JEWDAYO

I just came across this neat blog - JEWDAYO.

Every day it publishes a piece about the some significant Jew, whose birth, death of other significant event happened on that day. For instance, did you know that in the last week:

Sunday: On May 16, 1990, Sammy Davis Jr died.
Monday: On May 17, 2004, Gail and Betsy Leondar-Wright were the first same sex couple to be married in Massachusetts
Tuesday: On May 18 1869, Rachelle Yarros, the first woman admitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Boston (1890), was born.
Wednesday: On May 19, 1952, Joey Ramone was born.
Thursday: On May 20, 2002, Stephen J Gould died.
Friday: On May 21, 1980, Ida Kaminska, the great Yiddish actress, died.

The full entry for today, Saturday May 22, is produced below. See accompanying photo above.

Jewdayo is a day late in celebrating the 85th birthday (May 21, 1925) of Frank Kameny, the co-founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC and a pioneering gay rights activist — but we’re right on time in marking the birth of Harvey Milk on this date in 1930.

Milk became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. He was born in Woodmere, New York to Lithuanian Jewish parents; his grandfather was a department store owner who helped found the first synagogue in that town. Milk was a hard-driving community organizer and coalition-builder, described by his campaign manager, Anne Kronenberg, as “imagin[ing]a righteous world inside his head and then . . . set[ting] about to create it for real, for all of us.”

He began his service on the Board by sponsoring a bill that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which received national attention when it passed. Milk became an icon of the rising gay and lesbian movements when he was shot dead in 1978 by Dan White, a disturbed city supervisor whose acquittal on murder charges (he was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter) sparked rioting in the city. In 2009 Harvey Milk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.

“If a bullet should go through my head, let that bullet go through every closet door.” — Harvey Milk

Looks like a web site I might visit often. So I have added it to the list of recommended links to the right.