Sociologist Ida Russakoff Hoos, who started the Jewish Vocational Services, died at age 94. Hoos, an early critic of relying on technology to study social issues, succumbed to pneumonia in a Boston hospital. Hoos was born in Maine and studied at Radcliffe during the Depression. In 1938 Ben Selekman, director of Associated Jewish Philanthropies, hired her to start the Jewish Vocational Services to create better employment opportunities for young women. “In those days,” Hoos later recalled, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “there were companies who wouldn’t touch a Jew.” Over the next four decades she served as a consultant to the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, NASA, the Office of Technology Assessment and the Energy Department. “I really think she was a bit before her time in recognizing that the tools of systems analysis and cost-benefit analysis were a bit overrated,” former student and John Hopkins professor Lynn Goldman told The Los Angeles Times. “She could see through many of the things being done at the time and could pinpoint the variables that were left out.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
