The one and only Jewish Miss America
On the 100th birthday of Bess Myerson
Even before the state of Israel was founded, the first Jewish beauty queen was crowned in 1950. A few Jewish beauty queens also made headlines in other countries. The first was Bess Myerson. She was born 100 years ago, on July 16, 1924, in the Bronx, New York.
It is September 8, 1945, just a few months after the end of the Second World War in Europe and six days after the end of the war in the Pacific, 22-year-old Bess Myerson is crowned America's most beautiful woman in Atlantic City. She is “Miss America 1945”. And the first Jewish woman to win this title.
“She was very progressive, very intelligent and free spirited. She was what I would call an early feminist.”
Says film director David Arond, who portrayed Bess Myerson in the award-winning documentary “The One and Only Jewish Miss America”. Her fame came at a dark time. 400,000 Americans had died in the Second World War, yet Jews were excluded from many professions and universities. “After the holocaust you think there would be a little sympathy, instead the Jews were blamed for World War II”, tells David Arond. “Because if it wasn’t for the Jews, the thinking went, the American soldiers wouldn’t have been engaged in the battles.”
Bess, the daughter of Jewish emigrants from Russia, initially had no idea of any of this. She grew up in the Bronx in New York, her parents were workers. Her father was gentle, her mother strict. She wanted her three daughters to do well at school and play a musical instrument. Bess played the piano and flute. At 5’10”, she thought she was too tall, too thin and wished she had more hip. Arond explains: “In 1945, Jewish people were told that we were ugly. A lot of the propaganda of Hitler was communicated to Jews in the world. A Jewish woman as Miss America was an affirmation for many that Jewish people could be accepted by mainstream America.”
“My mother is a wonderful symbol for the fight against antisemitism.”
Says Bess Myerson's daughter, the actress and screenwriter Barbara, Barra Grant for short. However, many of her compatriots saw it differently at the time. The director of the beauty pageant had urged Myerson in advance to adopt a surname that sounded “less Jewish”: Myerson refused. After the competition, a number of commercial enterprises withdrew their sponsorship of “Miss America”. Ford Motor Company, for example. According to David Arond, Henry Ford was notorious antisemitic and pro Hitler. “So she didn’t get the new Ford car she was entitled to as winning the festival. And she didn’t get her 5.000 dollar scholarship which she was gonna use to buy a concert piano - simply because she was Jewish.”
Yet the Jewish “Miss America” only really realized how deep the prejudices still ran away from the East Coast with its large Jewish community - on the usual “Miss America” tour through the more conservative rest of the country. Daughter Barra Grant tells: “There was a country club, a very big event where she was supposed to play her Grieg piano concerto. She was all dressed up in her gown. And then in the last minute, a woman ran up the stairs and said ‘Oh no, you cannot play here tonight: we are restricted. No Jews allowed.’“
The young Miss America almost admitted defeat, but then, with the support of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, she simply turned the tables. Bess Myerson told a reporter: “They asked me to go out on a tour speaking at high schools and colleges, speaking to students about their problems having to do with antisemitism, with hatred, with racism. And I did a speech called ‘You can’t hate and be beautiful’“.
Instead of becoming the first concert conductor Myerson had wanted to be, she became a social activist. Her looks and eloquence also made her a fixture on television quiz shows for years. As a secular Jew, she nevertheless raised millions of dollars for the new state of Israel. In 1969, Myerson was appointed Commissioner of Consumer Affairs for the City of New York. In 1980, she ran for the US Senate as a representative of the Democratic Party - unsuccessfully. Then became the city's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Wrote columns and a consumer guide book.
Self-confident, independent and professionally successful: Myerson embodied a new type of woman. Following in her footsteps, as it were, were two women far removed from her, with whom she shared more than just the title of beauty queen.
Two years after Bess Myerson became “Miss America”, the first beauty queen was crowned in Iraq in September 1947 - and again a young woman who was Jewish won. Renée Rebecca Dangoor was the daughter of a respected doctor and her grandfather was the chief rabbi of Iraq. She herself was born in China, in Shanghai. In 1990, she gave a lecture on the fate of the Jews in Shanghai during the Second World War.
Sarah Idan was born in Baghdad in the same year. Like Bess Myerson, she would later attend a music academy in the USA. And 70 years after Renée Rebecca Dangoor, she will cause an international sensation as a Jewish beauty queen from Iraq. As “Miss Universe Iraq 2017”, Idan represented Iraq in the competition for the title of “Miss Universe”. Because she posted a selfie with the representative from Israel, she received death threats in Iraq and finally moved to the USA. In December 2023, she visited the site of the massacre of October 7 in Israel and prayed for peace at the Wailing Wall. In early 2024, Sarah Idan announced her intention to run as a representative of the California Democratic Party for the House of Representatives.
Both women, Renée Rebecca Dangoor and Sarah Idan, represent what Bess Myerson's daughter, Barra Grant, considers to be the essence and legacy of her mother:
“My mother had tremendous empathy for what you call the underdog. And this was her real reason for fame, I think, that she spoke out against what was wrong – and stood up for what was right.”
As successful as Bess Myerson was professionally, she was less fortunate in her private life. After her pageant, she married a traumatized war returnee who became an alcoholic and occasionally violent. She had a daughter, Barbara. However, after the divorce and a second marriage to Barbara’s adoptive father, Myerson was constantly busy with her career. “I was very proud of my mother. But I was missing unconditional love. I was not the focus of her world,” the daughter says. For a long time, Barra Grant felt overshadowed by her famous, beautiful mother1.
At the end of the 1980s, Myerson suddenly fell from grace with many admirers. She was already over 60 when she was charged, along with her lover, who was 21 years younger and married. Myerson is said to have tried to influence his divorce proceedings by helping the daughter of the presiding judge to get a well-paid job. Myerson was also arrested for shoplifting $44 worth of earrings and nail polish from a department store. She subsequently moved from New York to Florida and continued her philanthropic work from there.
When Myerson, who had beaten ovarian cancer, fell ill with leukemia, she moved to Los Angeles to be with daughter Barra. The two had, despite all odds, remained united in love throughout their lives. Bess Myerson died on December 14, 2014 at the age of 90. To this day, she remains the one and only Jewish “Miss America”.
This text was first published, slightly shorter, in German as a radio report. Listen here.
In 2018, Barra Grant wrote her darkly hilarious autobiographical mother-daughter theater piece “Miss America's Ugly Daughter” in which she performs herself.