Elena Kagan — supreme court with roots in the Russian Empire
Elena Kagan was born in Manhattan on 28 April 1960, the second of three children of Robert Kagan, a lawyer who represented tenants and chaired his local community board, and Gloria Kagan, née Gittelman, who taught at Hunter College Elementary School. Both of her parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire.
Her mother was born in South Philadelphia in 1930. In 1933 Gloria's father, Laizar Gittelman, opened a butter-and-egg shop on South Seventh Street; the family later moved to Atlantic City, where Elena spent childhood summers at her grandparents' home. A grandmother, Esther Bokelman, had come from Russia to Philadelphia as a child. Her brother Irving has said that their father's father came from Poland and that their mother's family traced its roots to Ukraine. No published source names the towns.
Kagan attended Hunter College High School, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1981, studied at Worcester College, Oxford, and took her law degree at Harvard in 1986, where she was supervising editor of the Harvard Law Review. She clerked for Judge Abner Mikva of the federal appeals court in Washington and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the Supreme Court, practised at the firm Williams & Connolly, and in 1991 joined the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School.
From 1995 to 1999 she served in the White House under President Bill Clinton, as associate counsel and then as deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council. A nomination to the federal appeals court in Washington in 1999 lapsed without a hearing. She returned to Harvard Law School, became a professor in 2001 and in 2003 became the first woman to serve as its dean.
In March 2009 she became the first woman to serve as Solicitor General of the United States. President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court on 10 May 2010. The Senate confirmed her on 5 August by 63 votes to 37, and she took her seat on 7 August as the 112th justice and the fourth woman to serve on the Court. She had not previously served as a judge.
"Grandparents emigrated from the Russian Empire to Philadelphia and New York; towns not documented"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Russian Empire (towns undocumented)
Both of her parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire; her mother's father, Laizar Gittelman, kept a butter-and-egg shop in South Philadelphia.
Both of her parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. Her mother's father, Laizar Gittelman, kept a butter-and-egg shop in South Philadelphia from 1933. No published source names the towns the family came from.
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Russian Empire (towns undocumented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.