A serious person with a great sense of humor. A powerful advocate for women’s rights. A stalwart believer in the 14th Amendment. A tenacious and focused speaker with a strong bullshit detector.

Who else could this be but Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

Depicted in the newly released documentary, RBG, this diminutive 85-year-old powerhouse Supreme Court Justice has inspired me more than ever.

When she reads Sarah Grimke’s quote aloud, “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks,” I felt verklempt (Yiddish for too emotional to speak).

Just yesterday, RBG dissented in her written Supreme Court opinion: “The majority was ‘egregiously wrong,’ retrenching on 80 years of federal law that sought ‘to place employers and employees on more equal footing.'”

(Check out the wonderful picture book for kids I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes her Mark by Debbie Levy.)

Throughout my teaching career I asked students, if they ran into me walking down the street thirty years hence I hoped they would call out, “Fourteenth Amendment, Equal protection of the laws.”

It’s never happened but RBG has called it out for me, in front of millions more Americans than I could ever influence.

When the filmmakers first asked Ginsburg about making a movie, she replied, “Not yet.” 

It seems pretty obvious why she changed her mind.

I’ll see RBG later today for the second time this week. It’s rare that a documentary makes the Top Ten movies for attendance, and rarer still that I see a movie for a second time. Go see it!