Marlene Trestman's Most Fortunate Unfortunates is the first comprehensive history of the Jewish Orphans' Home of New Orleans. Founded in 1855 in the aftermath of a yellow fever epidemic, the Home was the first purpose-built Jewish orphanage in the nation. It reflected the city's affinity for religiously operated orphanages and the growing prosperity of its Jewish community. In 1904, the orphanage founded the Isidore Newman School, a coed, nonsectarian school that was also open to children, regardless of religion, whose parents paid tuition. By the time the Jewish Orphans' Home closed in 1946, it had sheltered more than sixteen hundred parentless children and two dozen widows from New Orleans and other areas of Louisiana and the mid-South. Based on deep archival research and numerous interviews of alumni and their descendants, Most Fortunate Unfortunates provides a view of life in the Jewish Orphans' Home for the children and women who lived there. The study also traces the forces that impelled the Home's founders and leaders—both the heralded men and otherwise overlooked women—to create and maintain the institution that Jews considered the "pride of every Southern Israelite." While Trestman celebrates the Home's many triumphs, she also delves deeply into its failures. Most Fortunate Unfortunates is sure to be of widespread interest to readers interested in southern Jewish history, gender and race relations, and the evolution of social work and dependent childcare.

Supreme Court advocate Bessie Margolin (1909-1996) molded modern American labor policy while creating a space for female lawyers in the nation's high courts. In this comprehensive biography, Marlene Trestman reveals the forces that shaped Margolin's remarkable journeyaEURO"beginning in a New Orleans Jewish orphanageaEURO"and illuminates the public and private life of this trailblazing woman. Margolin launched her career in the early 1930s, when only 2 percent of America's attorneys were female and far fewer were Jewish or from the South. Among other numerous accomplishments, she defended the constitutionality of the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority, drafted rules establishing American military tribunals for Nazi war crimes, and shepherded through the courts the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Margolin culminated her government service as a champion of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. Her passion for her work and meticulous preparation resulted in an outstanding record in appellate advocacy: she prevailed in cases associated with twenty-one of her twenty-four Supreme Court arguments. Margolin shares an elite company of individuals who attained such high standing as Supreme Court advocates, and she did so when the legal world was almost entirely male.