Annette T. (Teta) Rubinstein (1910-2007), Marxist educator, editor, writer, literary critic and political activist, was born to socialist parents in New York on April 12, 1910 in an apartment on the top floor of the Manhattan School, a private school founded by her father to educate underprivileged immigrants. She taught philosophy at New York University while she completed her graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia with her 1934 dissertation, Realistic Ethics.
Although often critical of the its positions, Rubinstein was a member of the Communist Party from the 1930s into the 1950s. She was active in the American Labor Party and later became its Vice-Chairman for New York. In 1934 she began a long relationship with the Robert Louis Stevenson School, first as a teacher and later as owner and principal until her forced resignation in 1952. From 1941-1946 Rubinstein served as the Executive Secretary of the Committee for the Care of Young Children in Wartime. In the late 1940s she also served as the President of the West Side Child Care Council.
In the Spring of 1949, following the sudden death of the congressman for New York's 20th Congressional District, the ALP selected Rubinstein as its candidate in the subsequent special election. Also in 1949, the Robert Louis Stevenson School opened a Veterans Division to take advantage of the educational provisions of the GI Bill of Rights. The Veteran's Administration and New York Board of Education apparently responded to her political affiliations by invoking a series of technicalities to stop reimbursing the school. In 1952 Rubinstein severed her connection to Stevenson School and testified before the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee.
Following her unsuccessful pursuit of publishing employment Rubinstein focused on writing. The Great Tradition in English Literature: From Shakespeare to Shaw(1953) concentrated on the relationship of political and social movements to major literary works. To commemorate the late Congressman Vito Marcantonio, for whom Rubinstein had served as an aide, she edited I Vote My Conscience: Debates, Speeches and Writings of Vito Marcantonio, 1935-1950(1956). Rubinstein also generated a continuous stream of book reviews, literary criticism and articles, and worked as an editor on the Marxist periodicals Mainstreamand Science and Society.
In 1958 Rubinstein ran for Lt. Governor of New York on the the Independent Socialist Party line (a coalition of socialists, Communists and Trotskyists). In 1960 ATR was instrumental in the creation of the Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience which focused on the issues of class discrimination and racism in the schools and in the courts and published several ATR pamphlets, including Attica 1971-1975(1975), The Black Panther Party and the Case of the New York 21(n.d.), and Suicides in Prision: A Cry for Help on Rikers Island(n.d.). She also edited Schools against Children: The Case for Community Control(Monthly Review Press, 1970).
In the late 1950s and 1960's Rubinstein lectured across the United States, Canada and Eastern Europe, and held visiting appointments at several Eastern European universities, including Karl Marx University in Leipzig. She visited the People's Republic of China in 1972, and returned in 1982-83 and 1987-88 as a professor of English and American Literature at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. While in China she created the textbook American Literature, Root and Flower: Significant Poets, Novelists and Dramatists, 1775-1955(Beijing, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1988).
