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CORA WEISS: A CHAMPION OF PEACE, INTERNATIONALISM, AND WOMEN’S
RIGHTS
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John Cavanagh
December 9, 2025
Institute for Policy Studies
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_ Cora was a champion of the United Nations and its mission to
advance peace and women’s rights. She insisted that we at IPS name
programs in positive terms with “what we’re for”: peace,
disarmament, internationalism, women’s rights, the common good. _
Cora and Peter Weiss, receiving a gift of a Chilean arpillera from
Cristian Letelier, son of Orlando Letelier, at an IPS 50th anniversary
event in 2013. Peter and Cora were friends of the Letelier family.,
Photo by Rick Reinhard for IPS)
Cora Weiss was a woman who changed my life at the impressionable age
of 19. I was a sophomore at conservative Dartmouth College, interested
in the world beyond the United States but ignorant of how to become a
part of that world.
I was studying Chinese at that moment when Nixon and Mao had opened a
door to closer U.S.-Chinese relations and my Chinese teacher suggested
I take advantage of Dartmouth’s “semester-off” grants to do an
internship in Washington. I later learned that he wrote to Cora and
asked where a young, “confused” Dartmouth student might go to get
a glimpse of how to work for a better world.
Cora reached out to the Indochina Resource Center, a small but vital
organization in Washington, D.C. that was fighting to end the Vietnam
War, and they agreed to host me in the spring of 1975. There, I met
some of the most committed and effective activists from Vietnam, Laos,
and the United States who were teaching the Washington establishment
and the country about the atrocities that the United States was
committing in the countries of Indochina.
[Cora Weiss speaks at a memorial event for the late Saul Landau in
2013. Her son Danny (left) and husband Peter (right) listen on.]Cora
Weiss speaks at a memorial event for the late Saul Landau in 2013. Her
son Danny (left) and husband Peter (right) listen on. (Photo by Rick
Reinhard for IPS)
During my work at the Center, I “met” Cora as her voice boomed
over the speaker phone and she reported on a recent trip to
Vietnam. Cora was a pillar of so much of the anti-war organizing in
this period: trips to return POWs, humanizing the Vietnamese people
for Americans, conveying the impact of the war on women and children.
My timing was impeccable as the war ended during my internship. My
going away present was a May 1975 poster advertising a massive peace
celebration Cora co-organized (with Don Luce) in New York City’s
Central Park. Forty years later, when I had become her friend, I asked
if she needed a copy of the poster and it turned out she’d been
looking for one for years. I was able to make an impeccable copy for
her, while the original still hangs in my family home.
In 1983, the Institute for Policy Studies hired me to lead its global
economy work — and I was delighted to find that Cora and her
brilliant international lawyer husband, Peter
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IPS. They showed great interest in the work I had done after graduate
school at the United Nations in Geneva, and they were there to offer
support and ideas for the next four decades.
Cora was a champion of the United Nations and its mission to advance
peace and women’s rights. She insisted that we at IPS name our
programs in positive terms to inspire people with “what we’re
for”: peace, disarmament, internationalism, women’s rights, the
common good.
She always wanted to hear about and meet the women we were bringing
into IPS, and loved to talk to me about their work: Isabel Letelier,
Barbara Ehrenreich, Sarah Anderson, Phyllis Bennis, Karen Dolan, Emira
Woods, Lindsay Koshgarian, Kathleen Gaspard, Christine Ahn, and
others.
When I needed help, I called. In 1996, IPS and the International Forum
on Globalization were seeking a venue for a huge teach-in on
globalization in New York, and Cora delivered the glorious Riverside
Church, where she ran their program on disarmament. I joined a United
Nations advisory committee and Cora introduced me to her friend, Helen
Clark, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand who ran the UN
Development Program.
[Cora Weiss (center) speaks on a panel at IPS's 50th anniiversary
celebration with Emira Woods (left) and Phyllis Bennis (right). (Photo
by Rick Reinhard for IPS)]Cora Weiss (center) speaks on a panel at
IPS’s 50th anniversary celebration with Emira Woods (left) and
Phyllis Bennis (right). (Photo by Rick Reinhard for IPS)
As a philanthropist, she invested not only in many of the key peace
and women’s rights groups, but in dynamic and brilliant people she
believed in. In the midst of all of her other duties as a peace and
women’s rights leader, Cora ran the Samuel Rubin Foundation (now
directed by her daughter, Judy), a foundation set up by her father who
had created the perfume company Fabergé and sold it to set up the
foundation.
For decades, that foundation generously supported IPS and its
international arm, the Transnational Institute (now an independent but
still allied organization). She and Peter not only supported the
institutions they felt would deliver peace and human rights and
women’s rights, they were there for leaders when they needed help.
As a trustee of Hampshire College, Cora helped key leaders get
teaching jobs. She paid for the college education of the children of
victims of political assassination. She gave special grants to IPS to
help build retirement funds for some of its original leaders who
couldn’t imagine they would ever “retire.”
And she was audacious in her creations. In 1999, she organized The
Hague Appeal for Peace, bringing Bishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa
and 10,000 people to the Netherlands to educate for peace.
One of my favorite Cora moments was in 2009. I told Cora that I had
been invited to attend a White House speech by President Barack Obama
on the economy. Cora had met Obama on the campaign trail and had told
him about the role that she and IPS Trustee Harry Belafonte had played
in organizing funds for the program that brought Barack Obama’s
father to study in this country. In 2009, a new book (_Airlift to
America_) had just been published on this program, and Cora wanted to
inscribe a copy and have me deliver it to President Obama.
I arrived at the White House for the speech and was told that we had
to wait an hour and could explore parts of the White House because the
world had just been told that Obama would win the Nobel Peace Prize. I
figured that I would never actually meet the president so I wandered
into the White House library and put the book on a shelf next to some
important 18th century tomes. I then told a confused and disbelieving
White House aide where I had left a gift for the president from Cora
Weiss.
Cora and Peter were incredibly proud of their three children, and
loved to talk about them. Cora loved to organize birthday parties for
Peter where people were challenged to talk about their dreams to make
the impossible possible. She loved meeting women who would, like her,
push the boundaries of the possible.
And she inspired me to help IPS build an ambitious program to mentor
new leaders of the movements that will lead us out of this time of
crisis, now called the Henry A. Wallace Fellowship Program
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Cora’s bold, inspiring legacy will live on for generations to
come.
_J__ohn Cavanagh directed IPS’s Global Economy Project from
1983-1999, directed IPS from 1991 to 2021, and is now Senior Advisor
at IPS._
_IPS is a progressive organization dedicated to building a more
equitable, ecologically sustainable, and peaceful society. In
partnership with dynamic social movements, we turn transformative
policy ideas into action._
* Vietnam War
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* Indochina Peace Center
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* United Nations
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* women's rights
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* peace movement
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* Internationalism
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