In 1992, she was nominated to the state’s General Assembly, to fill the seat left by the illness and resulting resignation of her good friend Bennett Mazur. Weinberg ran her first race, for a seat on the Teaneck town council. Loretta Weinberg speaks at a Temple Emeth gala. (Barbara Balkin) “I wrote the first affirmative action program for any county in the state of New Jersey.” Working with her good friend Jeremiah O’Connor, the freeholder director, the town was able to apply for federal block grants by convincing other towns, despite New Jersey’s fiercely held belief in home rule, to join as a region, therefore becoming big enough to qualify for those grants. She was able to make policy “I helped start the first domestic violence shelter,” she told us in 2014. She was the board of freeholder’s clerk and then an assistant county administrator. In the end, “Teaneck was the first town in the country to voluntarily go and vote to integrate the schools,” she said.īut it wasn’t until 1975, about a decade after the Weinbergs had moved to Teaneck, that the Democrats gained power in Bergen County and as a direct result Loretta got an official job. “I had a very high-level job, distributing literature,” she said. She volunteered for Lyndon Johnson on a national level locally, she fought for school integration.
Weinberg was a full-time, stay-at-home mother - a role she loved - but soon she got drawn into politics. “This was the 1960s.” The red-hot issues then were women’s rights (called women’s lib back then), civil rights, and of course the war in Viet Nam.
Teaneck was politically active, full of young progressives, many of them Jewish. The Weinbergs joined a local Reform synagogue, Temple Emeth Loretta still is an active and influential member there.
The town already had many Jews, but the community was not the magnetic center of Orthodox life that it since has become. The Weinbergs had two children, Danny and Francine Loretta stayed home with them, and in 1963, with a one- and a two-year-old, the family home soon became Teaneck.
She did keep getting better and better jobs, though, almost despite herself. Weinberg worked, but she did not have a career, as was conventional for newly married women then. (He lost.) She moved to New York, lived on the Upper West Side, and met her soulmate, Irwin Weinberg. She recalls that her first vote for president was cast for Adlai Stevenson. (And in that lack of political activity, she was representative of her generation at the time.) Loretta began college at the University of California at Berkeley - this was at least a decade before Berkeley was Berkeley - and graduated from UCLA without having been politically active. Her mother, Reva Isaacs, was a feisty, entrepreneurial single parent, who exemplified resilience. She’s tired of talking about herself, she said - it seems almost as if she’s delivering her own eulogy - but in a recent interview in her Teaneck office she talked about her long career in public service, and how her Jewish values informed it.Īs we wrote in a long profile in 2014, Loretta Isaacs was born in 1933 she grew up first on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and then, after her parents’ divorce, was whisked entirely across the country, across time zones, to Beverly Hills. She’ll be leaving office - she’s now New Jersey’s State Senate majority leader - at the end of this term. Get The Jewish Standard Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories
Now, though - in a display of calm common sense that has marked her career - she’s decided that it’s time to retire.