

4. Obituary: New York Times, October 13, 1945.