Randi Weingarten Isn’t Really a Mother or a Stepmother

‘S o many of the leaders of the left — and I hate to be so personal about this — but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children. And that really disorients me, and it really disturbs me,” J. D. Vance said in 2021. “Randi Weingarten, who’s the head of the most powerful teachers’ union in the country — she doesn’t have a single child. If she wants to brainwash and destroy the minds of children, she should have some of her own and leave ours the hell alone.”

Vance’s comments only recently surfaced. Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, responded on Jen Psaki’s MSNBC television show, calling Vance’s comments “insulting” and “gross.” Weingarten said, “I’m blessed that, you know, Sharon has two kids, and, you know, I consider them my kids now.” In a statement released on Wednesday, Weingarten said that she is “blessed to be a mom by marriage” and asserted “shame on JD Vance.” The media have covered Weingarten’s remarks, referring to her as a “stepmother” with “two stepchildren.”

This is not the first time Republicans have questioned Weingarten’s claim to motherhood, particularly as it relates to her qualifications to lead a large teachers’ union. In 2021, Republican senator Tom Cotton stated that “Randi Weingarten doesn’t even have children — what does she know about raising and teaching kids?” During a congressional hearing in 2023 on pandemic-era school closures, Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said that Weingarten was “not a biological mother” and “not a mother,” although Weingarten said during questioning that she is a “mother by marriage.”

Despite Weingarten’s claims and the media’s coverage, she is not a mother, or even a stepmother. I will summarize some of my previous National Review reporting on the relevant family history:

Margaret Moers Wenig, a rabbi known for the sermon “God Is a Woman and She Is Growing Older,” was married to a man and had two daughters. According to a New York magazine article, Wenig realized she was a lesbian roughly a decade into that marriage. Wenig divorced when her two daughters were young; she and her ex-husband shared equal custody. Wenig began a relationship with Sharon Kleinbaum, also a rabbi. According to a New York Times interview published in 1993, Kleinbaum mentioned raising two kids but did not disclose their ages. In 2008, Wenig and Kleinbaum wed during the California window that allowed same-sex marriage. Kleinbaum and Wenig divorced in 2012 after a nearly 20-year relationship. By that time, the two children had already finished their undergraduate degrees at Yale University. (Wenig characterizes the divorce as rather bitter, and once even “took measures to end [her] life.”) Kleinbaum was friends with Randi Weingarten in the 1990s, and they wed in 2018. The two daughters were well into adulthood by the time their stepmother, Kleinbaum, wed Randi Weingarten.

So, to summarize this succinctly: Weingarten’s spouse, Kleinbaum, had a previous spouse who had two children, who were both college graduates when Weingarten and Kleinbaum wed. (Does anyone need a flow chart?)

Of course, a woman can rightfully call herself a “mother” without having conceived or borne children; any reasonable person would agree that an infertile woman who adopted and raised a child is a mother. But Republicans refute Weingarten’s claims of motherhood without hostility toward stepmothers or adoptive mothers. Instead, Republicans point out that Weingarten isn’t a mother to reinforce the argument that her lack of experience raising kids renders her unsuitable to lead a powerful teachers’ union; her policies, like the school closures during the pandemic, have been disastrous for children, parents, and teachers.

Weingarten can call herself a “mother by marriage,” but she cannot claim to have raised children. And perhaps Wenig — the biological mom — offers the clearest rebuttal. Her biography on the Hebrew Union College website says, “With Dr. Robert Joel Rubenstein and Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Wenig raised two children, Liba and Molly, of whom she is very proud and for whom she is deeply grateful.” No mention of Weingarten.