Yesterday Heather Booth, Director of Americans for Financial Reform, wrote a piece in the Huffington Post called V-I-C-T-O-R-Y!!! lauding Congress for passing the most significant financial reform legislation since the Great Depression. Americans for Financial Reform has spent the past year fighting for this reform and is sharing this victory with all of us: "Thanks to all who raised their voices, demonstrated, sent emails, analyzed the policy, blogged and promoted the issue, contacted congress and engaged your neighbors, friends and families. You made this victory possible. And the struggle continues."

We can now add financial reform to the impressive list of Heather Booth's contributions, including her work in the civil rights movement and the women's movement.

Heather Booth, featured in JWA's exhibit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, founded the first campus women's movement organization in 1965 and created JANE, one of the country's first pre-Roe abortion counseling services (which grew into a collective underground abortion clinic). She has continued to organize for childcare, health care, and women's rights in a number of different ways.

In college in the 1960s, Heather Booth was active in SNCC and went to Mississippi for the civil rights movement and the Freedom Summer Project. A letter written by Heather Booth to her brother from Mississippi is featured in a new Go & Learn lesson plan called Sing a New Song: Jews, Music, and the Civil Rights Movement. This and other Go & Learn lesson plans are available free on our site.

The photo pictured above is from her time there and shows her playing the guitar for Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper who became a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We love this photo, and it has become the representative image for JWA's new Living the Legacy curriculum about the role of Jews in the Civil Rights Movement (and is featured, along with other content by Booth, in a lesson on Freedom Summer). Living the Legacy will be the focus of the Summer 2010 Institute for Educators coming up in about a week, and will be available on our site in the fall!

We at JWA wish to extend our congratulations to Heather Booth and thank her for her latest efforts on the behalf of the American people. You continue to blow us away.