Hollywood icon Barbra Streisand (Funny Girl, The Way We Were), the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award-winning star, was selected to receive the 2023 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award by the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor presented the prestigious award to Streisand in a private ceremony — a move sure to be subject to scrutiny considering the recent furor over Supreme Court ethics and questions about Sotomayor’s use of staff in promoting her secondary career as an author. Streisand is a multi-millionaire liberal activist with a long history of donating money to Democrats and advocating for liberal legislation.
The Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award was established in 2019, before the late Justice’s death in 2020, and is presented annually “to leaders who have distinguished themselves by assuming a leadership role and making a meaningful change in the lives of others.”
Streisand is the first woman to direct, produce, write, and star in a major motion picture, as well as the first female composer to receive an Academy Award — for her 1983 film, Yentl.
Note: The inaugural Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award was presented to philanthropist and art patron Agnes Gund (Chairman of the Board of Directors of MoMA). In 2021, the award was presented to Queen Elizabeth II. Fashion industry icon Diane von Furstenberg was the 2022 award recipient.
Streisand opens her video acceptance speech below noting what she and Ginsburg had in common, including both having been Jewish girls in Brooklyn with big dreams.
Streisand says that having the Ginsburg Award presented to her by Sotomayor “made the honor even more remarkable.”
In addition to being an advocate for voter rights, and gender and racial equality, Streisand is also a well-known philanthropist, including her work with The Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai and at UCLA, where she’s funding a “forward-looking institute focused on solving societal challenges” including climate change and the circulation of misinformation.
Chairman of the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation and Ginsburg award creator, Julie Opperman, said: “I made a promise to Justice Ginsburg to help preserve her legacy and to ensure that this award that bears her name continues to recognize strong women leaders who have made the world a better place, and I only wish she was here today to celebrate Ms. Streisand with us.”
