A documentary celebrating award-winning journalist Ruth Gruber, witness and participant in the Making of History will be shown on Monday, April 28 at 6 p.m. in the Cargill Auditorium
Ruth Gruber didn’t just report the news…she made it!
AHEAD OF TIME, tells the remarkable journey of American writer and journalist Ruth Gruber. Born in Brooklyn in 1911, she was the youngest person in the world to receive a Ph.D. (at the age of 20), a feminist before feminism. While at school in Cologne, she witnessed the rise of Nazism and began documenting her observations. A trail-blazer who rejected the gender standards of her generation, she became a full-time journalist at the age of 24, traveling to the Soviet Arctic in 1935 as the first reporter in the region and beginning an illustrious career with the New York Herald Tribune.
Gruber’s involvement in the events surrounding WWII gives her a unique perspective of last century’s most defining events, including the establishment of the State of Israel. In 1944, she became more than a witness; enlisted by the Roosevelt administration to secretly escort one thousand refugees from Naples to New York on the ship Henry Gibbins. Gruber covered the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and reported on the British attack of the ship Exodus outside Haifa Harbor. Her photos, published around the world, helped change world opinion toward the Jewish refugees and their quest for a Jewish state.
Never losing her tenacity and verve Gruber went on to publish 19 books and receive lifetime achievement awards from the Overseas Press Club, National Jewish Book Awards and the National Coalition Against Censorship among many others.
