Jewish group honors Ginsburg for lifetime achievement

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JERUSALEM (AP) — A prominent Jewish organization has awarded U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg its first lifetime achievement award.

The Genesis Prize Foundation noted Ginsburg’s “groundbreaking legal work in the field of civil liberties and women’s rights” in its announcement this week.

The foundation sponsors the annual Genesis Prize — an award that is informally known as the Jewish Nobel.

It said the five winners of the Genesis Prize — former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, actor Michael Douglas, violinist Itzhak Perlman, sculptor Anish Kapoor and this year’s recipient, actress Natalie Portman — had selected Ginsburg.

“We honor Justice Ginsburg as an outstanding daughter of the Jewish people who made an enduring contribution to human civilization, who is an example of talent and achievement and who is committed to bettering the world,” the five said in a joint statement. “She is a source of inspiration not just for Jews but for people of all faiths and ethnicities around the world.”

Ginsburg, 84, has served on the Supreme Court since 1993. She is just the second female justice and often cites her Jewish heritage as a source for her love of learning and sensitivity to the plight of oppressed minorities.

The former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, Aharon Barak, is scheduled to present the award to Ginsburg at a ceremony in Tel Aviv in July 2018.

The Genesis Prize was inaugurated in 2014 and is run in a partnership between the Israeli prime minister’s office, the private Genesis Prize Foundation and the chairman’s office of the Jewish Agency, a nonprofit group with close ties to the Israeli government. It is funded by a $100 million endowment established by the foundation.