Madeleine May Kunin -€“ 1-May- 2006- To Life! A Celebration of Vermont Jewish Women

About this film

Ann Zinn Buffum and Sandra Stillman Gartner, project directors, interviewed Madeleine Kunin on May 1, 2006 in Burlington, Vermont as part of DAVAR’s oral history project. Madeleine May Kunin was born in Zurich Switzerland in1933. In 1940, Madeleine, along with her widowed mother and brother Edgar, escaped the Nazis in Switzerland and immigrated to the United States. Her mother never remarried and raised the two children on her own. After a short time in California, the family settled in Forest Hills, New York where she attended a reform temple. She celebrated a group Bat Mitzvah at Town Hall in NYC. After earning her masters degree from Columbia School of Journalism she moved to Vermont at the suggestion of her brother who was already there working as a journalist. She accepted a job with the Burlington Free Press thinking, âAfter a year I (will) apply to the Paris Herald Tribune or the New York Times. Her travel ambition changed after marriage to Dr. Arthur Kunin and the birth of their four children. In 1971 the women's movement was in full swing. Madeleine and her friend Esther Sorrell decided to run for public office. After serving in the legislature and as lieutenant governor,…

Directors & creators

DAVAR: The Vermont Jewish Women's History Project

Subjects

immigrant; Vermont governer; Lieutenant general; Deputy secretary of Education; equitable education

View on archive.org ↗