Dorothy Saxe

Dorothy Saxe died on 13 October 2026 at her home in Menlo Park, California, aged 100. She had been in hospice care in her final months. Her daughter, Ellen Saliman, told J. The Jewish News of Northern California that her mother never complained, and that even on the day she died she thanked her nurse. The cause of death was not made public in the reports of her death.

Tributes came from the Contemporary Jewish Museum, whose executive director Kerry King called her far more than an exemplary trustee and a generous donor, from Jewish Federation Bay Area and from the Oshman Family JCC. She was predeceased by her husband George, her parents, her brother Bud and her sister Harriett, and survived by her children Loren, Ellen and Joel, six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. A memorial service was scheduled at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills on Monday 19 October 2026, following a private burial. The family asked that gifts in her memory go to Congregation Beth Am, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco or the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

Dorothy Saxe was born Dorothy Ruby on 10 February 1926 in Michigan City, Indiana. Her parents were Fay and Jack Ruby, and she grew up with a brother, Bud, and a sister, Harriett. She studied psychology at Northwestern University and graduated in 1946.

A year later, on 19 October 1947, she married George Saxe. They had fallen in love only four months earlier, after a chance meeting when he was visiting one of her friends in Indianapolis. Marrying Dorothy was "the best thing that ever happened to me," George told J. The Jewish News of Northern California in 2007, when they marked their 60th anniversary. The couple had three children, Loren, Ellen and Joel, while still living in Indiana.

In 1959 the family moved to Palo Alto, California, where George began a career as a real estate developer. They joined the Reform congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills a few years after its founding, and it remained central to Dorothy's life for more than six decades.

In the late 1970s she came across a catalogue from the Corning Museum of Glass and was captivated by contemporary studio glass. Neither she nor George knew anything about the field, so they educated themselves, meeting gallery owners, collectors and artists all over the country. Around 1980 they began collecting in earnest, and their interest widened from glass to studio craft in general. Over time they acquired more than 700 works, and friends in the field came to regard them as early innovators in glass art collecting. Dorothy took a particular interest in encouraging emerging artists, and the friendships she formed with artists mattered to her as much as the objects.

The Saxes believed art should be accessible, and they donated much of their collection to museums. The de Young museum in San Francisco opened the Dorothy and George Saxe Gallery and hosts the Saxe Collection, which it describes as one of the premier collections of contemporary craft in the United States. Dorothy served for three decades as a trustee of the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state, and the couple helped establish the nonprofit Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass.

In 1984 the Saxes were among the founding donors to the predecessor of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which began on the ground floor of the Federation building on Steuart Street in San Francisco. Dorothy was a trustee of the museum from its founding until her death. In 2009 George endowed the Dorothy Saxe Invitational in her honour, a recurring exhibition in which artists reimagined Kiddush cups, spice boxes, Chanukiahs, seder plates and tzedakah boxes, and later Jewish ideas such as Sabbath and tikkun. "I love Judaism and I love art," she said of it.

She also served on the boards of Jewish Family and Children's Services and the regional chapter of AIPAC, and the Saxes made major gifts to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Congregation Beth Am, Camp Newman and the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, where they helped build the Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life. In 2022 the Jewish Federation awarded her its Judith Chapman Memorial Women's Leadership Award.

Dorothy and George Saxe were married for 62 years, until his death in 2010. At home in Palo Alto they kept Friday night Shabbat dinner as a weekly family tradition. They set up charitable funds for each of their grandchildren so that the next generation could choose its own causes, and several family members followed them into philanthropy; her grandson David Saxe became a vice chair of the Contemporary Jewish Museum board and often accompanied her to art events after George died.

She was an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, enjoyed ballet and opera, and was an early advocate of recycling and conservation. She kept driving into her nineties. Her philosophy of giving was simple: "Because that's what you do." Late in life she said, "I've been lucky and blessed. I live gratitude."

The Saxe Collection at the de Young, and the gallery that bears the couple's names, keep a large body of American studio craft on public view. At the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Dorothy Saxe Invitational became one of its best known exhibition traditions, bringing contemporary artists of every faith into conversation with Jewish ritual and thought. Museum staff and artists alike described her as a mentor, and her family continues the philanthropy she and George began.