Ruth Davidow
Ruth Rebecca Davidow (September 11, 1911 – June 28, 1999) was an American nurse, filmmaker, and political activist. Early life_portrait.jpg) Born in Volkovisk, Russia on September 11, 1911,[1] Davidow grew up in New York City after her mother, a Jewish socialist, fled tsarist Russia in 1917.[2] Her mother's politics were formative for Davidow. Her mother was a seamstress and became a leader in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and sold The Daily Worker, a communist newspaper, door-to-door.[2] When her father developed tuberculosis, Davidow gave up aspirations of becoming a lawyer and enrolled in nursing school at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital to help provide for the family. She also found this a politicizing experience, both in caring for the poor and in unionization efforts at the hospital.[2] Career When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, Davidow volunteered to go in support of the Spanish Republic against the fascists as a nurse with the medical staff of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American volunteer unit.[1] This was in defiance of a travel ban from Franklin D. Roosevelt's then-isolationist administration.[2] She arrived in June 1937,[3] working in a frontline hospital during the Battle of the Ebro.[1] She returned home in December 1938,[3] and in 1939 she toured in the United States with another American nurse, Evelyn Hutchins Rahman, talking about their experiences in Spain.[4] Davidow married Fred Keller, a fellow Lincoln Brigade veteran, after the Spanish Civil War.[5] They had one daughter, Joanie Keller Selznick.[1][6] She later moved to Cuba, serving as an aid worker from 1960 to 1962 following the revolution.[6] She also worked in the American South in 1965 supporting the civil rights movement as part of the Medical Committee for Human Rights.[6] During the Native American occupation of Alcatraz (1969 to 1971), Davidow was one of the only non-Native Americans allowed onto the island, providing medical care.[6] Davidow was featured in the film documentary The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (1984). In the 1980s, Davidow founded a clinic in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to offer care to drug addicts.[2] Encouraged by her daughter, a filmmaker, Davidow also began making films as a form of activism in the 1980s.[7] Her 21 films deal with a variety of topics in politics, health, and geriatrics.[6] Honors and legacyIn 1996, the Spanish government awarded Davidow honorary citizenship for her nursing service during the civil war.[6] She was profiled in the 1991 Academy Award-nominated documentary Forever Activists: Stories From the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade by Judith Montell.[7] DeathDavidow died on June 28, 1999, in San Francisco.[1] References
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