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Jacqueline "Jackie" Koldin Levine ’46 remembers the 1960s as a time when it seemed like there was a protest of some sort every day.

“It was an exciting time, and it was a necessary time,” she says.

Growing up with a suffragist mother and father who loved to talk politics with her, Levine was a natural activist. She spent her life fighting for the causes she believed in.

Levine attended 91�Թ��� during World War II, graduating cum laude in 1946. While studying for her master’s in sociology at Columbia University, she met her future husband, Howard. They settled down and had three children: Ellen Cramer ’73, Stephen, and Ned. While her children kept her very busy, Howard also encouraged her to find activities that would use her education and sharp mind. In 1960, she met some women who invited her to a meeting of the American Jewish Congress. 

“They were just starting to talk about the Civil Rights Movement,” Levine says, “and I enjoyed the conversation as much as the fact that they wanted to do something, not just write a letter or discuss  it privately.”

She joined a picket line, her daughter in tow, outside a Woolworth’s in Newark, N.J., to protest the company’s policy banning Black people from its lunch counters in the South.

The Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest, N.J., Levine’s home of many decades, published a book on her life by Adam McGovern in which Levine is quoted as saying, “To be Jewish is to consider every individual, every community, a responsibility. Our heritage and humanity demands nothing less.”  

She first crossed paths with Coretta Scott King on a trip to Geneva for the Women’s Strike for Peace in 1961. They met again in 1963 at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which Levine attended with her husband and their friends. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s storied “I Have a Dream” speech, Coretta approached Levine and asked her, "How do you think Martin did?"

“That was one of the best speeches I think he ever made, and I ever heard,” Levine says.  

In 1965, she once again joined the Kings to march from Selma to Montgomery. On a call shortly before her 99th birthday, and the 60th anniversary of the march, she could still remember it clearly. Unlike many of the protests she had participated in, there was a palpable sense of danger.

“The white people had guns, they were looking at us, and we didn’t know if they were going to shoot or not,” she says. “And the march itself was scary in that sense. But when we finally arrived at our destination and heard Martin speak, it was so remarkable that we forgot about being scared.”

Levine also joined protests against the Vietnam War and worked for decades to help Russian Jews emigrate from the Soviet Union. She organized protests and pushed to keep the issue in the public eye, even traveling to Moscow, and meeting with  President Jimmy Carter in 1980.

She became vice-president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and she and Howard founded the Koldin-Levine Scholarship Award to aid young people brought to the United States by HIAS. She worked with the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC) to push for the deportation of Nazis who had been allowed to resettle in the United States during the Cold War and became the first-ever female chair of the organization.

“Her shoes were so big that I couldn’t fill them,” Cramer says with pride. “She truly saved  people’s lives.”

Levine also served 91�Թ��� on the Board of Trustees from 1979 to 1991, and, with Howard, donated more than 500 prints from their art  collection to the College.

President Emeritus Mary Patterson McPherson called them “two of the best institutional supporters a president can hope for.”

“Jackie Levine was one of the Trustees I valued most in my many years in the 91�Թ��� administration,” McPherson says. “She has been devoted to the institution since her days as a student and understands deeply what the College should insist upon in the quality of its teaching  and learning.”

Levine shared some words of wisdom for aspiring activists. “There’s not a dearth of things to protest,” she says, noting that there are many ways to make one’s voice heard, from marches to writing letters.

“Everything you do or say makes a difference and these days, more than a difference," she says. “We can change feelings, actions, politicians, everything — and we have.”