Chai Feldblum

Early life and education

Chai Feldblum was born in New York City to Meyer Simcha and Esther Feldblum. Meyer Simcha Feldblum was born in Lithuania and survived the Holocaust by living in the forests of Poland. He came to the United States following WWII, where he earned his ordination and Ph.D from Yeshiva University in NYC and became a rabbi and a Professor of Talmud, first at Yeshiva University and then at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Esther Feldblum was the daughter of Rabbi Ephraim Eliezer Yolles, a Hasidic Rebbe (the Samborer Rebbe) of Philadelphia. Esther Feldblum received her Ph.D in Jewish history from Columbia University and taught for one year at Brooklyn College before dying in a car accident at the age of 41. Her dissertation, The American Catholic Press and the Jewish State: 1917-1959, was published as a book posthumously.

Chai Feldblum grew up in Washington Heights in New York City. Her Orthodox Jewish upbringing shaped her commitment to social justice work.

Chai Feldblum attended the Yeshiva University High School for Girls in Manhattan, New York before majoring in Ancient Studies and Religion at Barnard College. Feldblum received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1985. Coming from a long line of Orthodox Jewish rabbis she once aspired to be a talmudic scholar. She left Orthodox Judaism by the time she was a "young adult".

Career

After graduating from law school, Feldblum clerked for federal Judge Frank M. Coffin on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and then for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the Supreme Court of the United States.

While working from 1988-1990 as Legislative Counsel to the AIDS Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, Feldblum was the lead attorney on the team drafting the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990.

She joined the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC in 1991, teaching classes on "legislative lawyering," a phrase she coined to describe the work of the attorneys who craft or lobby for legislation. She founded and is the director of the university's Federal Legislation Clinic.

Since joining Georgetown, Feldblum has continued her own legislative lawyering career. In 1993, she was the legal director for the Campaign for Military Service, a group which lobbied to overturn policies forbidding gay and bisexual people from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces. The CMS was the first organization to air a nationwide television commercial on a gay rights issue.

In 2003, Feldblum became co-director of Georgetown's Workplace Flexibility 2010 project, which works to improve conditions for employers and employees. The program focuses on flexible work arrangements (FWAs), including phased retirement, non-traditional scheduling and number of hours worked, telecommuting, and multiple points of exit and re-entry into the workforce.

In 2006, she founded the Moral Values Project, with the mission statement:

We believe that moral values matter in the governing of our polity. And we believe that Americans can articulate, and live up to, a more progressive set of moral values regarding sexuality, sexual orientation and gender equity. Sexuality can be a positive, important force in our lives. Heterosexuality, homosexuality and bisexuality are all morally neutral. But the love that is expressed by those who are straight, gay or bisexual is morally good – and all equally morally good. All forms of gender are morally neutral. But lack of gender equity is morally bad.

More recently, she was the lead drafter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit employment discrimination based on someone's real or perceived sexual orientation. She also worked on passage of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, and has testified before Congress on numerous occasions.

EEOC nomination

In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Feldblum for one of the seats on the five-member Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In response to attacks on her, Obama stated in an October 10 speech to the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign:

Nobody in America should be fired because they’re gay, despite doing a great job and meeting their responsibilities. It’s not fair, it’s not right, we’re going to put a stop to it. And it’s for this reason if any of my nominees are attacked not for what they believe but for who they are, I will not waver in my support because I will not waver in my commitment to ending discrimination in all its forms.

In testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Feldblum testified that she did not believe in governmental endorsement of polygamy or polyamorous relationships, consistent with her own writings in which she had always restricted such endorsement to non-sexual domestic partners. She testified that she has therefore asked for her name to be removed from a document called Beyond Marriage document, which supported legal recognition of a variety of non-traditional relationships besides marriage, including "Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner."

Obama made a recess appointment of Feldblum and three other nominees to the EEOC on March 27, 2010. On December 22, 2010, the U.S. Senate confirmed Feldblum to the seat on the EEOC for a term expiring July 1, 2013. She is openly lesbian, and is the first openly LGBT person to serve on the EEOC.

On December 9, 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed for cloture on Feldblum's renomination to serve for another term on the EEOC, expiring on July 1, 2018. On December 11, 2013, the Senate voted 57-39 to break the filibuster, paving the way for a final vote on Feldblum's nomination. Then, on December 12, 2013, Feldblum was confirmed to a full term in a 54-41 vote.