WOMEN
OF VALOR
Riveters from Four Corners of the Jewish Community
By Debra Kamin
A woman of valor, who can find? Far beyond pearls is her value. Her husband's
heart trusts in her and he shall lack no fortune. She repays his good,
but never his harm, all the days of her life… She fears not snow
for her household, for her entire household is clothed with scarlet wool.
Bedspreads she makes herself; linen and purple wool are her clothing.
Well-known at the gates is her husband as he sits with the elders of the
land. Garments she makes and sells, and she delivers a belt to the peddler.
Strength and splendor are her clothing, and smilingly she awaits her last
day.
She opens her mouth with Wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her
tongue. She anticipates the needs of her household, and the bread of idleness,
she does not eat.
Judaism reveres women of valor, with the ancient proverb describing her
in undulating verses as a woman who protects the home, predicts her husband’s
needs, watches over the children and still has the strength to negotiate
at the neighborhood market. In San Diego today, there are countless women
of valor, but they are more than protectors of the house and hearth. They
are sculptors of our community, defenders of justice, teachers of our
children and trailblazers of modern business. They are witty and filled
with class, but are also not without their reserves of strength and shrewdness.
Here is a salute to four modern women of valor—a politician, an
educator, an artist, and an entrepreneur— who represent but a fraction
of all the women of valor helping improve the San Diego community every
day.
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THE
POLITICIAN
Bonnie Dumanis, district attorney of San Diego, is sitting in her
grand downtown office, quipping. I’ve just asked her if she
ever expected to be so successful in her career, and her response
is to lean back in her mahogany leather chair and chuckle.
“I don’t think I had to be DA to be successful or to
be a judge to be successful,” she says in her thick Massachusetts
accent. “I felt that I was successful when I made it out of
law school—that was a miracle.”
It’s true; San Diego’s district attorney is funny. She’s
also openly gay, proudly Jewish, and the first woman to serve in
her position.
Dumanis was raised in Conservative, and she says that, as a girl,
she was keenly aware that she would never be able to achieve her
dream of becoming a rabbi. She hated that she couldn’t be
a part of the minyan and that her financially-strapped family couldn’t
justify her having a bat mitzvah, because, as a girl, it would have
been a purely social occasion.
At one point, she applied to Yeshiva, but as high school graduation
approached she became more pragmatic and decided on the University
of Massachusetts instead. “I guess being a lawyer was the
closest thing I could come to being a rabbi,” she says with
a tiny wink. She gestures to the wall across from her desk. A beautiful
print has the words from Deuteronomy: “Justice, Justice, Shalt
Thou Pursue,” in sweeping colors. “A lot of what I do,
when I say I talk to victims’ families, I think it’s
very similar to what you do as a rabbi.”
Dumanis is a strong, sassy woman who has no problem speaking her
mind. When she ran for DA, however, she says she was often asked,
‘you’re so nice. How could you be the DA?’”
“That’s a function of being a woman,” she says
now, adding that no one would ever ask a man the same question.
And what did the former hard-line judge say when she was asked about
her ‘niceness’?
‘Well, all those people I sent to prison might disagree with
you.”
Dumanis admits that women have made significant inroads, but, as
she puts it, “I don’t think we’re there yet.”
For her part, Dumanis, who is on the California District Attorney’s
Board of Directors, the State Bar Board of Governors, and the Police
Officers Standard in Training Commisioners, continues to aim high.
She is on a quest to meet every single one of the 1,000 employees
in her office (at press time, she had conducted private, 10-minute
interviews with over 50) and dreams of someday visiting Israel for
the first time.
“The message I bring to people when I talk to them, particularly
young girls, but youngsters in general, is that as long as you’re
able to dream outside the box, you can do it,” she says.
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THE
EDUCATOR
Rabbi Lisa Goldstein doesn’t shake hands when she meets you.
She hugs. After one cup of coffee and a little conversation with
this woman, it makes sense. She is a woman of absolutely no pretense,
who wears her love of Judaism and Jewish students as openly as she
does her kippah. Lisa Goldstein knows that she is not your ordinary
rabbi, and this is precisely what makes her so special.
Raised in the outer suburbs of Los Angeles into a family of intellectuals,
Goldstein was sure, when she went off to college at Brown University,
that she would end up a doctor or lawyer . It was during her junior
year, when she traveled to what was then still East Germany, and
celebrated Passover in a dilapidated synagogue in Dresden, that
a metaphorical lightening bolt hit the young woman. “I was
so moved and inspired by this tiny, joyful community in communist
Germany, of all places. I thought, ‘This is it! I have to
give something back to this. And how am I going to do that? I’m
going to be a rabbi.”
“From that moment in Dresden it just sort of this understanding,
like the veils had been taken away, that this was what I was created
to do,” she says. And since coming to UCSD, she has been able
to get down and do it.
Goldstein’s official position—of which she is now in
her tenth year—is two-pronged. As Hillel of San Diego’s
executive director, she serves the eight different colleges and
universities of San Diego County, which encompass about 5,000 Jewish
college students. Her day includes overseeing fundraising, educational
programs, public relations, staff supervision, and myriad other
duties.
