She was the middle child in a New York family whose intellectual dynamism and embrace of liberal causes provide a window onto the social milieu and culture that shaped her.
The three Kagan children came of age during the social and political ferment of the 1970s, when community groups were absorbing the lessons of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and Bella Abzug won a seat representing the Upper West Side in Congress after she declared, “This woman’s place is in the House — the House of Representatives.”
Robert Kagan, their father, carved out a law practice representing tenants in the wave of co-op conversions that swept the city. He also volunteered his skills on a number of land-use issues roiling their Upper West Side neighborhood, once roping himself to a tree that was about to be cut down. Their mother, Gloria, taught for 20 years at Hunter College Elementary School, where she was legendary for challenging her students to challenge themselves, sometimes to the point of making them tremble. . .
“There was thinking, always thinking,” Joyce Kagan Charmatz, Robert Kagan’s sister-in-law, 71, said of the family’s dinner table. “Nothing was sacrosanct.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/nyregion/20kagans.htmlThis spring, in a letter to The Chief-Leader, a civil service employees’ newspaper, Mr. Kagan compared the attempts by Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor, to end teacher seniority protections to Goldman Sachs’s alleged misdeeds. The letter had the crusading, poetic feel of a lawyer making closing arguments.
“It’s morally and ethically wrong to take away the jobs of people who have worked hard for decades simply because a cheaper body can be found,” he wrote. “It is a spiritual pollution of the values that we should uphold. It is another step away from civilized behavior toward the idea that only might makes right.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/nyregion/20kagans.html?pagewanted=4
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