Description: A pivotal moment in her childhood helped Guttman define her Jewish identity.

Question: Where are you from and how has that shaped you?

Transcript: I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and I grew up in a small town – Monroe, New York. I’m very proud of my roots in Brooklyn. And I grew up in a small town that, even though it was only an hour north of New York City, seemed like middle America. I think it shaped me. Well first of all, I think it’s made me understand a cross-section of people and their problems that it’s very hard to get out of books. And the fact that my parents were not native to Monroe – my father wasn’t a native American, he was born in Germany – has made me particularly sensitive to the whole project of integration in the United States, and also to just generally the issue of social justice.

Question:Who was your greatest influence when you were young?

Transcript: My main influences were first and foremost my parents. My father escaped Nazi Germany. The youngest of five children, and he got his whole family out early in 1934. He lived in India for fourteen years, started a business there. Basically he was a hero to me. And my mother was a child of the Depression and wanted to be a teacher and couldn’t. And I think partly for that reason, unbeknownst to me as a child, I always wanted to be a teacher. So my parents were bigger influences on me than any group of people combined.

Question: When did education spark your interest?

Transcript: When I was in kindergarten I wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. And when I was in high school I wanted to be a high school teacher. And sure enough, when I was in college, I wanted to be a college teacher. And I guess even though I’m sure I would have been motivated to learn because of my parents, I really got the opportunities to become an avid mathematician, for example, because of my education. And I was a child of the Sputnik era. So my high school was a high school that was funded because of the Russians. Because “The Russians were coming! The Russians were coming!” and we were gonna compete with them. And I was really admiring, as well as critical of some things in high school, such as the way Civics was thought. But I was admiring the fact that this nation funded education for everybody. So I’ve admired and cared about education since as long as I can remember having memories.

Question: Do you recall a pivotal childhood moment?

Transcript: A pivotal moment in my childhood. Yeah. The pivotal moment in my . . . There were two pivotal moments in my childhood. One was in elementary school when the only other Jewish kid in my elementary school – his name was Andy Goodnik, my name is Amy Gutmann – was threatened to be lynched in the coatroom because he was Jewish. Now that was a pivotal moment of my being very proud of being Jewish. I was always proud of being Jewish, but I never knew how important it was publicly to be proud of that. And I came to his defense. And I mean it was a small thing to do, but it was a pivotal moment for me. It made me realize how much it wasn’t just my father’s background in life that mattered, but it was a very important part of my identity. And it was important to assert it at critical moments. Not obnoxiously, not continually. It wasn’t all of who I was, but it was an important part of who I was. And it was an important part of what I believed, both because I went to Hebrew school my whole childhood, but also because it was connected . . . The kind of religious training I had, which was in _______ Judaism, was part and parcel of my belief in social justice. Not just for Jews. The Exodus is a story I was taught in my belief . . . it’s a story of all people getting liberated. So it was my way of connecting who I was in particular, and a universalist project for freedom for all people. It was a very pivotal moment.

The other pivotal moment was when I got into college and I got a full scholarship to Harvard and Radcliffe. I couldn’t have afforded to go to an Ivy League University. My father had died when I was a junior in high school. We were on Social Security. My mother taught at . . . See now that’s a Freudian slip. She would have loved to have taught. She was a secretary for the principal of my high school. And so I remember her bringing me that envelope after school and opening it. And I had some sense at that time that the world was gonna open to me at that point. And it did.

Recorded on: 7/5/07