AFT women’s rights leaders celebrate breaking boundaries

Since its beginnings, our union has been led by powerful and courageous women. Two were honored at this convention's Women's Rights breakfast: The Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi emerita at New York's Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the largest LGBTQIA+ synagogue in the world, which she led for 32 years; and the Women's Rights Award was given to Karla Hernández-Mats, past president of United Teachers of Dade, the largest teachers union in the southeastern U.S., and an AFT vice president and nationally respected voice on public education.

Kleinbaum is often quoted by her wife, AFT President Randi Weingarten, as saying, "Joy is an act of spiritual and political resistance." Kleinbaum struck that note in her opening invocation and award-acceptance remarks. While acknowledging that progressives can and should grieve for the destruction and cruelty going on around them, including women's bodies being under attack, she also offered words of hope and comfort: "Laugh and love, be strong when we fear. … Know that in the end, Pharoah does not win." She urged participants, "It is up to us to carry the seed … of healing this broken world."

Kleinbaum has lived that challenge. As Weingarten told attendees, Kleinbaum arrived at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in 1992, during the worst of the AIDS crisis, with a grief-stricken, traumatized congregation to minister to. "In her first month, she did four funerals and one baby-naming. One-third of the men in the congregation died of AIDS," Weingarten recounted.

Weingarten praised Kleinbaum's "quiet leadership," which persisted despite the hostility (even being literally spit on at times) that Kleinbaum faced as an openly gay faith leader. According to Weingarten, it was about "saying, 'No, I'm not going to hide, I'm not going away.' She had to break so many boundaries. She had to create such big tents."

Hernández-Mats was the first Latina officer elected to lead UTD. She served as president for nine years, from 2016 to 2025, during which she led efforts that resulted in the successful passage of two countywide referendums to increase teacher pay, marking the largest pay increases in the history of Miami-Dade County Public Schools. In 2022, Hernández-Mats was selected by the Democratic Party to run as the lieutenant governor of Florida as the Democratic nominee.

But this record of stellar achievement started small, with one brave, solo action. Hernández-Mats' fellow co-chair of the AFT Women's Rights Committee, AFT Vice President and AFT Massachusetts President Jessica Tang, told the story: In 2011, Hernández-Mats, then a science teacher at Hialeah Middle School, answered the call from then-United Teachers of Dade president and now AFT Secretary-Treasurer Fedrick Ingram, for members to get active. So, Hernández-Mats made a homemade sign calling for teacher pay raises. She held that sign by herself on Hialeah's 49th Street. Ingram spotted her, and the rest is history.

In receiving her award, Hernández-Mats urged participants to identify and welcome a new generation of leaders: "Find people and give them the opportunity, just like Fed gave me the opportunity." Earlier in the program, she urged attendees: "Coming together, we are reminded that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves. … Never give up on the promise of justice."

United Farm Workers of America co-founder and labor legend Dolores Huerta made a special appearance. Huerta celebrated that today, "We are finally being able to get more women in positions of power. We're not there yet, but we're on the way."

In closing, Huerta struck a note of hope that brought attendees to their feet: "Just by your example, we can show that women are the leaders. … We will make it happen and develop the kind of world that we want our children to live in."

[Christina Bartolomeo/Photo credit: Pamela Wolfe]