“The West Bronx is located in time midway between the lower East Side (or the East Bronx) and West Side Manhattan. It is a community whose residents seem occupied full time in discovering the wonderful things produced by the world that can be had for even the moderate amount of money at their disposal” (Glazer, 1949). With a few strokes of her pen, Ruth Glazer (later Gay) painted a vivid portrait of the culture of second-generation Jews in New York. As a free-lance writer and editor for over fifty years, she explored the Jewish experience of both America and Germany.

The oldest of three daughters of Harry and Mary Pfeffer Slotkin, Ruth was born on October 19, 1922, in New York City, and was educated in local schools. When her family moved from the Bronx to Queens so that her milkman father could open a delicatessen—the subject of her first article—Ruth transferred from Hunter College to Queens College, from which she graduated in 1943. At college she was a member of Avukah, a leftist student Zionist organization. Shortly after graduation, in September 1943, she married sociologist Nathan Glazer, then a graduate student and later an editor at Commentary. They had three daughters, Sarah (b. 1950), Sophie (b. 1952), and Elizabeth (b. 1955). In 1958, they divorced, and the following year she married the historian Peter Gay.

In the early years of her first marriage, Ruth Glazer pursued employment in the fields of education and editing. Working first with the labor movement, she served in 1943–1944 as assistant to the director of the education department of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and from 1944 to 1946 as education director of the leisure-wear joint board of the same union. She then became assistant editor and staff writer at the magazine Labor and Nation (1946–1948) and researcher and editor on the American Joint Distribution Committee’s JDC Review.

Like many educated and talented women of her generation, Ruth Gay combined motherhood with part-time work. Free-lance writing and editing meshed well with her domestic responsibilities. Beginning in 1946, she published human interest articles about contemporary Jewish culture, with such titles as “The Jewish Delicatessen” and “The World of Station WEVD” in the “American Scene” department of Commentary. In the late 1960s, she also contributed occasional pieces about American life to Amerika, a magazine published in Eastern European languages by the United States Information Agency. In 1965, she published her first book, Jews in America: A Short History.

Gay received an M.L.S. from Columbia University’s School of Library Service in 1969. From 1972 until 1985 she combined writing with a position as archivist/cataloguer at the Yale University Library. In 1984, she spent three months in Berlin, funded by a grant from the library, to organize the archives of the West Berlin Jewish community.

After 1985, Gay devoted herself to her research and writing. Her wide-ranging essays on cooking, Germany and German Jewry appeared in such journals as The American Scholar, Midstream and Conservative Judaism. She also published two additional books, The Jews of Germany: A Historical Portrait (1992) and Unfinished People: Jewish Immigrants to the United States: 1880–1914 (1996). The latter earned her the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for non-fiction.

Ruth Gay’s life demonstrates how it was possible for an intellectually vibrant woman who became an adult in the mid-twentieth century to build a career that accommodated both marriage and motherhood. She died of leukemia on May 9, 2006.