She is also the Campus Director for UCSD, working directly with
the staff and making herself available to that campus’ students.
“I try to have coffee with a different student everyday,”
she says. They are, she says, the best part of her job.
“I always think when people start getting pessimistic about
the Jewish future, they should come to Shabbat on campus.”
“There are so many ways to be a Jew,” Goldstein says.
“My role is to create a space in which people can explore
what that connection’s going to look like for them.”
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THE
ARTIST
A former opera singer who was born and raised in Milwaukee, Ann
Campbell has the soul of an artist with the charm and good nature
of a Midwestern girl. Now the director of strategic planning for
the San Diego Opera, Campbell, as good-natured as she is, is probably
unaware of the killer combo that is her good looks, charisma and
cleverness. With a balanced budget for the past 21 years at the
San Diego Opera, the opera’s donors are likely a bit more
aware. It’s safe to say that her husband, San Diego Opera’s
general director and artistic director Ian Campbell, knows about
it as well.
Campbell has studied voice performance at the prestigious Indiana
University School of Music. “You want to know why I went into
arts management? Because I discovered that I was a nice Jewish girl,
and living on the road singing elsewhere, outside of home, was very
lonely and painful.”
Asked why she never chose to become a cantor, Campbell sighs. “I
had never had any Hebrew training,” she admits. “I was
so insecure about the Hebrew…I would make a different decision
today.”
Instead, Campbell (then Ann Spira) went into arts management with
the Milwaukee Symphony. When Ian Campbell launched a national search
for someone who could both manage fundraising and promote a love
of the art, her name continued to pop up. He flew her out for an
interview, and she landed the job almost immediately.
“I was 28…I was a baby,” Campbell says. “I
cried all the way from Milwaukee from San Diego. But obviously for
me it was a fantastic decision, in so many ways personally and professionally.”
Within days of arriving, Campbell found a community at Congregation
Beth Israel, where she remains active to this day. And not long
after, the chemistry between her and Ian became undeniable. They
were married two years to the day that she was hired, and now have
two sons.
To Campbell, the work done at the San Diego Opera translates into
so much more than what happens between the rise and the fall of
the curtain. Under her leadership, the organization has developed
the largest education and outreach program for opera in the country.
“We go into the schools with 14 different programs,”
she says, “We literally educate kids about the art form…we
try to be really good community citizens, not just an arts organization
that presents magnificent art.”
As a former performer herself, Campbell keeps herself as close to
the art form as she can. “I know in my heart that I never
would have been Janet Baker or Marilyn Horne, and that frustrated
me…so this is definitely not second choice but the best thing
that I could do,” she says.
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THE
ENTREPRENEUR
If one has to work from home, Barbara Bry’s ultra-contemporary
house on Mt. Soledad is a nice place to it. Light pours in through
the sweeping windows, and bold-toned, minimalist furniture is framed
by tasteful, personal art.
Bry spends almost every day here, working from the third-floor office.
Like the house’s furnishings, Bry’s career path has
been anything but ordinary.
She has an MBA from Harvard, class of ’76, but instead of
using that coveted degree to join the ranks of suits and stuffed
shirts, chose upon graduation to become a journalist.
“I often say I brought down the class average in terms of
starting pay,” she says with a smile.
Bry took a job as a business and political writer at the Sacramento
Bee, and then went to the L.A. Times, where she spent six years.
During this time, she met her first husband, a real estate developer.
They were married in 1980 and had their first child in 1981.
She left the Times in 1984. “The hours were long and I already
had a daughter,” she explains.” A neighbor, Buzz Woolley,
introduced her to the CONNECT program at UCSD.
“You have to think back 20 years…there was no Qualcomm…our
business leadership in this community realized we needed to do something
with all the technology that existed (in San Diego),” she
explains.
As associate director for ten years, Bry says her experience was
like a second MBA. At the same time, she noticed more women getting
involved with technology, and decided to do something about it.
Along with others at UCSD, Athena was launched. “Every woman
who matters in technology in San Diego (is in Athena). All the big
companies, Qualcomm, Pfizer, so on,” she says.”
When asked if she worried that she did not have the skill set to
work in technology, Bry is honest, “I’m not a technologist…but
it was just reading, being a journalist.”
By 1993, Bry and her first husband had divorced and she needed to
earn more money. She met Neil Senturia ten months later. They were
married in 2000. Together, the pair has created the software company
ATCOM, the first to offer high-speed internet in hotel rooms, as
well as creating some of the first email kiosks ever offered at
airports. They sold ATCOM in Sept. 1999 for between $65 and 80 million.
In 1998, Bry joined Proflowers.com as vice president for business
development. “Of course, I knew nothing about the flower business,”
she says. She must have known something, though, because Proflowers
made nearly $200 million last year.
Bry left in 2002. Since then, she has helped create the independent
online newspaper Voice of San Diego, as well as launch Blackbird
Ventures, which invests in growing companies, with her husband.
Beth Walsh has been a consultant and friend of Bry’s for many
years. “Barbara is fearless and helps to protect and grow
the other women in this community as well as in all of the things
that she has achieved personally on her own,” she says. “I
think that I’m pretty safe in saying that.”
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