How a trailblazing Jewish scientist is still revolutionizing the world of astronomy

Located in northern Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will revolutionize the study of the universe when it incorporates the largest digital camera ever built in the world. Photo by Getty Images

By Benjamin Ivry July 21, 2025

The first test images from a groundbreaking observatory in Chile named for trailblazing American Jewish astronomer Vera Rubin have been dazzling stargazers, capturing the light from millions of distant stars and galaxies on an unprecedented scale and revealing thousands of previously unseen asteroids. Thanks in part to Rubin, these revelations will transform our understanding of interstellar space.

Philadelphia-born Rubin (whose family name was originally Kobchefski), died in 2016 at age 88. She was a perennial Nobel Prize candidate for her transformational insights about the way galaxies move and what impacts them. She also raised four children who earned science PhDs and entered academia, with support from a mathematician husband and tolerant, insightful parents.

Her father, born Pesach Kobchefski in Vilnius, Lithuania, Americanized his name to Pete Cooper upon immigration to New York. He epitomized the fearless intellectual questing that his daughter would also represent. On the eve of the Great Depression, Rubin’s father quit a Bell Telephone Company job due to boredom, whereupon a supervisor kvetched about his apparent flightiness: “That’s the trouble with you Jewish boys.”

Rubin’s mother, Rose Applebaum, of Bessarabian Jewish origin, had pursued a passion for singing, eventually limited to participation in synagogue choirs. She studied with Yossell Bogash, a Ukrainian teacher who changed his name to Giuseppe Boghetti to sound more operatic. At Bogash/Boghetti’s studio, fellow students included the tenor and chazzan Jan Peerce and the contralto Marian Anderson. In another example of family stalwartness, Rubin’s maternal grandmother fearlessly traveled to the New World in steerage, chalishing because the only food aboard ship was treyf.

Although Rubin could not rival her mother’s musical skills, as a girl she was such a fan of the American Jewish songwriter George Gershwin that she actually dreamed of being Gershwin. Decades later, her adoration of musical theater persisted, showing the lifelong zest and performative zeal that Rubin displayed. On donating her papers to the Library of Congress, Rubin requested tickets to a show at the library featuring Stephen Sondheim, another Jewish songwriting overachiever.

Even during her undergraduate days at Vassar, Jewish showbiz charisma followed her, when Leonard Bernstein, already a musical superstar, visited the campus in 1946 to conduct the premiere of his ballet Facsimile at the college chapel. But for a student like Rubin, who dreamed since childhood of being an astronomer after spending nights gazing at the mysterious firmament, a visit to Vassar by the young physicist Richard Feynman was equally thrilling.

She married one of Feynman’s students, Robert Rubin. As a young graduate student at Cornell, she worked with the eminent physicist Hans Bethe and boldly presented partial research findings at a conference, overturning typical expectations that an astronomer would be a man speaking with a European accent.

Instead, Rubin sounded direct and down-to-earth as a Philadelphia Jewish woman. One posthumous tribute lauded her for taking “zero crap, pointing out sexism wherever she saw it with her unique blunt humor.”

She was utterly serious in her identity as an observant Jew, at first accompanying her family to B’nai Israel congregation in Washington, D.C. Later in life, she attended Temple Sinai, a Reform synagogue, also in D.C.

In 1996 she would tell an interviewer, as cited by her biographers Jacqueline and Simon Mitton: “I’m Jewish, and so religion to me is a kind of moral code and a kind of history.” Seeing science as a moral activity, she would repeatedly set aside her upbeat persona to weep at the slow, limited progress that women were granted in scientific professions.

As if to gain solace, Rubin would be a fiercely proud, protective Jewish mother. When her husband was offered a much-coveted post at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the couple vetoed the offer after an envoy from the brainiac center, physicist Freeman Dyson, visited their home and “insulted” their children by calling them “brats.”

In an interview, as science writer Richard Panek noted, Rubin affirmed that she adored kids, considering the development of small children to be the “most remarkable thing in this world.” “Galaxies may be pretty remarkable,” she added, “But to watch a child from zero to two is just incredible.” Rubin deliberately imitated the Jewish caricaturist Al Hirschfeld who included his daughter Nina’s name in his artwork, by penning the name of her son Allan in a cloud diagram accompanying an article published in The Astrophysics Journal.

Combining her passions for science and Jewish motherhood, Rubin owed much to a support group organized by what she termed her “very conventional, very loving Jewish family.” For her to attend twice weekly evening classes to earn a Ph.D. degree, intricate assistance was necessary with grandparents as babysitters and her husband as all-purpose chauffeur.

The product of an inspiring, motivating Jewish family, Rubin would underline the importance of instilling in little Jewish girls, and others, the self-confidence to dare to be different and remain undaunted by opposition. She always remembered that when she requested a graduate school course catalogue, Princeton refused to send one because they didn’t accept women as graduate students at the time. Many years later, when her daughter, also an astronomer, reported on attending an academic conference in Japan where she was the only woman present, Rubin wept to think that so little progress had been made for gender equality in science.

Sometimes her adversaries were Jewish men, as when the American astronomer Jesse Greenstein declared at one symposium that if a quasar was changing in size, as Rubin had alleged, he would “eat his hat.” A quarter-century later, Greenstein was irked at being reminded of this threat by Rubin, whose pioneering observations had by then been validated.

Despite such travails, she put a more positive spin on the statement made by American Jewish theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg that the universe appears to be pointless. Rubin admitted that the universe is like an “amusing game” where people procreate, perhaps without an “enormous point to it all.”

Yet she noted, with assurance born of deeply imbued Jewish culture and tradition, “for some of us, attempting to understand this universe is important and a major part of our lives.”