Oral history interview with Tamara Slobodkin, 2000

Biographical Note

Tamara Slobodkin was born to immigrants of Jewish heritage who had come to the United States from Europe after time in Palestine. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut and attended Oberlin College and Conservatory to study piano as a teenager. She married her husband when she was seventeen, and he was twenty-three, finishing his PhD in biology at Yale. In 1957, her husband earned a professorship at the University of Michigan, so the pair moved to Ann Arbor. She quickly became active in the NAACP, Ann Arbor CORE, and Women Strike for Peace. In the late 1960s, her husband got a job at Stony Brook University, so the couple moved to Long Island, New York. She founded a chamber group in Long Island called the North Shore Pro Musica that performed at churches and community centers. She also started a practice training advanced and professional pianists of all ages

Scope and Contents

Slobodkin begins this interview by discussing her parents’ histories and heritage, including their youths in Europe, how they were raised, and how they met and married in Jerusalem before immigrating to the United States. She briefly discusses her father’s Zionism, socialism, and agriculture, was well as antisemitism he faced from his childhood into his adulthood. She notes that he helped introduce European cattle to Palestine. She describes her own childhood, and the influences to her developing political consciousness, such as her mother’s involvement in the Hadassah organization. She delves into her move to Ann Arbor in 1957, and how she became involved in Ann Arbor CORE. She explains the activities she was involved in at CORE including mentorship initiatives, home renovation for locals, and book drives. Slobodkin describes being a volunteer witness in the House Un-American Activities Committee trial. She describes protesting the University of Michigan inviting George Lincoln Rockwell, then leader of the American Nazi Party, to speak on campus. She closes the interview by speaking more about her family history, her Jewish heritage, and her current job as a piano teacher

Subjects

• Civil rights movements--United States--History--20th century.
• Congress of Racial Equality.
• Interviews.
• Michaels, Sheila, 1939-2017, interviewer.
• Oral histories.
• Pianists.
• Slobodkin, Tamara--Interviews.
• United States. Congress. House. Committee on Un-American Activities.