Chai Rachel Feldblum (born April 1959) is an American author and activist for disability and LGBT rights. A former law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, she served as Commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She was nominated to the position on the EEOC by president Barack Obama in 2009. In April 2010, she received a recess appointment to the EEOC, and in December 2010 she was confirmed to serve on the EEOC by the United States Senate. The Senate confirmed her in December 2013 for a second term on the Commission which expired in July 2018.
Early life and education
Chai Feldblum was born in New York City to Meyer Simcha and Esther Feldblum. Meyer Simcha Feldblum was born in Lithuania and survived the Holocaust by living in the forests of Poland. He came to the United States following WWII, where he earned his ordination and Ph.D. from Yeshiva University in New York City and became a rabbi and a professor of Talmud, first at Yeshiva University and then at Bar Ilan University in Israel. Esther Feldblum was the daughter of Rabbi Ephraim Eliezer Yolles, a Hasidic Rebbe (the Samborer Rebbe) of Philadelphia. Esther Feldblum received her Ph.D. in Jewish history from Columbia University and taught for one year at Brooklyn College before dying in a car accident at the age of 41. Her dissertation, The American Catholic Press and the Jewish State: 1917-1959, was published as a book posthumously.
Chai Feldblum grew up in Washington Heights in New York City. Her Orthodox Jewish upbringing shaped her commitment to social justice work.
Chai Feldblum attended the Yeshiva University High School for Girls in Queens, New York before majoring in Ancient Studies and Religion at Barnard College in the class of 1979. Feldblum received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1985. Coming from a long line of Orthodox Jewish rabbis she once aspired to be a talmudic scholar. She left Orthodox Judaism by the time she was a "young adult."
Career
After graduating from law school, Feldblum clerked for federal Judge Frank M. Coffin on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and then for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the Supreme Court of the United States.
While working from 1988 to 1990 as Legislative Counsel to the AIDS Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, Feldblum was the lead attorney on the team drafting the Americans with Disabilities Act, which became law in 1990.
She joined the faculty of Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC in 1991, teaching classes on "legislative lawyering," a phrase she coined to describe the work of the attorneys who craft or lobby for legislation. She founded and is the director of the university's Federal Legislation Clinic.
Since joining Georgetown, Feldblum has continued her own legislative lawyering career. In 1993, she was the legal director for the Campaign for Military Service, a group which lobbied to overturn policies forbidding gay and bisexual people from serving openly in the U.S. armed forces. The CMS was the first organization to air a nationwide television commercial on a gay rights issue.
In 2003, Feldblum became co-director of Georgetown's Workplace Flexibility 2010 project, which works to improve conditions for employers and employees. The program focuses on flexible work arrangements (FWAs), including phased retirement, non-traditional flextime and working time, remote work, and multiple points of exit and re-entry into the workforce.
In 2006, she founded the Moral Values Project, with the mission statement:
She was the lead drafter of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit employment discrimination based on someone's real or perceived sexual orientation. She also worked on passage of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, and has testified before Congress on numerous occasions.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
In 2009, President Barack Obama nominated Feldblum for one of the seats on the five-member Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In response to attacks on her, Obama stated in an October 10 speech to the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign:
Following her nomination, Feldblum came under attack on various grounds. In testimony before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Feldblum testified that claims that she believed in governmental endorsement of polygamy or polyamorous relationships were wrong, consistent with her own writings in which she had always restricted such endorsement to non-sexual domestic partners.