Weiss, Cora

WEISS, CORA (1934-2025). Peace crusader, a leader of Women's Strike for Peace (WSP), and activist in other peace and anti-nuclear movements, Weiss served as a tireless organizer with strong, if muted, ties to the Left.

Daughter of Vera Rubin, an anthropologist, and cosmetics entrepreneur Samuel Rubin, Cora grew up in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, at the time a magnet for leftwing activists and artists. Her mother played prominent volunteer role in the campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which occasioned home visits from Franklin and Eleanor. In later years, the Samuel Rubin Foundation supported various progressive causes.

Cora Weiss graduated from the Ethical Culture Society Fieldston school and attended college in Madison, Wisconsin. There, she helped rebuild the local Left following the crushing defeat of the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948 and advancing Cold War. She later recalled that she personally launched the “Joe Must Go” campaign against the notorious Wisconsin anti-communist crusader, Senator Joseph McCarthy. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1956 with a degree in cultural anthropology.

Marrying Peter Weiss, a fellow college student in 1956, she moved with him to the Bronx, where they raised three children. Her life changed dramatically when she joined the Riverside (Bronx) chapter of WSP in 1961, a small organization that addressed the growing dangers associated with nuclear weapons testing. The WSP publicized the perils of strontium-90, which found their way into the food supply and even into children’s teeth. The WSP soon became a spear point of antiwar activity, along with the Student Peace Union and a several other pacifist organizations in the early 1960s. Its membership, drawn primarily from suburban homemakers and mothers, proved vital to its work: right-wingers and and hawkish liberals in Congress, eager to pin the “subversive” label on opponents of nuclear testing and preparations for war, could not locate a vulnerable spot to attack the organization.

The WSP continued to introduce the public to the grim, catastrophic effects of atomic testing Weiss encouraged the WSP to play an active role in opposing the US invasion of Vietnam. The organization again successfully again fought off. To make herself heard, she went so far as to use her shoes to thump on the Pentagon doors. The WSP drew attention to the atrocities of the war, carrying signs along the fashionable Park Avenue in New York City that featured photos of Vietnamese slaughtered by American soldiers.

Co-Chair of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, Weiss gathered speakers for the 1969 event at the Capitol to demand immediate withdrawal. George McGovern, Coretta Scott King, and Mary Travers joined her on stage. She also traveled to Vietnam to meet representatives of the North Vietnamese Women’s Union and brought back letters from US prisoners of war. She “humanized” the sufferings of Vietnamese civilians, especially women and children and inaugurated a project to help America’s Vietnam veterans cope with their injuries and their experiences.

In 1982, with the Vietnam War long past but Ronald Reagan loosely discussing a nuclear holocaust, Weiss mobilized the largest peace demonstration in the United States to date, with a million gathered in New York’s Central Park. Later as the International Peace Bureau’s representative to the United Nations, she helped to draft UN Security Council 1325 resolution on the significance of women’s activity in peace movements. This resolution received a rare unanimous vote in 2000. Weiss also served as the president of the Hague Appeal for Peace and remained active in peace-related movements for the rest of her life.

Grele, Ronald J. “Cora Weiss Oral History Project: The Reminiscences of Coral Weiss” (2014). Columbia University Center for Oral History.

Swerdlow, Amy. Woman’s Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.