Madeleine May Kunin | Jewish Women's Archive (original) (raw)

Born in Zurich, Switzerland, on September 28, 1933, Madeleine May Kunin was the second child of a German father and Swiss mother, Ferdinand and Renée (Bloch) May. Her father died when she was almost three years old; not until she was in college did she learn that his death had been a suicide. Her mother moved the family several times, finally settling in a small town, Hergiswil, where she thought they might be safer in case of a Nazi invasion. As the German threat grew, Renée May sought a visa to enter the United States. In June 1940, the family arrived in New York City.

Members of Madeleine’s parents’ families became scattered throughout Europe, Palestine, and the United States during the period between the two world wars. Several relatives died in concentration camps. These events left a deep impression on her, as she wrote in her autobiography:

On some level that I do not yet fully understand, I believe I transformed my sense of the Holocaust into personal political activism. This was the source of my political courage. I could do what the victims could not: oppose evil whenever I recognized it. The United States of America would protect me. I lived in a time and place when it was safe for a Jew to be a political person, to speak, to oppose, to stand up.

Kunin graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1956, with a BA in history. She earned an MS from the Columbia School of Journalism. As a fledgling journalist, she first encountered career barriers based on her sex. Potential employers unabashedly stated that they would not hire her because she was a woman, while others offered her work only for the “women’s page.” She obtained her first job as a journalist with the Burlington Free Press in Burlington, Vermont, where she became a general assignment reporter. She left the newspaper in 1958 to serve as a guide in the American Pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, returning to her native Europe for the first time since fleeing in 1940.

In Burlington, she met Dr. Arthur S. Kunin, whom she married on June 21, 1959. Four children—Julia, Peter, Adam, and Daniel—followed between 1961 and 1969, and for a decade, Kunin devoted her attention largely to domestic concerns. Yet, during those years, living in Burlington, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Bern, Switzerland, when her husband was on sabbatical, Kunin was developing skills, contacts, and attitudes that would shape her political career in the years ahead.